Where Everybody's Crazy

After several days of fighting with video editing software, and DVD software, and video encoding software, I finally uploaded the video of the other week's leadership seminar. It's Japanese only, but at least you get to see that, as usual, if you tied my hands behind my back I wouldn't be able to say a thing.

Update: While I'm on a roll with videos, here's another one about me and what I'm doing here.

Today I had a small explosion at my pastor. I think he was probably expecting it, and he dealt with it very well. Mind you, I decided not to say all the things I'd thought about saying beforehand.

Basically I told him that I was fed up of the legalism and the emphasis on appearances that is so prevalent in the Japanese church. He agreed that it was a big problem and tried to point me to some explanations - the need to keep a diverse people together and to provide some kind of uniformity and structure to their expression of faith; the fact that if people leave the church due to conflict, in the West they'll usually go to another church, whereas here they'll usually leave altogether. And the ever-present fact that pastors just plain don't trust the laity. Until that changes any chance of a lay revival is dead in the water.

I managed to come up with an analogy which made him wince, and rightly so.

I said that in Japan the pastors are building bonsai churches. They look very neat and pretty, but their roots are tightly constricted with the rules that we impose upon them. Any time they do anything interesting, we cut them off to keep them looking neat. And then we wonder why they don't grow.

And discipleship is the same. So long as pastors exercise control - and don't exercise trust - we get bonsai Christians. All neat and tidy, but too constricted to grow properly. There is a leadership issue here, of giving trust and giving people the freedom and the safety to try, to fail and to learn; there is also a fundamental cultural issue of control relationships in societies. Think about the control a traditional business extends over its employees, and that's what's being replicated in the church. And it has to change, somehow.

I don't quite know where to go from here, but I'm happy that I managed to vent my frustrations and we didn't end up arguing. I'm getting more and more sold on the house church movement, simply because I can't face the idea of committing 25 man-years (5 people in a team for 5 years) to build and prop up another bonsai church somewhere while millions still don't know about Jesus. It doesn't seem like the best use of our time, and anyway there's no evidence it produces the kind of Christians we think are mature at the end of it. I don't know why we do it.

But anyway the Japanese church is not going to go away, and despite all its faults it's the only one we've got, so we have to work with it. Perhaps the idea would be to train Japanese pastors in how to exercise appropriate and Biblical leadership. Which was, coincidentally, what I was planning to do all along.

I posted this is a comment on the Church Planting Institute blog, but they deleted my comment without notice. Which is very nice of them. Way to build community, guys! (OK, I've been guilty of doing that in the past too - my house, my rules - but I'm not really trying to build community here too much. Just providing an outlet for other ranters and ravers... :)

Their article quotes a book on leadership:

Leadership competency may be the tools of effective leadership; but biblically informed character has always been the power of effective leadership. When a leader does not continually address character formation and transformation in their personal lives and operate solely from a competency base, then competency will ultimately fail to produce the kind of results God intended through the life of that leader. And remember, lasting transformational change begins with the heart. Our central beliefs establish our cores values, our values inform our worldview, our worldview conditions our primary motives, and our motives energize our behavior. Our behavior merely reflects the condition of our hearts (Proverbs 4:23). The lesson: pay attention to the heart from God’s point of view (1 Samuel 16:7), and God-honoring behavior will follow.

I can't remember my comment verbatim, but it was something like the following:

It's a shame that people feel forced to use management-speak to talk about leadership, particularly when one of the important qualities of a leader is clear communication. See if this is easier to read:

Leadership isn't just about what you can do, it's also about who you are. If you're just focused on what you can do and don't develop who you are, you're not going to succeed. Who you are starts with what you believe, and that determines why you do what you do. If you want to improve your leadership, start by improving yourself.

Tuesdays, I go to meetings: denominational pastors' meetings, area pastors' meetings, block prayer meetings. Today, one block prayer meeting and one area pastors' meeting. They took up all day, and let's be honest, were completely useless.

Well, no, let's be fair. The prayer meeting was worthwhile. Our denomination, the SFDD, divides its churches into four blocks, and there are four churches in our block. We meet together to pray and share news once a month. Churches generally prepare an A4 sheet of prayer requests, and each church's pastor reads the requests off their sheet, and then we pray.

The other meetings are useful, but in a bit of an oblique way. The contents are irrelevant to me on the whole; the importance is in terms of networking, showing willing, and observing how business is done in the Japanese church context. From that point of view, they're invaluable.

One thing I have noticed, like the recitation of the prayer request sheets, is a fantastic attention to detail. I guess I'm being polite in saying that. The other day, at the denominational pastors' meeting, what was supposed to be a high-level discussion about the vision and purpose of the headquarters building very quickly turned into organising the cleaning rota. I asked my pastor (who, incidentally, reads this blog. Hello, Takahashi-sensei!) about this and he said that we had a lot of attention-to-detail people in our denomination.

Well, I would have accepted that until the regional pastors' meeting today. This is an interdenominational meeting, which is a pretty rare thing here in Japan, and it's mainly a fellowship and unity thing, although we are organising a big interdenominational conference together. And an inordinate amount of time in that meeting was taken up with announcements about the conference cafeteria menu, biographies of the musicians taking part, and examples of the artwork on sale in the gallery. I don't need to know all this stuff. In each of these meetings, I have written down on my little notepad, "Is this discussion taking place on the right level?" Am I just living in a country of anal retentives? Do you have to have an ISTJ personality type to be a pastor here?

I'm not sure. I don't think these people are incapable of vision and leadership. I think it just expresses itself in a very relational way. And part of that expression is keeping everyone informed, even in the minutiae of what's going on. We don't like surprises. In my paper on leadership in Japan, I wrote about the concept of "nemawashi" - I didn't realise at the time that it had a very negative connotation, but it's still useful - it means ensuring everybody is on board before a decision is made publicly. This nemawashi is necessary to satisfy a desire for information and total involvement in a decision which is to be taken corporately.

Another factor may be that, where unity is hard to find, agreeing about stuff that doesn't matter gives a useful sense of safety. There was no way on earth we were going to agree on a vision for headquarters. And if we didn't agree, that would be embarrassing. But if we don't agree about the cleaning rota, well, who cares?

One more thought: all this involvement and sharing information doesn't seem to have made a blind bit of difference to church unity. We can, apparently, keep everyone "on board" and still split like good Protestants.

I'm still working out what to make of this. I want to make one more connection. One of the barriers to lay involvement in churches here is the control factor. Pastors like to know what's going on in their churches. Of course there are issues of pastoral responsibility, but I can't help connecting the insatiable desire for detailed information and involvement in our pastoral meetings with the insatiable desire for detailed information and involvement in church activities. Do pastors need to let go? Or is there a way to both work effectively and preserve the benefits of relationship-based leadership?

When I was at Bible college, we did an essay for the leadership course on "transformational and transactional leadership in the life of Jesus". To define those terms a bit, transactional leadership is leadership which sets conditions and rewards to get a goal done. Tell the men that if build this ship for you, you will pay them. Transformational leadership is that which inspires a team to want what you want. Teach the men, as Saint-Exupery put it, "to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In transformational leadership, the team is the real end product; even if you don't build the ship, you may well have built the men.

I argued in my essay that Jesus used a mixture of transformational and transactional leadership styles, but on the whole he was a transformational leader. Which is not surprising, because I think of myself as a transformational leader. Everyone knows, of course, that Jesus was interested in building people up more than getting stuff done. Right?

I wonder now how, in my essay, I could have missed the entire book of Matthew.

Matthew is an odd gospel. OK, we think it's written as an introduction to Jesus for a Jewish audience, and so it works almost as a restatement of the Law in Jesus' terms. Jesus deepens the Law: used to be you couldn't murder, now you can't get angry; used to be you couldn't covet, now you can't get lustful. So naturally, it's going to come across in pretty harsh, transactional terms. It's actually quite hard stuff: "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." "Unless your righteousness exceeds the scribes and the Pharisees, you will in no way enter into the kingdom of heaven." (When was the last time you heard a sermon on that verse?)

This got me thinking about the whole leadership thing again, and I realised something: where are the disciples? In Mark and Luke we see Jesus sending out the disciples, hearing about how their mission trips went, encouraging them, taking them off for retreats, teaching them privately, answering their questions individually. In Matthew, they hardly make an appearance. Only one disciple interacts with Jesus individually - Peter - and that's only a handful of times.

There's apocalyptic, there's rebuke, there's woe, and there's an awful lot of commands to be adhered to if you want to call yourself one of Jesus' followers. The Matthean Jesus was not, compared to the other accounts, a particularly friendly and encouraging guy to work for. Transformational leadership? Maybe not.

I don't know if you've noticed that I've been rather more quiet than usual recently, but part of the reason is that we're nearing the end of term - in fact, the end of my time here at college - and I've been working on my research paper.

Now what they don't tell you is that "research paper" is really a misnomer. By calling it a "research paper" and giving you a "supervisor" you get the impression that this is some serious piece of academic activity; but at only 7,000 words maximum, it can barely be called a dissertation. It's an extended essay, at best.

So I spent a couple of weeks stressing about it and trying to write down every single idea that I had, and then got told that all that would have to wait for the PhD. (I hate it when people give me ideas like that.)

Then I just wrote a few ideas down, came to some conclusions, explained how I got to those conclusions, and hey, I was just a bit over 7000 words.

And here it is, complete! You can also download it as a PDF. I don't claim it's brilliant - but that's only because I know what I would have liked to have put in there if there wasn't a word budget - but in the light of the fact that there's so little out there on the topic, it's good enough.

Enjoy.

So here I am trying to work out a contextually-sensitive leadership development programme for Japan, but I haven't even been contextually sensitive enough to discover whether leadership development is a meaningful concept in Japan.

The only references I've found to leadership training in Japan are from nurses and teachers. And from programmes that Americans have brought in.

It's annoying when you find that your research has been barking up the wrong tree, but it's really disturbing when you wonder whether the tree even exists.

少し時間ありますか？私の卒論の研究を助けてください！ １０分掛かりません。

Last night, for a bit of light bedtime reading, I settled down and consumed the first of the many books and papers I need to get through for my research paper. I'll be researching how to create a leadership training programme for Japan which is both Biblical and entirely culturally Japanese.

Last night's paper was a MA thesis by Richard Pease, Japanese leadership styles: a study in contextualizing leadership theory for church growth in Japan. It's come out of Fuller and it's got those magic words "church growth" in it, so it's based on a bunch of assumptions I find questionable at best: the most questionable in particular for this study is that if we have good leaders, our churches will grow. The most questionable in general is that if we do everything right according to these principles and formulas, our churches will grow. This needs to be clearly identified as not faith, but ritual magic.

Amongst other Classic Mistakes was a close alliance between "Biblical" and "American" models of leadership:

As the prime example of a Biblical model for church growth leadership, Paul's example fits well into the American perception of a strong leader.

and I thought that was really going to kill off how "contextual" the study was prepared to be. Actually, when it came to surveying and understanding Japanese models of leadership, the paper leant hard on the next MA thesis I have on my desk, Billy Ogata's Small groups and lay leadership training for church growth in Japan, and it did pick out a few important cultural points from that study.

The main value of the paper for me was that in thinking about what it had to say, I had an important realization: When Chie Nakane says that "Japan has never produced a truly charismatic leader", she is saying something positive, not negative. A leader who leads through autonomous strength of character would not be a Japanese leader! Japanese leadership is primarily leadership-in-consultation. Now we have another data point to answer one of the main questions of my research: is the church expecting of Japanese leaders a style of leadership which is totally alien to them?

The team, the project, the job, the organisation will all pass away. The relationships last for eternity. Get the relationships right.