A warning to leaders: Turbulence is not the danger

Best fasten that safety belt. Turbulence is the new normal and our response? We need to honour the past but we need to know how to learn from the future. Too many leaders are focusing only on the turbulence, not realising that they’re trying to face the future using yesterday’s logic. That might explain a lot!

That is the conclusion from an article by Graeme Codrington. You may remember that I blogged about Graeme's work during my sabbatical when I read his book and thesis on generational theory. I learnt a great amount from him that is still moulding my thinking and my approach to leadership within the church.

This article by Graeme is written with business leaders in mind rather than churches. However the wisdom he offers is very applicable to church leadership. We live today in a time of turbulence in almost every area of life. There is turbulence in our economies, turbulence in the moral framework of our society, turbulence within the family structures of our communities and turbulence within how our churches relate to and engage with the communities we are called by Jesus to reach with his love. According to statistics I heard recently over 50% of churches have no teenagers in their church communities. A missionary organisation I have connections with is committed to planting Missional households alongside the top 100 universities in Europe and the top 100 universities in America – why? The drop out rate of Christian young people going to University for is massive. In Cambridge there are 33,000 students at the university, but only 1,000 connected with any local church, we are in danger of loosing a whole generation.

It has been said that when faced with difficulties we can't expect to do the same things as before and get a different result, yet so often we seem to be doing exactly that within the life of God's church.

Graeme's article is well worth reading and can be found in full here: http://www.newworldofwork.co.uk/2011/11/16/a-warning-to-leaders-turbulence-is-not-the-danger/

 

 

 

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