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October 11 - November 4, 2017
“Mac, I’m in marketing and sales. The largest part of my job is training people, which I love doing. I read your story, and I said to myself, That stuff he writes about can’t happen unless somebody’s constantly training people. If you’re going to keep that story honest, training, training, training is going to be your most important job. Understand what I’m saying here?
Shepherds (those at the center of the congregation) were the people who had responsibility for the flock (the larger congregation). Their job description was threefold. They defined the direction in which the flock would move, they assured that the flock was properly fed and rested (you could say nurtured and strengthened), and they guaranteed that the flock was protected from danger and disease at all times.
The world is totally rearranging itself, Gordon: the way it thinks, the way it communicates, the way it organizes itself. I see the evidence every day in my job. Our church has to start envisioning new responses and initiatives to express the Christian way in this new world. We’ll be a different kind of Christian community seven years from now, and we’re going to need people at the center who will discern what God wants us to be. Don’t stop thinking!
We have to think of where we will be and go to that place
“It’s a quote from Richard Foster. ‘The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.’”
Good grief, Pastor Mac. More Arlenes? The thought makes me shudder. But if you’re serious with your question about where to find more of those deep people, I only have one answer. Grow them! There were those who grew me when I was young. It isn’t any different now.
“Well, if you listen carefully, you hear things that indicate that not everyone is used to hearing the kind of thing you’re talking about. If you talk about leadership development, some automatically think about teaching people to fill slots on committees or to head up programs or to serve on the elder board. When we talked the other night, I tried to make sure that they knew you were referring to something far more significant.”
What do people think leadership develop,met is? What do I think it is?
“I get more and more attached to the term deep people,” I said. “It excites me. And, besides, I’m so weary of the word leader, which has been overused to the point that it’s hard to know what it means any longer. I find myself wanting to explore all of its implications.”
Rich continued. “Ramya described flowers that sometimes grow up in her yard in places where they’re not supposed to be. She said that gardeners call them ‘volunteers.’ Seeds stick to a bird’s wing or a dog’s paw, for example, and then, when it gets shaken off, it might take root in the new location where it was never intended to be. A short time later, what have you got? You’re surprised by a volunteer flower. “But then, Ramya said, there are the flowers that grow exactly
where the gardener meant for them to grow. They’re there because they have been planted, watered, protected from weeds. Ramya called them the cultivated ones. So you’ve got two kinds of flowers: cultivated and volunteer. It’s nice to have both, but what you really want is more of the cultivated ones.
“Marshall had this little black notebook that he kept with him all the time, and he slid it across the desk so the reporter could see it. He said that the book contained the names of certain younger officers, and that he was spending huge amounts of time studying these men closely. He told the reporter that he was constantly assigning them to projects and tasks that were almost impossible to complete and watching how they handled themselves. And he said something like this to the reporter: ‘The ones who meet the challenges of those assignments will be pushed ahead . . . and those who fail will
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“This great idea is a challenge like none other in the church. Cultivating deep people starts small . . . with just one or two people who give it all they’ve got. We think that’s you and Gail. You are the ones to make it happen. If I were to put it in terms that they sometimes use in business, you’ve got to consider becoming the chief training officer of the church.”
Since I was silent, Rich spoke again. “I’ve heard you sometimes wonder out loud how much longer you should keep being the pastor of our church and when it might be time to lay the responsibility down. But here’s my word to you—and forgive me if I’m coming on too strong—don’t even think of leaving us until you’ve taken your best shot at doing what pastors all over this country need to be doing.” “Which is . . .” “Which is to invest yourself in the cultivation of a new layer of deep people. Then if you ever want to get on with something else, you’ll have my blessing, even though we’ll miss you
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Rich drew a deep breath. Then he said, “The group at our house last week dreamed of you coming up with a two- or three-year plan in which you’d help us raise up a whole new generation of deep people at the church. You’ve done it informally to some extent already. People like Carly and me have been greatly influenced by you and Gail, but in a sense we’re like Ramya’s volunteers. You probably weren’t aware that you were cultivating us, but you were.
Growable describes a person who is eager that his or her life be continuously reshaped to replicate the redemptive and serving love of Jesus Christ. We both liked our new word and our definition of it. We agreed that growable and growability had to be at the top of the list of criteria when we searched for people to be mentored into depth.
Make list of every man, woman, couple who played a cultivating role in your life over the years. Why did they do it? How did they do it? How did you react? What was the result? Did you ever thank them?
I took quick glances at the stories of Joseph, Gideon, Ezra and Nehemiah, David, Esther, Simon Peter, and Barnabas. There were others, of course. But they all had one obvious thing in common: they possessed a remarkable depth of spirit relative to their times.
If they’re going to become part of the next generation of leaders in and out of the church, they have to begin to know and trust one another.
If you don’t understand the rabbinical contract, you don’t really know as much as you should know about Jesus.”
“Because rabbis had something of a formulaic way of teaching, and it worked very, very well. If you know a bit about the ways of rabbis, it might affect the way you do this project of yours.”
“Well, Jesus’ message was about love . . . as in ‘Love your enemies’ or ‘Forgive those who persecute you.’ Not a message to be welcomed in the larger population, by the way.
“Among the highest priorities for a rabbi were his handpicked students. Rabbis always had students—each called a talmid. The group would have been called the talmidim. There was usually a close following of these students—disciples, you Christians sometimes call them. They were very dedicated learners.
A good rabbi, you know, was like a college or university today.
“Well, rabbis tended to teach in what I call a spiral. First, there would be
instruction. And when the rabbi instructed, the disciples were to sit in silence. That’s a rabbinical term. They listened and then memorized what the rabbi taught them. What he taught was sometimes called the rabbi’s word, or gospel. He taught them the Torah and offered his version of what the Torah meant. Then when he permitted, the students would ask questions: ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘Why didn’t you see it that way?’ The students might quote interpretations of other rabbis and ask him to make comparisons.
“Then when the teacher concluded his instruction, he left the students alone to discuss what they’d heard. They would argue and debate until the rabbi’s word was fully digested. Now his word was, you could say, in them.”
He’s saying that they could take his teaching to the bank.”
“The second way a rabbi taught,” Michael explained, “was through imitation. Now the spiral tightens a bit. Disciples watched their master—another word for teacher—like a hawk because they believed that the Torah came to life in him. His very way of life was an animated version of Torah, and the followers would want to mimic him in every way, to the last detail. When your Jesus said that he was the way—” “—and the truth and the life,” I said,
“Yes, the truth and life. When he said that, he was saying, ‘I am acting out my own word in living color. Copy me and you bring the Torah to life.’”
“Well, just remember that a student’s greatest aspiration was to become so much like his rabbi that people wouldn’t see a difference between them.”
“The third thing a rabbi did could be called examination. Now the spiral is really tightening and ready for another circle of teaching. A rabbi constantly tested his students. He gave them little assignments to teach other people, for example, so that he could know if they
were learning what they should.” “I never thought about that,” I said. “So when it says that Jesus sent his disciples out to preach, it was kind of a quiz. And when they came back, he wanted to know how they’d done, what questions they had.”
“Any rabbi would have done that sort of thing. You also have stories where Jesus let learners fall into embarrassing situations. I’ve read them many times. Rabbis didn’t mind allowing their students to fail. That storm story where he said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ is an examination moment. When he told them to feed that big crowd of hungry people, he was challenging them to do something special. When he scolded them about the children they’d tried to keep from bothering him, he was rebuking them, correcting them. He was saying, ‘I happen to like kids.’
“The relationship of a rabbi to his students always came to an ending point. This relationship was not like a marriage.”
“What do you think,” Michael asked me, “Jesus meant when he said to his students, ‘I’m going away . . . It will be good for you . . . You’ve been my servants, but now I regard you as friends’? What’s happening here? I’ll tell you what’s happening: he’s releasing those men from the rabbinical contract. They’re free to go. In fact, he expected—he even wanted—them to go and teach others just like he’d taught them.” “The Great Commission,” I said.
“Now, where are you going to make this rabbinical thing happen?” “We’re thinking we’ll do it each week in our home, a full evening almost every week for a year. I don’t want to do it in a church building. I want our connection with these people to stay outside the institution where there’s some sense of larger reality.”
“And, by the way, this is not a drive to recruit supervolunteers,” I went on. “It’s driven by a conviction that a church’s first task is to bring out the very best that God has put into people. We’re very much aware that this was Jesus’ rabbinical strategy.”
“First,” Mercedes said, “we believe that a business can be only as good as its training. Our very best people are expected to allocate a significant portion of their time to training.
“If you skimp on training, you spend more and more of your time problem solving. Bottom line? We make big investments in training because training is less expensive than problem solving.”
“Every training module, every training meeting begins with a reaffirmation of our core business.
“Here at the Center, as I said before, we talk about continuous personal growth. We want every employee to take advantage of the opportunities we offer for personal and professional development. And I’m talking about everyone here: those you might think as holding down the most menial jobs and those who work at the highest management levels. Some of the very best people in this company started at the bottom—driving the shuttle to the airport or working on the night shift cleaning staff, for example—and because of our training program, they have gone on to flourish in management careers.
“We are very careful to match right people with right training,” Mercedes said. “Our HR department regularly confers with our department managers so that all training modules reflect exactly what the managers think their people need.”
Mercedes continued. “Let me throw out one or two other things that might be important to you, Pastor Mac. Here at the hotel we train our people in groups, and we try to create experiences where people learn from peers, not just the executives and managers. That means cross-training where people teach each other their jobs.
“We create disciplines that build a kind of pride of achievement and belonging into our people. A little bit like the marines, you
“This is one of the things that has always bothered me about how some people treat the church, Pastor Mac. Because we don’t want to offend anyone in the church, we do not ask much,” she said. “People in the church come and go as they please; they arrive late, leave early, maybe not show up at all. They are asked to prepare things, and often they do not. They are challenged to get into the action, but they sit back and let someone else do the work. No one can respect an organization like that.
It’s very, very important for everyone to know that they’ve been observed and what we’ve seen and appreciated in them.
“The training program here makes you feel that the hotel believes in you and cares about your future.
information, and the program to which I’d just been exposed all conveyed a clear message: this national chain of hotels believed (really believed!) that identifying and training highly motivated people to pursue the mission was a top priority. Everything I saw and heard that day underscored this commitment. Then, I asked myself, if a visitor came to our church and assessed the space, the equipment, the staff, and the process we used to train people, what would that message be?
I think we should try to emulate the way Jesus worked with his disciples as closely as possible.
selecting growable people—has to start on your knees.
“I think I have an answer for that,” I said. “We’ve been kicking around words like growable and cultivating. So who are the growable men and women in our congregation? People, younger and older, who have reached a moment in their spiritual journeys where they want someone to push and poke at them and challenge them to enter into a process of spiritual cultivation so that they can become all God has made them to be.”
