Eight people from my church attended a seminar yesterday by Tom Bandy, a church consultant and organizational theorist. He urged us to abandon committees and programs and create ministry teams engaged in more spontaneous forms of mission. “Move from the solid to the liquid,” he said.
Organizational speakers like Bandy pull back the curtain and help us imagine how things might be. What they describe is idealistic, though, which is why one participant at our event called it “Nirvanaland.”
I appreciated his three elements of a leader’s healthy spirituality:
- Humilitas — deep humility before God.
- Conversatio — a radical, ongoing conversation with God and the world.
- Humanitas — compassion and gentleness.
(Things always sound impressive in Latin.)
And he said this: “The fastest growing demographic is the spiritually hungry and institutionally alienated.” I belong to this demographic myself, which puts me at odds since I live in the world of institutional religion.
