Swimming Against the Tide: The Value of Values

By Claire Dalpra.

I came across some useful advice on leadership succession a few years ago. I’d been interviewing leaders on how a sense of community is best nurtured in young churches – my professional quest to find real life examples that prove depth and quality of community life can be reality rather than mere aspiration.

Comments on leadership succession were made on the back of discussions around the importance of values for any church serious about nurturing its community life. Once a young church has some idea of its core values, interviewees said it was a precious gift in helping to recruit future leaders. A candidate’s ability to understand a church’s bespoke values should be the most important criteria in appointing them as a leader. Problem solved?

Not really. There are wider forces at work that have the potential to get in the way. Expectations for how long the founding pioneer needs to stay are often as short as three years (a by-product of a seed-corn funding mentality perhaps?). This means a founding leader may move on before the church has identified their values, making the induction of any outside successive leader to its values premature.  Interviews confirmed that establishing values in a church planted from scratch will take far longer than three years. Therefore founding leaders need to be resourced to stay longer.

Furthermore, clergy deployment patterns limit the chances for a minister to join a church as a learner to understand its values before applying for the post of leader. Using placements or sabbatical time may be creative ways forward but outsiders have to be fast learners. Learning to identify and work with values doesn’t feature prominently, if at all, in current ministry formation, which needs addressing if understanding values is deemed to be key.

The monastic pattern of electing a new leader from within the existing church membership, who knows and lives the values of the community, may be the best solution. However, issues of appropriate ongoing training, remuneration and leadership recognition need to be taken seriously for this to work well.

Once again, this proposed solution for leadership succession within fresh expressions seems at odds with ‘the system’ which is geared towards finding outside successive leaders for long-established churches. It’s a shame. Our young churches would certainly benefit from more realistic time frames, participation before application by potential successive outside leaders and ways of championing young churches who raise up
successive leaders from within (rather than regarding them a strange anomaly). It’s a tall order with so many financial and ministerial pressures facing the wider church.

No wonder we have a problem.