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Sunday, Jun 28 by Bryce Mensink in Leadership | (0) Comments
An event on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 in the Ozinga Chapel of Trinity Christian College reminds me of this morning. The latest group of Candidates for the Ministry of the Word was presented to the Annual Synod of the Christian Reformed Churches. In this ceremony, future office-bearers took one giant step forward toward leading the Church of Jesus Christ. This morning, our latest class of elders, deacons, and pastoral workers are being ordained to church office. They will lead and care for our congregation, a part of the Body of Christ.
The candidates listened to the Rev. Dr. Duane Kelderman, whom you can see on the giant screen. He passed along some wisdom from Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis during World War II.
Bonhoeffer had observed that spiritual leaders can do great damage in the Church when they love their vision of the Church more than the people of the Church. That got me meditating and I think my mind drifted away from the rest of Kelderman’s speech.
What can happen when an office-bearer loves her or his vision of the Church more than the Church? For starters, let me offer a couple of guesses. They can become very impatient with, even hostile toward, fellow Church members who do not see the future as they do? They can abandon the Church’s establish procedures in order to realize their dreams? What dangers do you see when a leader loves a vision more than the people he or she is called to lead?
We elders, deacons, and pastoral workers are called to lead the Palos Church in a time when we are rediscovering the vision God has for us. Palos Church needs us to dream dreams about our future and set plans for moving toward God’s ideal for us. But, let us never love our dreams and plans more than God’s dearly loved people who make up our Church.
I found Bonhoeffer’s own words (in translation) on the internet: “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together).