Roadblocks and Guardrails for Visionaries
I love visionaries, and Nick was a visionary. In fact, Nick's enthusiasm and love for the Lord were contagious; he was a great impetus to the vision of the church. But Nick was coming up with a different idea each week. One week he walked into my office with an idea how we could reach all the Vietnamese refugees in our city. Two weeks later he was wanting to sponsor a World Vision hunger campaign with our young people. The next week he was ready to take a group to Haiti to help construct a hospital. Nick wanted to do it all, and in fact, many of his programs were effective. But he burned out many people in the process and rolled over anyone who did not agree with him—including me. The term administration is a confining word for a visionary; it seems to limit the Holy Spirit. Visionaries prefer spontaneity and allowing the Holy Spirit to lead. They say too much administration hinders the Spirit and limits the vision of the church. In short, they consider administration and vision contradictory. It is refreshing to work with someone who wants to move. But with two or three visionaries like Nick, the church can become spastic—jerking and groping this way and that without any real direction. How do you manage a visionary? How much freedom do we give the youth group, for instance, to have its own dreams and then act on them? How do we allow other groups in the church to have their own authority for making decisions without creating church-splitting issues? This tension reminds me of the faculty member who told his colleagues in a leading university, "The state legislature has always granted us complete academic freedom here, and if we don't do what they want, they are going to take it away from us." Pastors stand in the middle of a ...
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