Remissioning Church by Josh Hayden

An Open Invitation for Remissioning Leaders

There is a story that Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius hired an assistant to follow him as he walked throughout the empire and whisper in his ears, after he’d been praised by the people, “You are just a man. You are just a man.” No matter your budget, your role, your attendance, your salary—you are just a woman; you are just a man. Don’t confuse your role in the organization with your spiritual or emotional health.

Here are a few characteristics that are helpful for remissioning leaders to develop and practice in their own lives and to cultivate in various leadership communities in the church.

Vulnerability

Brené Brown gets at the heart of vulnerability with this question: “Are we willing to show up and be seen when we can’t control the outcome?” (Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone [New York: Random House, 2017], 154). Vulnerability as a leader is scary, especially in established churches where the people may not be used to a pastor transgressing the barrier between leader and follower. But without vulnerability, it becomes impossible for a church to experience transformation. Vulnerability in leadership and within the church are crucial to remissioning. Vulnerability helps you shift into a with-ness that flattens hierarchical power structures and creates a posture of repentance, learning, and perpetual transformation.

Polycentric Power

Polycentric leadership moves from the head of the table to a round table. Instead of being the ones who make every decision, polycentric leaders emphasize making disciples, and the disciples are the church. When multiple centers of authority are connected to each other through shared mission, mutual submission, and the Spirit, power is diffused throughout the whole church instead of centralized in one group, committee, staff, or leader.

In this way, leadership is about much more than making decisions. We focus on formation, discipleship, and cultivating kingdom imagination. And instead of a church falling apart when a lead pastor resigns, polycentric leadership situates the leadership back into the core of the church and the relational trust that grows through apprenticeship and shared decision-making. Giving away power, taking on the form of a servant, and making space for others to lead creates a vacuum for others to grow and fill.

Willingness to Risk

Tod Bolsinger’s book Canoeing The Mountains is inspired by the journey of Lewis and Clark to discover a water passageway from the East Coast to the West Coast for trade. The problem was none of their maps worked, and the passageway didn’t exist. But instead of turning around and heading home, Lewis and Clark explored on and charted new territory they would never have seen if they had stopped going. Remissioning leadership requires you to risk and explore new ways for your church to be faithful to the mission of God in your context—even when your maps are wrong and the next right step isn’t clear.

Change requires risk and the risk means that not everyone will stay. But the risk of staying the same is you will continue down the path you are already on, and that is itself a risk. Which risk will help you chase after the telos (faithfulness and fruitfulness) God has put on your heart and the heart of your church?

Receiving the Work as a Gift

Contrary to the CEO pastor model, remissioning leaders practice humility and hold their work with an open hand, receiving as a gift from the Spirit this journey with a group of people for the sake of a larger mission. This isn’t to say there aren’t hard days, and I mean incredibly hard, but your posture as a leader will help set the tone for the journey. While remissioning a church is one of the hardest things anyone can do, it is still a gift. It has the potential to transform you and your church as it awakens to the mission of God for the sake of its community. Keeping that vision in front of you can help you pause and remember the gift that the Creator of the universe invites you into this work as a way of sharing in the mission.

Self-awareness

There is a world of difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness. Self-conscious leaders have a hard time separating what people say about them and the image they project from who they are. Self-awareness is the process of learning to go beneath the surface of one’s life to discover the motivations, patterns, joys, sins, pains, hopes, dreams, and desires that shape your actions and leadership. Leaders who intentionally take steps to grow in their self-awareness embody the expectation for the church that we are never “finished” but that we continue to grow, learn, and develop throughout our whole lives.

Remissioning leaders recognize that the transformation of their churches depends on the Spirit and our willingness to submit our lives to the possibility of transformation before expecting others to change first. The days of Christendom are behind us, and our maps no longer work. Are you willing to develop new maps and explore uncharted territory both in yourself and with your church for the sake of your community?

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Josh Hayden is the co-founder and co-president of `Iwa Collaborative and the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Ashland, Virginia. He has worked and led in nonprofit organizations, church plants, and established churches. He has a doctorate in leadership and organizational change from Duke Divinity School and is the author of Remissioning Church and Sacred Hope.