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.

Movement Leadership

Leading a movement is world's apart from leading a congregation. As a pastor of a congregation, it would be my duty to anticipate people's needs, provide programs and methods to meet those needs, to come up with ministries and delegate people to run those ministries.

But what I am finding is that leading a movement is less command and control and more of ensuring the DNA of the thing and then letting everyone loose. My role is less of turing chaos into order and more of leading our people to the edge of chaos. This means that once the DNA is imprinted on people, my job then is to lead them into places that are in disequilibrium, exposing them to need and then allowing them to rise up and meet that need through the unique expression of the movement's DNA through them.

In this way, ministry and mission emerge from the people rather than handed down from the top leadership.

Movement leadership then becomes concerned with the quality of discipleship and how people are living out the mission of Jesus.