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| Pastor-in-Charge Wesley Taylor sends me stuff — good stuff. Original prayers and litanies. Once, however, he sent an article he had written that had been published in the local paper. At the end of the column, it identified him as Rev. Wesley Taylor, Pastor-in-Charge, Tualatin United Methodist Church, Tualatin, Oregon. My post-graduate studies were in the History of Christianity at Iliff School of Theology and Princeton Theological Seminary. At the latter, during Ph.D. studies, I successfully passed both comps and orals in the five major areas of church history: Patristics, Medieval, Reformation, Modern European and American. But never once had I run across this phrase: Pastor-in-Charge. Two weeks later, I was walking in lower Manhattan and strolled past an Episcopal church where one of the staffers was listed as “Pastor-in-Charge.” I’m ordained with the United Church of Christ. I didn’t know that pastors were in charge of anything! Then Sara Schnelle, the admin person in Taylor’s office, helped me out. She referred me to the UMC Book of Discipline, and I quote, to wit: Section: Local Church, Paragraph 204, Definition of a Pastoral Charge, 1. A pastoral charge shall consist of one or more churches that are organized under and subject to the Discipline of The United Methodist Church, with a charge conference, and to which an ordained or licensed minister is or may be duly appointed or appointable as pastor in charge or co-pastor. Where co-pastors are appointed, the bishop may designate for administrative purposes one as pastor in charge. See Judicial Council Decisions 113, 319. Let’s assume for a moment, for the sake of argument, that pastors are in charge of something. What would this look like, were this the case? For help on this, I turned first to the apostle Paul’s pastoral letters in Scripture. I noticed that Paul was a “take charge” guy. His instructions to Timothy are explicit: Women are to “dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes.” They are also to keep quiet “with full submission.” He went on to say, “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Timothy 2: 8-12). I defy any of my UCC colleagues — male or female — to charge their female congregants with these Pauline directives. Not that we would want to, of course. Bishops and deacons draw his attention next. Bishops must be of high moral character, the husband of one wife; he must be “temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money.” His children should be well-behaved. Instructions concerning deacons are similar: They, too, must not be given to heavy drinking, and so on. Clearly, the apostle Paul is deeply invested in leadership issues. But I found that this is also true of the apostle Jim. In his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap .... and Others Don’t, Jim Collins (author of Built to Last) notes that all of the companies that were able to make the move from being merely good companies to great companies and sustain their growth over a 15-year period had a number of things in common, including a “take charge” kind of person whom Collins describes as a Level 5 leader. Level 5 leaders, however, are not flashy “I-centric” celebrities with big ideas, a grand vision and an autocratic, “biggest dog in the kennel” leadership style. Quite the opposite. They may have no vision, no clue, but they have two things: personal humility and incredible will to achieve — to achieve not for themselves, but for the company. Level 5 leaders, Collins writes, know how to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, get them all in the right seats, and then — together — try to figure out where the bus is going. Level 5 leaders aren’t afraid of “scary, squiggly things,” the kind of things you find under a rock — a rock which, once lifted, most of us will put right back down. Out of sight, out of mind. Level 5 leaders have mastered the Hedgehog Concept — a theory based on the fable of the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is sleek, quick and agile — flashy. The hedgehog is boring, slow and unattractive. The pattern is always the same: The fox thinks he finds in the hedgehog a quick meal, and just as he is ready to pounce, the hedgehog rolls himself into a ball, and all the fox gets is a mouthful of prickly, spiny needles. The hedgehog leader gets the “Big Idea” or the one true thing. The foxy, sexy leader is all over the place with new ideas, new strategies, places to go and people to meet. The hedgehog gets it done — simply and with passion. The book deserves a read by pastors-in-charge who want to take their church from good-to-great (I didn’t say from small-to-big). No organization goes from good-to-great without leadership — the right kind of leadership. So if we’ve lost our charge, no one is in charge, or the wrong person is in charge or the right person is in charge, and we need to get out of the way. Perhaps our biggest need is to get charged, re-charged, turbo-charged, put a hemi in our hummer, and move out. This book by the apostle Jim might be a good place to start. Zoom, zoom.
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