Pentecostal Discussions

Rebuilding 'The House' III: Martha's House

All the above said, there is nothing as powerful as a properly functioning, healthy church community. It was this that turned over the Roman Empire, revolutionised Western Culture, gave the world an inestimable heritage of service and value. What is it that makes such a thing work? Systems theorists tell us that all social organisms need maintain the balance between task and maintenance. Task is the exciting stuff – it is the stuff that ‘we are here for’, it is what pastors love throwing vision at. It is assumed to be the task of the leader, whether in the business corporation, the NGO or the church. Maintenance is what holders of such conceptions of leadership like to leave to others – it is the vocation of the ‘pastoral care’ pastor, the ‘administration guy’, the facilities and programs director. The systems theorists, however, would point out that vision is not the only task of leadership. The task of leaders is to act as the cut out switch, the holder of the balance between the demands of maintenance and task. To set task without reference to maintenance is to invite burn out and the phenomenon of the ‘big back door’; to set maintenance without reference to task is to freeze into self-satisfied irrelevance. The reaction of Pentecostal churches in particular to the latter model of church has meant a distorted preference for the former model of leadership – the model which leaves the leader with the task of vision, but no responsibility for what happens in the rest of the organisation. This flows through into what our ruling metaphors for church will be: house or Temple, home or mission. Any one of these models can be made to work – the trick is for it to know what it is, and to do that well, without denying the vitality of the other metaphors.

Rebuilding 'the House' II

by Mark Hutchinson

The back room culture supporting this new post-denominational form of global organization (which in many ways is reminiscent of the global Keswick conference form so popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century) is supported by a model of ‘servant leadership’ absorbed from the corporate world. This was a form of leadership theory proposed by Robert Greenleaf which – reacting to the ‘fuhrerprinzip’ style of dominating leadership in the second world war and tapping into the energy of 1960s antiauthoritarianism – proposed a new form of leadership which is

based on teamwork and community; … seeks to involve others in decision making; which is strongly based in ethical and caring behaviour; and … which is enhancing the growth of people, while at the same time improving the caring and quality of our many institutions. [Spears, 1996, 33]

Rebuilding 'the House' I

 by Mark Hutchinson

If one were to ask the question “what is Pentecostalism”, the answers might surprise you. It depends on who you ask. Ask a member, and you are likely to be told that it is the movement of God in the world. Ask a Pentecostal theologian, and you are likely to be told that it is a movement of experiential holiness marked by distinctive doctrines emerging from a belief that God, in the last days, has restored the biblical gifts of the Holy Spirit. Ask other sorts of theologians, and they will vacillate between ‘satanism unveiled’ and various sociological descriptions related to the downward mobilization of marginalized laity.