Looking for Leaders
What does leadership look like in the emergent generation?
Angie Ward
April 1, 2006
Steve is the thirty-something founding pastor of a midtown church. During his six-year tenure, his church has grown spiritually, numerically, and financially. He is articulate, well-liked, and well-respected, not only in his congregation but also in his community. He has trained other pastors, served in several denominational roles, and been published in several forums, including a blog that is read by several hundred of his peers around the country.
Yet Steve hesitates to call himself a leader.
Why? To Steve, a "leader" is a lone ranger, an outspoken general who calls the shots from an insular position at the top of an organizational hierarchy. Instead, Steve would prefer to call himself an "influencer." As such, he is an integral member of a network of relationships, and he considers those relationships infinitely more important than successfully achieving any particular organizational post or three-year plan.
But not everyone shares Steve's definition. A generation ahead in ministry, a cohort of Baby Boomers is growing increasingly frustrated by what they view as a serious lack of leadership among Steve and his peers.
Steve is not a real person, but neither is he entirely fictitious; rather, he is a composite of the characteristics shared by a significant contingent of Generation X, the generation typically classified as born between 1962 and 1981.
Now between 25 and 43 years old, the members of Generation X are supposed to be the future leaders in the church—except that, in the eyes of some of their exasperated forebears, many members of this "lost generation" don't seem in any hurry to step up to the plate.
In one church, an associate pastor continues to criticize his supervisors for their church's lack of postmodern ...
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