The Process - Lesson 2

I. Context of Christ Community Church

Welcome to session two. We are using the church where I pastor as our case study. I’m going to provide an overview of Christ Community Church, so that you’ll be able to understand context; and, therefore, be able to understand, extract and apply concepts to your particular setting.

Our church is just over 40 years old. Our church is also multi-site. We have what we call lead elders and campus elders. We’ll discuss more about this later, but, for now, just know that lead elders and campus elders are all biblically qualified. Lead elders have the additional responsibility of attending monthly meetings where we discuss matters that pertain to all of our campuses. Campus elders focus their attention solely on their respective campus.

The guiding motto we use is that we are “a staff-directed and elder and trustee-protected church.” This means that the staff make the day-to-day ministry decisions. Our staff are given the freedom to lead and make decisions. The role of the elders and trustees is to protect the church.

II. Functions of Elders & Trustees

What you’re about to watch is a basic overview that we have posted on our church leadership page of our website:

“Christ Community Church is a large church that exists in multiple cities. Thousands of people, a lot of staff, and moving parts. It’s natural to ask, who runs this place? Who makes the decisions?

Christ Community Church is a staff-directed, elder and trustee-protected church. That means the staff makes the day-to-day decisions, and there are accountability structures in place for things like for money, doctrine, policies, and generally speaking, being a biblical God-honoring church. There is an elder team, and there is a trustee team. Now, the elder team does four big things: 

• First, they make sure that the staff always stays true to the mission and teaching of God’s Word.
• Second, they pray for people, and, boy, do they pray a lot for people—they love this part.
• Third, they resolve conflict, and this part isn’t as much fun.
• Fourth, they hire senior-level staff. OK, that’s the role of ‘elder.’ 

Then, what exactly is a trustee? In the Bible they’re called ‘deacons.’ They oversee and protect church facilities and finances, and that’s a big job. There are multiple campuses and millions of dollars to steward. They make sure that every cent, every square foot is accounted for. For example, every year the annual budget is approved by the trustees, and the staff work within the parameters of that budget. Now you know what elders and trustees do.

Hebrews 13 says how we as the church should relate to leaders, “Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden—for that would be of no benefit to you.” In a nutshell, the elders are responsible for the spiritual health of the church; trustees are responsible for the financial health. We’re grateful for the elders and trustees of Christ Community Church.”

III. Leadership Philosophy

Our general approach is an attempt to be a healthy middle ground that avoids two unhealthy extremes. One unhealthy extreme is a “church board,” that holds all of the authority and makes all of the decisions while the staff holds all of the responsibility. This is actually why we prefer the word team instead of board. The other unhealthy extreme is a church that is run by a one-man-show pastor. This kind of pastor often functions like a dictator without any checks or accountability. 

IV. Legacy Value of Leadership

Not too long ago, our church celebrated our 40th anniversary. We were also going through leadership transition. Our founding pastor was in his final year of serving as senior pastor; and he was getting ready to hand the leadership baton to me. During that last year, each month, Pastor Jim shared a talk with the church staff about the legacy values of the church. These weren’t meant to be sermons or in-depth theological studies but rather stories and reflections from a founding pastor. 

To finish this session, let’s listen in on about ten minutes of one of these talks about leadership. It provides some real-life insight into why we are a leader-led church, staff-directed, elder and trustee-protected.

“Today the legacy value I want to talk about is leadership. We’ve already covered evangelism, that was our starting legacy value—and we said that it’s what spawned the church. We want that to be worked deep within the fabric of our church. Then we did prayer. We did Bible—we did Bible in two parts, Bible one and two. Then we did worship—that’s how far we got last year. Today it’s leadership. I recognize that not everybody in the room is called into a leadership role, but even if you’re not in leadership, it’s important that you understand our legacy with respect to leadership. 

Here’s where it begins with me, okay? Here’s how I discovered I’ve got a leadership gift. I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a neighborhood that had ten boys my age. Our backyard was the biggest yard in the neighborhood, so all the sports got played in my backyard. Our yard also had several really big flower gardens, and one of my chores as a kid was to weed those flower gardens. I still hate weeding to this day, because it was on my chore list. However, this is how I discovered the leadership gift. My buds would come over, and they would say, ‘We could play some baseball.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, as soon as you guys help me weed this flower garden.’ My folks would look out the window about ten minutes after releasing me into the backyard, and there’d be like ten guys out there weeding the garden, and I’d be there standing in the middle kind of directing everybody, making sure the job was done. That’s my first experience with, ‘Oh I must have a leadership gift.’

When it comes to observing leadership in the church, I didn’t have good role models. In fact, I mostly had dysfunctional role models. I’ll give you two examples because they represent two extremes. First example is Des Plaines Bible Church. I ran into someone in the welcome center, which is now the prayer center, two weekends ago who said ‘You grew up at Des Plaines Bible Church, didn’t you?’ It’s now called the Bridge Church, and I think from what I heard a much healthier church than when I was there. 

Pastor Craig at Des Plaines Bible Church was a benevolent dictator. He did everything. He was the hub, and all of the spokes were connected to him. Amazingly, the church was like 500-1000 people, typically a church doesn’t grow that big if a guy’s hoarding all the leadership, but this church happened to grow. When he retired, they couldn’t find a replacement because—well they hired several replacements, but they went through two or three guys, everyone who came couldn’t fill his shoes, and before long the congregation was, ‘Well, that’s no Pastor Craig,’ so they would let another guy go. 

I remember, as I’m growing up, a church business meeting where Pastor Craig came back, he came back out of retirement, and he beat the lectern so hard a piece of it, the wooden lectern, chipped off, to scold the church that they were using and abusing pastors because they couldn’t keep anyone. And I remember sitting there thinking to myself, ‘Well, dude, you set the tone. I mean everybody watched the way you lead and assumed that is how leadership is done. And so nobody can measure up to you.’ I was smart enough, even as a kid, to recognize, this was a dysfunctional model. All you did was you reproduced in your congregation expectations that nobody else can fill. So that was one extreme.

At the other extreme—I was 27 years old, I was in my first lead pastor position, I had already been in student ministry, and had had some considerable success. We had grown a student ministry from about 20 middle school and high school kids to over 200. Then I had felt called to do ministry that would reach the adults of kids like this, so I came back to seminary, finished seminary, and then I took a lead pastor position at a church on Cape Cod that was a start-up. And I quickly discovered that the four elders of the church ran the place. I’ll never forget the time they told me—and I’m not making this up—they told me in an elder meeting, ‘We believe in servant leadership. We’re the leaders, you’re the servant. We tell you what to do, and you do it.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’ I’d never heard servant-leadership described in quite those terms before. One of the guys said, ‘If we tell you that your wife is to be sitting in the front row dressed in plaid, then you’ll have her in the front row dressed in plaid.’ I thought, ‘She doesn’t even like plaid.’ I was like, wow, wow—I’d go to these elder meetings that were so abusive. 

The chairman of the elders was the chief of surgeons at the Cape Cod hospital. He was used to the OR, where he would call out orders, and everybody would jump. I don’t recall whether it was a weekly meeting with him or whether it was every couple of weeks or once a month, but every meeting he did the same thing. We’d go out to lunch together. He’d have a 3x5 card in his pocket, he’d pull out the 3x5 card, and he’d list my latest infractions—the things he felt I was screwing up at. The only funny memory I have about that is that one time, one of the things on his list he said, ‘And in church this last weekend, you prayed with your eyes open.’ I’m thinking, ‘Well, dude, how’d you know?’ So there were some light-hearted moments. 

But, long story short, over time, I developed what I called in retrospect a battered wife syndrome. I just felt that I must be a bad person to have these leadership aspirations, it must be a prideful thing… And I remember coming across a passage in Jeremiah where Jeremiah said that it’s good for a young man to sit with his face in the dust, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s me.’ I recall coming home from elder meetings, and kneeling by the side of my bed, and weeping. And about ten minutes after I’d get home from an elder meeting, one of them would call; Dan was the only one who wasn’t abusive like the other three guys, but he never said anything. He would sit there in the elder meeting, and I’d watch the veins bulge on his neck, he would be so mad at the other guys. But he never said anything, until after the elder meeting he would call me and apologize for the way I’d been treated. It was like, ‘Yeah, you could have said something…’ But he never did. 

I remember being given a book at the time called Leading Your Church to Growth written by Peter Wagner, and he described the leadership gift that God gives to senior pastors, lead pastors. And I thought, ‘He’s describing me, but I’ve come to believe that that’s bad—it’s actually good? God could use somebody who wants to lead like that?’

So, when we began Christ Community Church after two years in that dysfunctional setting, there were two extremes I wanted to avoid. One extreme was the solo-dictatorial leadership of Pastor Craig. I saw the value of leading a team. God doesn’t call a single individual to lead an entire church—God calls a plethora of leaders. Ironically that’s how I had led my student ministry, when I’d been in my first ministry role and we’d grown 20 to 200 students. It was a very small church, there was only one adult volunteer, in student ministries in high school ministry. So, what I had to do was I chose four high school guys, and I poured my life into them. And Sue chose four high school young women and poured her life into those women. And those eight high school students became the leadership team and ran this ministry as it exploded with growth. So, I knew when we started this church, we were not going to do the solo-leadership thing. And the other extreme is, I knew I didn’t want to have anything to do with emasculated leadership anymore, that if people are given the responsibility to lead, then they need to be trusted to lead and be given the corresponding authority to lead.”

V. Reflection Questions

Okay, before you move on to the next section, here are your two reflection questions:

1. Is your church leaning towards one unhealthy extreme or the other? Take some time and write down your thoughts.
2. What terms does your church use for the roles of pastor, elder, and deacon? And how clear are these roles in your church?