As something grows good governance, sharing information and best practices are essential to keep any endeavour moving forward there is no doubt to that. However I believe there can be a danger hidden in success! Lets look at one trap I believe that we can easily avoid.

I suspect the world has always been a dynamic place but in my life time I have noticed an increase in the pace of change. I can only speak of my experience. Over the fifteen odd years of doing CPM/AIM style disciple making I can hardly recognise the Australian culture compared to when I started. EG: Increased safety measures for public safety, same sex marriage, mandatory pro-counselling for abortion, abortion terms extended, gender fluidity and its mandatory acceptance in the workplace as well as  schools, etc. etc... Changes for good or worse makes my head spin when I think of them.

I maintain this website, initially just to keep my resources handy as I travelled, but I have been kept so busy with my paid work as well as the Kingdom work out in the field it is hopelessly out of date with our current practice. It is just not high on my priority list. Every now and again I look at the tools listed or the description pages and realise that it just doesn’t reflect what we do on the ground anymore. Over the years we have weeded out a lot of the less productive content and replaced it with simpler more reproducible content. One day I will get the time to update the site I hope.

But here in displays the pot hole in the road I want to show you. My failing highlights it, the website is a time capsule of what we use to do. If someone were to take it and apply it verbatim they would be out of step with the culture today. Lucky it is just a website and not our organisational structure and practices though.

I believe that one must always remain a practitioner, to some degree, no matter what role you play in the organisation at the time. My primary role for quite some years now has been an administrator, overseer, trainer and facilitator since my Supervisor was called overseas. (If I was doing my job properly perhaps the website would be up to date?) However our priority is focused on the lost of this world and not administration. Our master led by example and being a servant. If I preach M. A. W. L. as a primary tool for discipleship then I too must also Model what is expected and not just tell others what is expected. This is hard to balance when you are self funded.

This balancing act does have one very important advantage though. My team and myself have always been at the coal face of our efforts. The cutting edge or the crash test dummies if you will. We have experienced every change in the culture as it happened and was able to respond to it in real time. The lessons we learnt we immediately passed on down the line to our networks.

I have seen the reverse of this strategy too in business and in private. For many decades I have worked for State and Federal Governments. Try as they may their managers are usually hopelessly out of date with current best practices, despite their many and varied meetings and seminars on the topic. I have seen departments decades behind in some cases. The problem is that the upper management is too far removed from the coal face. Trainers in these fields are often just rolling out systems that have already failed in other countries decades ago. The latest Australian flavour of practices is just the failed practices of other countries wrapped up in new shiny paper. They can’t sell their product any more over there so they look for new dumping grounds to make a profit. Privately I have seen a similar mechanism. I grew up amongst Australian Danish. I struggled personally culturally and I had an even bigger problem trying to relate to contemporary Danes visiting from Denmark. The language I had learnt had been frozen in time when the first immigrants arrived in Australia. The living language in Denmark had continued to expand and evolve to the point where I had difficulty in even saying hello without sounding silly and archaic. Organisations that do not keep their hand on the plough have a real danger of becoming time capsules themselves!

Managers and especially trainers must be actually coal face practitioners as well if they hope to stay in touch with today’s dynamic culture! Tools and practices that had once provided us with great success yesterday may not (probably will not) do so tomorrow.

Don’t get me wrong, seminars, pod casts, etc. etc. are excellent in sharing current best practices and lessons learnt! However what is working in the USA may not work in Australia if copied directly. Similarly what is working in Sydney NSW spectacularly may not work copied and pasted into Hobart Tasmania. These seminars and the like are a great and essential starting point to get a dart on the board. It is up to the leadership and training staff to give it the acid test and make any changes they think best fits. No longer can Managers sit in lofty offices and just delegate if they want to stay the most effective at reaching the lost. I believe that you can also see this hands on model all over the New Testament as well. Christ and Paul, for example, didn’t seem like ‘the stay at home and delegate’ type of people.

Is it easy? Well I’m the first to say no its not particularly if you are self funded tent makers! I believe that the stakes are too high not to try though. We are not looking at the bottom of a balance sheet or even the best way to deliver clean water but the eternal lives of the people around us. They are not static. They just keep being born, moving and dying all the time and we don’t have their time to waste getting it right.

A friend of mine pointed out one possible extra benefit to staying a practitioner even though you are very time and resource poor. He noted that because I had to work full time to sustain our ministry as well as juggle several hats in the Kingdom I had become very discerning of how I used my time. In particular I would invest heavily in people that were ripe for the harvest and were obedient to Christ. I would love the others I came across and would touch base with them from time to time to check their receptivity but I didn’t waste time and resources trying to make them ripe or obedient. I kept moving on. This must have been also modelled unknowingly.  The results were evident to the outside observer.

So no matter what success you have had and no matter how big your organisation grows I encourage everyone to keep a hand on the plough at least from time to time. God will give you the strength and direction if you ask him to.

God Bless and keep running the race, fighting the good fight.  Please don't get distracted by domestic affairs.

Macka.