Error Messages in LSM #3 Battery Flat!

· A common criticism of Local Shared Ministry is that it is difficult for members of the congregation to identify the focus of leadership that is normal in a paid minister.

· It’s a valid concern. If there is no “minister” in the situation, who models the ministry for everyone? Who sets the positive example and inspires action? Who brings the authoritative voice to discussion? And, if conflict develops, who referees the occasional fight?

· Obviously, the team members in themselves are individually the focus for each particular aspect of mission and ministry. They provide this role for their own teams of people in ministry.

· But when the team is functioning jointly, and when wider parish concerns are in the air there are invariably times when people look to an individual for “leadership”. I don’t think this is unreasonable. My kauri’s restoration of its lost “leader” suggests to me that there is a kind of naturalness about the concept of leadership residing in just one person.

· We used to joke about the team being a “multi-headed minister”. But that’s not how the above kind of leadership works: when overall leadership is required from one person, it's the task of the Enabler, working with the Team.

On leaders...

Not long after we came to Paihia I planted a metre-high kauri tree in our bush below the house. It has grown quickly for a long-lived native and is now seven or eight metres high. But perhaps it has grown too vigorously. Some time ago, its central stem or "leader" got broken off in a storm. For a young conifer, that’s disastrous damage.
Will it now develop a new shoot from the centre or will one of the surrounding branchlets grow inwards and take its place? Or will the side stem and a revived central stem grow up side by side making our stately tree into a double-leadered freak, perpetually vulnerable to a complete split? Is it possible that the other outside branches will all compete to do the same so that the tree becomes a kind of multiple-header absolutely alien from its destiny?
I am watching it with much more than a little interest. And I’m reflecting on the possibility that, whatever happens this season or next, if our tree is recovered from some swamp 40,000 years after the Great Warming of the 26th Century the growth rings in its cross section will tell the story of what transpired in our front bush in 2008. The scar and the tree’s triumph or failure in dealing with the accident will be locked into its history.

I wonder what it tells us now about small churches which opt for a strategy of ministry based on just one leader?