Making Big Leadership Decisions

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In many churches, we often look for heroic, anointed leaders.
There is some truth in the fact that God wants leaders to be heroic in their role.
However, this can put a lot of pressure on leaders to be right all the time.
When you are a leader, you won’t get it right all the time – and when you don’t, this doesn’t invalidate your leadership.
To stay healthy, we need to disavow people of such a high view of leaders (particularly amongst certain cultural groups).
As a leader, you will make lots of wrong decisions in your leadership journey.

Have good spiritual health before the decision – regularly engage in the spiritual disciplines. We can often wait until the crisis moment, but we first need to build a foundation.

Be self-aware enough to know your own predisposition.
Are you tempted towards a certain choice because it makes life easy for yourself?
Are you trying to avoid a confrontation (or charge into one)?

Richard has heard God speaking about going for 2000 people.
They started looking for buildings with 2000 seats in an auditorium plus lots of great facilities, breakout rooms, etc.
But whatever they tried, they were unable to get such a venue.
They realised that it was a wrong decision because it wasn’t working.
It can be tough to know when is the time to say something was a wrong decision and when is the time to push through.
It comes down to hearing God.
Richard still thinks that he heard God about thinking next of 2000 – but he had interpreted it in terms of what he already assumed (a big building with everyone together in one place).
Going to multiple congregations had been tried in the past but not worked – so they were feeling burned by that option.
In the end, they needed to come to the congregation and just say they had got it wrong.
You need a leadership culture that has a readiness to apologise.
When you have an idea of what God is saying, it’s good to step out and have a go – even when you don’t have certainty about how things will go.
Your best leadership decisions are decisions that create space for people.
As leaders, we can’t control everything.
Give people a spacious place, and then establish the boundaries for them – the principles/truths that keep it safe for people as they have a go.

The decision to plant congregations again – this time calling them sites (because ‘congregations’ hadn’t worked in the past, that name had baggage so it was re-branded).
Just because something didn’t work in the past, that doesn’t mean that thing was necessarily wrong – look at the context and circumstances.
There is no one model that always works.
They started planting in partnership with some Methodist churches.
They started a new site in a run down old building – but there was a vibrancy and life there, and God was doing things.
The plant is in a largely Muslim area – God challenged Richard about not giving up on any place.
They put on a community Christmas dinner and lots of locals came along and commented on feeling loved and included.
The key is seeing what God is up to and going with that.