Video Transcript: Introductions and Definitions

Greetings. My name is Bruce Ballast and I have the exciting pleasure of leading you through some reflections on leadership in this class. You’ll notice the title is Learning to Lead. I found in my own life, that there are some differences and levels in leadership in that there are some people who are just strong natural leaders, and they just have a sense of what's right to do at a certain time. And that's never been me, I had to learn how to lead and I'll share something of that story as we go on, and the process of leadership that hopefully will help you in whatever setting you are to lead more effectively. Many, many people have said that everything rises and falls on leadership. I’ll quote one of those as we go on in this session today. 

But in order for you to get an idea of who I am, and how I came into leadership, I just want to share something of myself with you for a few moments today. First of all, who I am. The first thing about who I am, is that I am a follower. In other words, I'm a follower of Jesus Christ. I had the wonderful privilege of going to a friend's celebration of five years in ministry, and his  father in law spoke at that ministry. He says, you know, one thing about being a shepherd of God's people, as he was pointing to his son in law, he said that Shepherd has a shepherd too. In other words, that person who is going to lead sheep in this particular area and care for these particular areas, is always looking to a shepherd for greater leadership. Well, that's who I am. Whatever I say in this these sessions, I want you to know that about me, that I am a passionate lover of Jesus Christ. I love his church, and I'm committed to his church. And I believe that leadership is something that's essential in the Church of Jesus Christ today. Sometimes when we study things like leadership, or church  growth, or some of those areas, we can come out with the idea that, Wait a minute, you're not talking about the Holy Spirit enough or, Is this really a Christian class? And I assure you that we'll be quoting the Bible, we'll be quoting Jesus Christ in this process. We'll be quoting Paul,  especially his exhortation in Romans, chapter 12 when he said, If your gift is to lead, lead  diligently. Know that behind all of that is a belief that there is a God who wants his kingdom built, his church to grow. He wants his influence spread throughout the world. And the way that's done is often through leadership. So as a leader, you've got to know that I'm a follower, a follower of Jesus Christ, and I'm assuring you that that's the best thing you can be as you lead as well. I am a husband. I married my high school sweetheart. We started dating when we were 16 years old and got married when we were 22, seniors in college, and now been married 43 years. Out of that, you got to know I'm a father of three adult children. Every one of you who's a father is a leader in one sort or another, you probably have figured that out by now. Well, I have three children. My son is an electrical engineer who lives in Seattle,  Washington. My next daughter is a teacher at Calvin College in the area of biology. And my  youngest child is a daughter as well, and she is working in St. Louis as an occupational  therapist, teaching that and also practicing in a hospital there. So I spent a lot of years raising kids and found out that there are elements of leadership in how you raise your children. And so what we talk about in this class is going to help you as a parent as well, and will help you as a husband or wife. I'm a grandfather of 11 children at this point, and I suspect that's  probably the limit, but we'll see... 11 grandchildren with whom I get to interact on a regular basis and finding that leadership has something to say to how I interact with them as their grandfather and my wife as grandmother. 

I have been a pastor for 39 years. In the process of pastoring, I served three different churches. The first church was a little church. When I came to that church, they were about 75 to 90 people in Plainwell, Michigan. Interesting story about that call. I graduated from seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I was a product of Michigan. I grew up here. And I was sick of the weather in Michigan. And so when I was done with seminary, I prayed Oh, God, I want to go south. Please get me a call to a church that’s south. And my first church was 35 miles dead south of where I prayed that prayer. I was there for four and a half years and got to see some marvelous things of people coming to faith. I had to learn a lot about leadership, some of which I will share, because I didn't know I was a leader at that point. And I left that church in depression and ended up moving to Southern California. Finally after four and a half years, we got it straight, I said, God, I want to go where the sun shines. I spent 23 years in Southern California. During that time, the church that I was privileged to pastor grew rather significantly, we had two additions to our building, and then we decided to relocate. And we spent six and a half years, raising money, purchasing property, building a building, moving, selling our original building, and moving to interim space in a warehouse and then moving on to the new property. And some of the greatest leadership challenges of my life were in that process and some of the greatest personal and spiritual challenges of my life. And I'll share more about that as we go on. 

And then lastly, I'm a leader, I have found in my life, that I am called by God to be influencing  people. So how did I figure out I was leader? Well, there's several things to consider in that regard. Growing up, I had no models for leadership whatsoever. My father wasn't a leader, he worked by himself in a General Motors factory. He was a tool and die maker. And in that process, he went to work every day, and he worked by himself all day. He didn't lead any, he had no influence whatsoever on General Motors, their production of cars or choice in which kind of cars that they were going to make. None whatsoever. He was not a leader in any way, shape, or form. So I had no models in my home, of what it meant to be a leader. My older brothers, of whom there are five, ended up not taking initially leadership positions. And it took a while before I got to see them developing leadership. So I had no models of what it  meant to be a leader, somebody who's helping God's people find a preferable future. We'll give more definition to that later today. 

Entered seminary, and there I found that leadership was not a very nice word. In fact, we were encouraged not to be leaders. The idea of leadership was that that was something someone else did. The pastor was to be more like a chaplain. We were to be people who were caring for the hurting, we were to be people who are preaching the word of God, we were to be teaching the word to various people. But the idea of leadership, things like defining the future and helping the church get to the future was something we never covered in seminary whatsoever. And so I entered my first church. It was a little church, and it had about 65, 90 people, somewhere in there when I first came there. And then by God's grace, we began to experience growth. I mean, thank God, people were starting to come to faith in miraculous ways and marvelous stories from that period of my life. As far as just seeing the Holy Spirit work and realizing that it's the spirit, not us, who does  that work of conversion. And so these people were becoming part of the church, and pretty soon we were running out of seating and had to begin discussing what are we going to do from here on? How are we going to move forward? What do we do with the building? Do we expand this building? It was a little tiny building and we had some people look at it in the building trades. And they said, you know, there's no effective way of expanding this little building to put more people in it. But didn't know what to do and just kind of spun wheels there for a couple of years. And in that couple of years, I went into a deep depression. I couldn't identify it as such, because I didn't know myself well, at that point, either. And as a result, I  began to pray for God to lead me elsewhere. I felt like I did not have the capacity to do what that church needed done. And so we went from about 90 in worship to almost 200 in worship in that church during that time. And I was just burned out and I would walk with my dog at night to the fields around there. And I would say, God, how long do I have to do this? I was even consider leaving ministry. It was then that I got a call to a church in Southern California, about 30 miles to the east of Los Angeles. And like I said, I was going where the sun shone. That was wonderful. But the good part about it for me was there was a pastor already there. I was the first staff person and so I thought I wouldn't have to deal with these questions of leadership. The church was larger. It was about 400 people when I came there, and I thought, well this other man who was my partner then in ministry was the one who was the leader. He  was the one who was going to take care of all that stuff and fight all those battles and  define the future and lead the church toward it and had to pay the price for that. Well, six  months after I arrived in leadership, he left and went to plant a church in central California. And so all of a sudden, I was 31, 32 years old. And all of a sudden, I'm expected to lead, and another person joined me who also didn't know much about leadership. But once again, you know, God blessed, and people were coming to faith. My partner during that time had a real gift in evangelism, people were coming to faith, the church was growing. And so soon, the questions were being asked, What are we going to do for the future? And so we could define an immediate step, we could move from one service to two services, but then what's the long range? That doesn't help our educational system and our church school and the things that are connected with Sunday worship? What are we going to do with all that stuff? 

And so that's when I began studying leadership, and trying to identify where I could be a force for leadership, an influence on the future, and how can I help this church move forward to the  areas where God was calling it to move. And those years were a wonderful time of just excitement, as we saw God move. And as I said earlier, we ended up relocating from a medium-sized building to a very large campus, 24 acres with multiple buildings, etc., and a sanctuary that would seat 1500 people. And so I learned a lot during that time. And then, as a result of leadership there, I was invited to be part of the nomination of leadership in my denomination, as well as local leadership among the pastors in that city as we began to plan to support each other as well as reach out together to that community. And so I was there for 23 years. It was a time of the adventure, and it was a time of draining. That six and a half year period of relocation was tested every skill of leadership that I learned, and it brought me to a place where I was pretty exhausted physically and spiritually. And then by God's grace, I received a call to a church back in Michigan, back where the sun doesn't shine a great deal. And I spent the last 11 years working at Covenant Life church here. And by that time I arrived here, I understood the process of leadership, because of the things I'm going to share with you about what I have learned to lead. And so that's a little bit about who I am, and how I come into this subject of leadership. 

Today, my main goal is that we would talk about first and come up with a definition for What is leadership? What does it mean to be a leader? What does it mean to have leadership go on? What does it mean to lead a group of people, particularly a church, a ministry, whatever it is you're involved in. 

One of the things I want to do is note that there are a lot of things that are called Leadership, a lot of definitions for leadership. For instance, Warren Bennis, Warren Bennis, Bert Nanus, in a key book, Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, have catalogued over 850 different definitions of leadership. And so what is leadership? 

Well, John Gardner: Leadership is the process of persuasion or  example by which an individual or a leadership team induces a group to pursue objectives held by a leader, or shared by the leader and his or her followers. You'll note there, it's a process. It's persuasion, it's pursuing objectives held by the leader, or hopefully by the group, and we'll talk about that later when we talk about the process of leadership itself. 

Oswald Sanders in Spiritual Leadership, the book, said Leadership is influence, the ability of one person to influence others. Now, I think he's assuming there the idea that you're influencing others toward something, because leadership is always aiming toward something. 

James MacGregor Burns in a book called Leadership said leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize in competition or conflict with others institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage and satisfy the motives of the followers. Now, the new element in that definition is that last phrase, in other words, leadership is mobilizing a group of people toward some purposes, some objectives, but notice that it satisfies the motives of the followers. You know, there's an old adage that I used to say kiddingly when the church, as we developed more leaders began to go places, I never figured it would go in certain ministries. I was Oh, they’re my people, I've  got to catch up with them, I am their leader. Well, that was people who caught the vision. And they began to define their own vision. So MacGregor is talking about some there,  MacGregor Burns here is talking about something very important. And that is that leadership leads people, and we're going to talk about that later, in a way that helps them satisfy their God callings in their own life. 

And then George Barna in a book called Leaders on Leadership said a Christian leader is someone who was called by God to lead, leads with and through Christ-like character, and demonstrates the functional competencies that permit effective leadership to take place. Now, the new thing there is the functional competencies. There are certain parts that are necessary for leadership to happen, certain skills and qualities. And Robert Clinton, finally, The Making of a Leader, the central task of leadership is influencing God's people toward God's purposes. I like that. Because when we're looking at the future, when we're leading diligently, it shouldn't be about us. It should be about, What is God's call? What is God's plan? What is God's purpose? So those are some definitions of leadership, that whole idea of a group of people moving towards some God's objectives. 

Now, I want to share with you my definition, it's come from many years of variety of studies, and reading and reflection, as well as being engaged in leadership. My definition begins with the leader. A leader, with all of his strengths and weaknesses, with his spiritual gifts and his lack of spiritual gifts. When you come as a leader, you are in many ways, a very unique person. How you lead is dependent on who you are. And so God may have called you as somebody who's got a tremendous education or no education at all. God may have called you as somebody who's an extreme extrovert, and so you're somebody who's used to and love dealing with people. And you may be an introvert. You may be somebody that just has a sense of where God is calling or what's right in a certain situation, or you may not. Later we're going to talk about the dark side of leadership, the fact that each one of us has a set of temptations that we can get into at various times, that has the power to destroy our leadership, and in some sense that's unique to all of us, though. Though, maybe not so unique, we maybe all face certain temptation, but it begins with the leader, and I'm going to let that little man there represent the leader. 

Now, once you have the leader, he comes into or as part of a culture. Now a culture is a group of people who gather together, and they have a certain common behaviors, they have certain common rituals, they have certain common language, they have a certain stories that they tell, they've got a history together. And as a result, they have defined how things are done here. That's the culture. Now we're going to explore the culture in depth. And I'm going to give you some ways and plans to define the culture in your own situation, your own life. But that's part of the definition of leadership is it’s leader now interacts with a culture or a group of leaders, interacts with the culture, which is the way things are done here. Every place you go, there is a culture. John Wimber was one of my professors at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California. He was one of the founders of the Vineyard movement back then in the 1980s. And they started this church called the Vineyard and it grew like crazy, but they decided to get started with no theology, except soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation. So they said, you know, The only thing you had to believe and commit to as a member of that church was that you are saved by grace through faith. And if you wanted your baby baptized, you could have it baptized. If you believe that baptism is only for adults, well you could do that, in that church. If you want to speak in tongues, and you believe that that was  essential to your spiritual experience, that's fine. If you believe us to speaking in tongues, was not part of the modern day church, but it ceased with the apostles. That was fine. You can be part of that church. You can believe a lot of different things and be part of that church. And they wanted to create such an inclusive Church as a result of that. After about a year, he said he was walking through the foyer, the narthex area of the church, into the worship center when he heard one person who had been there for almost a whole year talking into a new person. And the person who had been there for a while said to the new person, says, But you don't understand, that's not the way we do things here. Now Wimber said he was shocked because they were trying to avoid that all along. But over a year, a certain culture had developed—The way we do things here. 

So the leader interacts with a culture. And there are a variety of aspects to that culture, visible aspects and we’ll look at that more closely in future sessions. So the leader interacts with that culture to define a preferable future. Now I've pictured that as kind of a moon or a star up there. And it says the preferred future vision becomes the star that you steer by, not a simple map to follow. In other words, it's a picture—in the church language, it's a picture of where is God calling us to be? In language of Bill Hybels, you know, we're here, what's there? And then we'll define how we get there later. That's the next stage. But right now, it's a vision thing. How do you see—what do you see as the future of this organization? Now, I serve in the church, this applies to the business world,  this applies to wherever you are in your life. There's going to be a culture that you're  going to be a part of. And God is hopefully, as you lead, going to give you parts of a vision. Now it’s going to hopefully happen collectively. And we're going to talk about ways to do that. But it's looking forward and saying, We've got to go there. There is so much better than here. So that's part of the leadership process. It's having a vision, a preferred future in mind. And then finally, there's this box, and that is prayer and planning. Planning usually takes place in a couple of different ways. That takes place, first of all, conceptually. In other words, a conceptual plan is what's the vision for the future 1-3 years out into the future? What does that look like? And then you'll develop strategic plans, which are, you know, anywhere from one month to a year, a strategic plan of These are the steps we got to take in order to move toward that future that we've defined. And then there are tactical plans, which are about a month to three months. In the church that I've been working in for the last 11 years, we required all staff to every three to four months come up with a ministry action plan. Those are conceptual plans that reach into What is the future going to be like, and how does this contribute to that? That is all part of the leadership process. 

And that is this class in summary. Here's the definition that we're going to use. 

A leader, with all of his pluses and minuses, strengths and weaknesses, interacts with a group of people to define the culture—in other words, the way things are done here—in order to develop a vision for a preferable future, and then provides the impetus for doing the actions necessary to bring about that future with plans and prayer. That's my definition of leadership. And that's this course, in a nutshell. We're going to look first for many sessions at the leader, because everything rises and falls on leadership. And so we're going to look at the leader, and who you are as a leader, and how do you help understand who you are as a leader and what God has called you to be and become as a leader. And then we're going to look at culture. The way things are done here can be defined in a variety of ways. It could be defined in macro culture, looking at the big picture, and we're going to do that in some respects as examples. But then each organization has a subculture to that that develops and in the church cultures tend  to be especially strong. Any church or Christian organization that's been around for a while,  has a deeply embedded culture. And so how do you work with that culture in order to define the preferable future? So we're going to have many sessions on the culture. And then we're going to have many sessions on vision and how do you define that vision for for the preferred future. And then finally, we're going to talk about how you create the plans necessary that are going to get to that future. It's an exciting process. Since I've become aware of this whole process and this definition of leadership, it literally changed the way I approach ministry in the church. And so I invite you along on this journey with me. It's going to be an exciting one. And together hopefully, we're going to learn how to serve God more effectively. That's my goal. Thank you for being part of it.