Hamilton shares characteristics, principles of leadership
Rev. Adam Hamilton talks about good leadership June 4 at Annual Conference in Baldwin City. |
Written: 6/24/2009
By Lisa Elliott Diehl
Director of Communications
BALDWIN CITY—A job applicant at United Methodist Church of the Resurrection once said they were applying because they thought working for the church would be less stressful than working in the corporate sector. Rev. Adam Hamilton said that person didn’t get the job.
“My experience is that when you’re working with volunteers, it can actually be more frustrating and not less frustrating than when you’re working with the rest of the world,” Hamilton told members of the Kansas East Conference June 4. “You do it because you love Jesus and you love people and you still get complaints. And it’s highly stressful. And from time to time, you need to be revived.”
Revival is what Hamilton said he hoped to offer the leaders of the Kansas East Annual Conference in his three sessions during its 2009 conference.
Hamilton started by setting the stage for where the United Methodist Church is today. According to the statistics from the General Council on Finance and Administration, from 2001 to 2007, the denomination declined in worship attendance by 4.4 percent. United Methodist Women participation declined by 17 percent.
“At the current rate, we have only 14 years left before there are no women attending UMW,” Hamilton said.
Professions of faith declined by 18 percent, and confirmations declined by 21 percent. There’s an even steeper decline in the number of young people in local congregations.
“Because our average age is 58, we’re not making any more babies in our churches,” Hamilton said. “Our attendance is declining twice as fast as membership.”
As a denomination, worship attendance is declining by 73,000 per weekend. In 2007, worship attendance in the Kansas East Conference was 31,000 and 35,000 in the Kansas West Conference.
“We lost the equivalent of the worship attendance of the Kansas East and Kansas West conferences combined and another Church of the Resurrection,” he said. “We have to be aware of those statistics. You know the ultimate in stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We’re not doing that. We’re rethinking church. I believe we have a future with hope.”
There are several things the denomination has identified that have to be done to have a future with hope, and the General Conference has affirmed them, he said.
The first is recruiting outstanding young people into full-time Christian service.
“It used to be that the best and brightest young people wanted to go into ministry, that our best universities were started to train pastors,” Hamilton said. “We’ve got to help young people hear a call. Young people answer a call because lay people in the congregation tell them they have a call to ministry. The days when we encourage young people who can’t do anything else to go into ministry are over.”
Second, we’ve got to be looking at starting new faith communities that appeal to these younger people.
“There was a period of time in our history when we started a new church every day for 50 years,” Hamilton said.
Third, United Methodists must engage in servant ministry to our community and engage in ministry with the poor.
“Young people want to change the world, and we have the opportunity to invite them to join us in that mission to the world,” Hamilton said. “Jesus went about healing the sick, casting out demons, feeding people when they were hungry. We’ve got to be that kind of church again.”
Hamilton said leadership begins with a fundamental conviction that drives us to do what we do. It’s the “why?” question.
“The church belongs to Jesus Christ. It doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t belong to the district and, despite what the trust clause says, it does not belong to the denomination,” Hamilton said.
He mentioned a couple of scriptures that define the call to bring back the strays and search for the lost sheep.
“This is what God longs for us to do,” he said. “The question is, does anybody actually care?”
Hamilton came to faith through the book of Luke because, in that book, Luke shows that Jesus has a special concern for those that others push down and push out. Luke is the only gospel to tell the story of the prostitute weeping at Jesus’ feet. Luke also tells the stories of the shepherd who leaves behind 99 sheep to seek the one that was lost and of the prodigal son.
“Our church is not meant to be the Kiwanis club for religious people. We are meant to look for lost and stray sheep and bring them home,” Hamilton said.
He invited the conference members to think for a few minutes about the characteristics of bad and good leaders and share them with their neighbors. He said the idea is not to create a complete list but to highlight some of the more important characteristics of a good leader. People want to be proud of their pastor, which includes everything from grooming to how the pastor carries himself or herself. It’s important for the pastor to be respectable in the eyes of those who know him or her best. And finally, pastors and lay people need to realize that leaders make mistakes. How those mistakes are handled is the key.
“One key difference between a Christian leader and a garden-variety leader is Christian leaders are striving to follow Christ,” Hamilton said. “Part of our task or mission is to figure out how do we model the Christian life for other people. Ultimately, we do not want to have run the race and have forgotten to follow Christ. I make tons of mistakes, but my desire is to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ.”
“Leaders set the tone for the entire organization,” he said. “Over time, your church will begin to look like its leaders—lay and clergy leaders,” he said. “That leads us to be really mindful of how we live and what we do because that will shape the character of the entire congregation.”
Leaders clarify the mission and vision of the church. The mission is why United Methodists do what we do, and the vision is where we are going.
“The leader clearly articulates, even in the face of peril, that this is the mission,” Hamilton said.
Leaders hold the organization accountable to accomplish the mission.
“We own the ultimate responsibility for the organization’s success,” Hamilton said. “In the end, on my watch, during the period of time I’m the pastor of this congregation, I’m responsible for the success of our mission to the bishop, to the district superintendent and to God.”
Leaders also are responsible for preparing the organization for the future by leading change. John Kotter wrote that corporations are over-managed and under-led.
Managers plan and budget; leaders cast vision. Managers develop policies and processes; leaders align people to accomplish a mission. Managers control and problem-solve; leaders motivate and inspire. Managers create predictability and order; leaders produce chaos.
“Which would the average United Methodist Church rather have?” Hamilton asked. “We don’t like change, and that’s why leaders are important. I used to think I liked change until staff members came up to me and wanted to make a change, and I came up with 10 reasons why we couldn’t do it. I realized I only like the changes I want to make. Leaders lead people in a way that helps them change even when they don’t want to.”
Leaders honestly celebrate victories and evaluate shortcomings. Hamilton said he gives his sermon script to a staff member to review on Saturday night, so he can improve the sermon for Sunday morning.
“We, in the church, hate to criticize, so we just don’t evaluate anything,” he said.
Leaders don’t give up. Leaders figure out how to say the hard things to people in a way that they can hear it. The leader’s goal is to see lives transformed, and they can’t be transformed if there are more people deciding it is the wrong church than deciding it is the right church.
Hamilton then shared five important leadership principles.
“It’s all about people,” he said. “Leadership is about relationships and people. People don’t come to faith because you gave a superior argument. You should be able to make the case, but they come to faith because you loved them.”
Healthy organizations have a clear MVP—mission, vision and plan. Mission is a statement of why an organization or a group exists. It needs to be understood by someone with a fourth-grade education. It should be preached about or included in a sermon at least once a month.
“If your church isn’t clear about why it exists and where it’s going, that’s a good place to start,” Hamilton said. “If your church doesn’t have [a mission statement], here’s one that would be hard to argue with: making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”
Vision is the statement of where the organization is going. People are energized by vision. Vision has power. To fail to plan to reach your vision is to plan to fail to reach your vision. The plan should have goals that are specific, measurable, aggressive, realistic and have a time frame attached.
Another fundamental principle is change—innovate, improve or die.
“If you’re unwilling to change, you are not going to be around in the future,” Hamilton said. “Facts are our friends. If things aren’t going well, you want to know that.”
Hamilton said understanding the discipleship pyramid is a leadership principle. The pyramid is a triangle pointing upward toward the cross. In every congregation, 10 percent of the people are close to sanctification, wholly yielded to God. The next 20 percent are seriously committed to Christ. The next 30 percent are people who say they are Christian, try to give and attend regularly. The next 40 percent are people who say they are part of the church, but if the pastor’s not there, they probably won’t go. They’ll volunteer if it’s convenient.
Pastors like to do stuff for the 10 percent who are near sanctification, but Jesus spent his time with people who were on the lower rungs or maybe not on a rung at all. Jesus wants to take those people on a journey to be part of the 10 percent near sanctification.
The final leadership principle is “discernment by nausea.”
“If you have two possible paths you could take before you, the path that makes you sick to your stomach is probably the path you should take,” Hamilton said. “At Church of the Resurrection, when we’ve had two options, the one less traveled by has made all the difference. I would encourage you to be the kind of leaders who take the road less traveled by. I would encourage you to have a clear mission and vision.”
This is the first article in a series of three on Rev. Adam Hamilton’s keynote messages at the 2009 Kansas East Annual Conference.