By: Annie
When we talk about serving at church or leadership, it’s often focused on what people aren’t doing. Look at all these vacancies. Why aren’t more people stepping up? If you’d only put your trust in God, you could do great things. I’m not saying there’s no value in that line of thinking, but what’s another way of looking at it? What are people doing?
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We’re all frustrated with church. On some level, there is something you can’t get past about how we run things, who are leaders are, and that nothing ever gets better. For leaders, you probably feel like you can’t catch a break. No one will volunteer to help out, people think you’re incompetent while you attend yet another meeting and fail to balance church with life.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been challenging you to think about your spiritual journey and the things that hold you back from serving. I’ve been saying we need to be open and honest with each other about church to figure out how we can do ministry in a more sustainable way. So how do we have a meaningful and constructive conversation about church leadership? It’s in the title: meet the candidates.
I thought it would be a great idea to do this series where I’d devote an article talking about each of the candidates. So I asked some of our nominees two questions: Why are you running for this position? and What’s your vision/plan/goal for these next 2 years? What I got, for the most part, were abstract platitudes: “I want to help out at church and this is what I’m good at.” I take responsibility for asking dumb questions but as I read through the answers, I started to ask myself what I expect from our leaders. I don’t have a vision or plan, maybe they don’t either, so what am I doing to help them figure things out?
As members, we have a right to challenge our leaders. To hold them accountable and as a church, we must stand united with them. We’re on the ballot as much as our nominees. So go meet the candidates. Have coffee. Share and listen to each other’s faith journeys, where we’re at as a church, and how we can support one another.