Leading a Movement

I've been teaching, mentoring, developing, deploying, training, and empowering leaders for 16 years. So it is going to be a little odd for me to say that I am in that stage of my personal leadership development where I am desperately searching for a way to create a leaderless organization; a truly organic movement that impacts the heart of society. I am a pastor but I don't think I am gifted to be a pastor. I am a church planter but i don't want to plant a congregation. Confused? Try being me. Now, before you say, "It sucks to be you," I want to tell you up front that I am pumped. I am excited. I see light at the end of this leadership tunnel.

In their book "The Spider and The Starfish: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations," Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom have given me a clearer framework to work with when it comes to seeing and developing the church less as an institution and more as a movement. They cite leaderless organizations like eBay, al-Qaeda, the internet etc. to show how powerful these networks can be. From it's inception the church has always been a movement not an institution. But very few people have written about the church as such. Most people cannot see the church as anything else but a static and oft-times out of touch monolith whose time has come and gone. It's in my heart to recover and restore the church's organic nature.

There is a huge difference between the leadership style of someone leading an institution (CEO) and leading in a fluid network (CATALYST). Brafman and Beckstrom outline and contrast the difference below:



Much of the literature on leadership comes out of the context of a static, old-school organization. But there is a scarcity of material on leadership from within a movement. Somehow, that's got to change.