4. Boldness
If you search the New Testament, you’ll see boldness as a hallmark of early church leaders.
You can hardly describe the church culture of many churches today as bold. Anemic, maybe. Bold, no.
And when people become bold, people criticize them for being arrogant or in it for themselves. Well, sometimes yes. But often no. They’re just exercising a God-given gift. Paul, after all, was no stranger to that criticism.
After all, boldness moved the cause of Christ forward in a remarkable way, changing millions of lives.
5. A bias for action
We have plenty of thinkers in the church and not nearly enough doers.
Entrepreneurs bring a bias for action that is often astonishing. Spiritual entrepreneurs accomplish things nobody else accomplishes because they do things nobody else is willing to do.
If you think about the (much criticized) innovations in today’s church (video venues, multisite churches, online campuses, etc.) you realize that you open yourself to a world of criticism when you start bold new things. So what?
Not the only thing, but a missing thing.
I’m not saying the gift of apostleship is the only thing, but it is a missing thing.
Conventional seminaries are mostly addicted to producing shepherds. If all we get have is shepherds stepping into leadership, then what you get is people who will (mostly) care for small groups of people.
Organizationally, it makes some sense to hire leaders and have shepherd volunteers. That’s what we’ve done at Connexus. You can care for hundreds, or thousands, of people through volunteer shepherding (we call them small group leaders) and let the leaders lead.
Do we need the gift of shepherding? Absolutely.
But we’re desperately missing the gift of spiritual entrepreneurship in the church today.
