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Lost leadership

Acts 1: 1 – 26

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 02 Apr, 2005

MANY YEARS ago, there was an infamous musical called Hair. I think it was first on stage here about 1969 or 1970. It contained nudity, swearing, simulated sex, special effects and long hair.

  One special effect was strobe lighting. It gave the effect of stopped motion. Between flashes of light, people and things moved. You glimpsed what they were doing, rather than see each minute movement.

  The Gospels and Acts are like a strobe display of the events between Easter and Pentecost. You don’t see everything. You catch glimpses. There is always a puzzle about just what if going on.

  There’s a snapshot of disciples cowering in an upper room uncertain whether a raiding party will arrive at any minute, and Jesus appears. There’s a snapshot of the disciples fishing in Galilee, and seeing Jesus on the shore. There’s a snapshot of two disciples walking to Emmaus, and Jesus joins them. That’s how we see it. No detail, just flashes as the strobe light traps and freezes an action.

  Yet this time between Easter and Pentecost is vitally important. It speaks to any group struggling with its sense of direction and with how it will get to where it wants to go.

JESUS AND LEADERSHIP

  To understand this period in the life of the Church, we need to go to the early days.

  When Jesus began his ministry, he preached that God’s Kingdom had arrived. This drew a crowd of followers to him.

  From that crowd he chose 12 with leadership potential. Watch those 12 interacting, because their leadership potential emerges frequently. Constant squabbling and bickering is an indicator. Each of them wants to be in charge. Some of them have been small businessmen. Some have ambitious mothers. Judas and Simon were in Community Organisations.

  When you get people with leadership ability and ambitions together, they tend to pull in opposite directions.

  Someone who was here many years ago let it drop that he had leadership ambitions in our church. But his goals were very different from mine or yours. Eventually he saw that he had to pursue those goals in another church. We just didn’t have the resources to do what he had in mind. But until he realised that, we had several clashes over directions.

  Leadership clashes paralyse any group, and I imagine that it took a lot of hard work by Jesus to keep his group on track.

  You see something of this problem when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is.

  Peter says, “You are the Christ.”

  So Jesus begins teaching them about all he must suffer and how he will rise again.

  Peter rebukes him, and tells him that this should not happen.

  In other words, Peter wants to take charge in Jesus’s life and ministry, and to go in totally different paths from Jesus’ plans.

  Leadership issues were a constant.

  But we often forget that Jesus not only had the 12 to contend with, he also had many others as well. After he had sent the 12 out on mission, he then sent 72 others out.

  Sometimes his followers must have numbered in the hundreds. But even managing 72 would have taken some doing.

  If he was a good leader — and you can see from the Bible that he was one of the best — then he probably had each of the apostles managing six of those in the wider group.

  This was an ever–expanding organisation.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF LEADERSHIP

  But I wasn’t going to talk all morning about those early days. We are moving on to this period between Easter and Pentecost. The first thing to realise is that the disciples — all of them, not just the 12 in the inner circle — all the disciples were suddenly leaderless.

  Because we Christians often focus on the personal, we usually think about how abandoned and disappointed the disciples must have felt, and that is totally valid. But we also need to consider their organisational issues.

  Think about what it meant for those early Christians. They had lost a friend. They had lost someone who had been a big brother, a kuya, to them all.

  Even more so, they had lost their leader.

  Jesus said they would be like sheep without a shepherd. The Bible says,

^{MK 14:27} “You will all fall away,” Jesus told them, “for it is written:

“ `I will strike the shepherd,

and the sheep will be scattered.’

  There is a very strong emphasis in the New Testament on the leadership role. We Baptists tend to overlook it. But every group needs leadership. In fact, there are several leadership roles that you can find in a group.

  In Melbourne late last year, I had lunch with several colleagues from down there whom I knew by phone and e-mail but not face to face.

  When I was back in Sydney, I spoke to Ashley, one of the Data Analysts. I said, “You spent a lot of time watching the other people.”

  “I do that,” she replied. “I like to be sure that everyone is being included, and everyone has enough to eat and so on.”

  WIthout any prior arrangement, Ashley and I had leadership roles in that lunch meeting.

  I had a functional leadership role. I sent out the invitations, nominated someone to work out where we should meet, basically set the agenda for what we were doing. Ashley had a maintenance leadership role. She led in a way that oiled the wheels to make it all work.

  In the old days, most Pastors had very strong functional leadership roles. It was fine when everything went well. But anyone who got wounded was left to die along the way.

  Then, in the mid '70s, Pastors began rejecting that role, and moved over to a maintenance role. In fact, that was a strong emphasis when I was in college.

  The result was that many pastors in my group were bewildered, because about a third of the church wanted functional leaders and about a third wanted maintenance leadership, and the remaining third wanted anything but what they were getting. We had a big intake in our year, but also a massive drop–out rate.

BREAK DOWN IN LEADERSHIP

  The disciples were leaderless.

  There are some symptoms of being leaderless. We see them in the accounts of the disciples between Easter and Pentecost.

  The first thing you see is that the disciples were inactive.

  In many of these glimpses, we see them huddled in the upper room. The Bible says,

...for fear of the Jews.

  The Bible’s not wrong. They were afraid of the Jewish authorities. They all thought they might be next.

  But they were not able to act.

  Imagine how a novelist would have told it. He’s have had the disciples afraid, but actively planning how they could escape, or deciding how to change the situation to their advantage. But this lot didn’t even think of moving away from where they would pretty quickly be found.

  In the movies, they sneak out, one by one, under the cover of darkness. In the Bible, they sit around wondering what to do next.

  The difference is leadership. In the movie, with Steve McQueen as Peter, Peter coordinates it all and makes the bravest dask to safety, pursued by 50 savage Temple Guards. But that’s not the Peter in the Bible.

  The next thing you see is their disagreements.

  One by one they say, “Hey! We have seen the Lord! He’s alive again!”

  But Thomas says, “I need pretty good proof, or else I think you are all either stupid or lying.”

  Isn’t that what he says? “Unless I see the nail holes in his hands, and put my hand in his side, I will not believe you?”

  There is no element of trust. Yes, there are logical isses. No one ever thought it easy to believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead. We have to look at the evidence and decide whether it did occur or not, but we have no science or technology which tells us how it could possibly have occurred apart from God’s direct intervention.

  Yes, Thomas had doubts, and he had reasons for those doubts. But the way he expresses those doubts shows that there is something else going on.

  If one of you told me a story I found hard to believe, you all know what I do. I say, “Hmmm... can you tell me a bit more? That would be very unusual.”

  I know that some of you would be more direct and say, “I find that difficult to believe,” or “I don’t think it could have been quite like that.” You don’t say to me, “Unless you can give me personally satisfying proof, I think you are lying of mad.”

  People don’t talk to each other like that if they respect each other. And respect is a keynote of leadership.

  You can have someone who is a pretty incompetent leader. You can have someone who lacks gifts. But, if you respect him or her, you will at least consider following that person.

  Just after school, I went to Outward Bound. One of our team members had so little idea of maps or navigation that he used to get lost on the cross–country runs where we had white arrows every 50 m to show us where to go.

  But we still let George lead us. We didn’t let him read maps, but we did let him plan our routes and get us safely to where we were going. We respected him, and knew he was on our side and would choose to suffer before he let one of us get hurt.

  Thomas doesn’t have that kind of trust in his colleagues, and it shows. It shows how weak the group’s leadership is.

  The third thing you see is how scattered they were. The two disciples heading home to Emmaus, the group in the upper room, the fragmentation of the group. It’s in John 21,

2 Simon Peter, Thomas (called Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. ³ “I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

  Here are five of the key disciples.They are going back to their old business. They have no sense of the mission that Jesus had called them to. Six others of the group are missing altogether. The group is breaking in pieces.

SOLUTIONS TO LEADERSHIP ISSUES

  There are some Biblical solutions to problems of leadership as we look at this passage.

  Of course, sometimes the problems are more serious than those faced by the disciples. But I mean that the kinds of problems hindering leadership in this group were fairly simple ones.

  The first thing they did was to assemble together. We read,

^{AC 1:12} Then they returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city. ¹³ When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.

  You’ll notice that the whole 11 of them were there — Judas had already left them and committed suicide. The remaining group came together.

  When a group has leadership problems and they stick together even when it feels uncomfortable, eventually leadership begins to reveal itself. Someone starts to take responsibility to get everyone to the table on time. That’s the beginning of leadership.

  The second thing is that they prayed.

  We read,

¹⁴ They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.

  There’s a song,

Be careful what you pray for,

You just might get it;

Be careful what you pray for,

You might regret it...

  Often the problem with our prayers is that what we pray for is what we get. We schedule a time of prayer for the spiritual health of the church and we spend the hour praying about Mrs Jones' bunions. And we never think of thanking God that Mrs Jones survived her bunions. We just feel disappointed that there was no revival. But we get what we ask for.

  I’m sure that they prayed for wisdom, that they prayed for understanding, that they prayed for an ability to make sense of everything that had happened.

  James, the Lord’s brother, was one who joined them at this time, and he wrote, many years later,

⁵ If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

  Finally, they filled the gaps.

  Peter has taken up a central role in the organisation, and we read how he led them to elect a replacement for Judas.

^{AC 1:23} So they proposed two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. ²⁴ Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen ²⁵ to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” ²⁶ Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.

  We mightn’t have all the answers, or be fully on track. But it’s always better to be prepared for things to improve, rather than rushing around trying to solve a problem that is too big for us to handle.

  If we need someone for a job, we need to elect the person. We might not have everything as we want it, but that's not the issue. Churches usually try to get the ministry right and then fit someone to the ministry. God’s way is to get the right person and she or he will trim the ministry until it fits the person. The church between Easter and Pentecost had no ministry at all; but Peter had Holy Spirit foresight, and got them to elect Matthias to a ministry that didn’t exist yet.

  We aren’t yet where we should be, but let’s stick together as we pray, and get the people we will need, while we wait for the Lord to show us the next step to take.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)