The Organizational Development Muse

These certainly ring true from my perspective as a church consultant and having recently resigned a co-lead pastorate with my wife who was the first female pastor. Even if churches say they are open to women in ministry, there are many social norms that work against allowing a woman to minster freely or at least as freely as a male pastor.  
 
In regard to churches and transition, I don't know how any church can be free from this struggle because of the overwhelming growth in information and access and the emerging and encroaching implications of diversity in our culture. This gives churches tremendous opportunity to reach out and "welcome the strange among us." However, it also presents tremendous challenge to the normal functioning of a local congregation to give up control/power as others join their community. I am not convinced an established church can do very well at this unless the individuals that make up the church have also been "the stranger" and understand what it feels like to be on the outside.  
 
I have been very challenged in my own life to discover what it means to empty myself as Jesus did - to give up claim to what we are born into. He became a servant to all without the support of a leadership body or congregation behind him. Somehow he emptied himself and at the same time became more of who he was called to be. If the church can somehow grasp that kind of "emptying" then there will be better listening, greater opportunities for change, and hope to become the incarnate body of Christ to their community. Otherwise, churches, and all institutions, have a strong tendency to portray a guarded stance that is ready to resist or attack anything that is identified as foreign by its natural immune system. When any institution feels threatened, as well as churches, it will make self preservation its primary goal, often subconsciously, and act in ways that limit growth and even move it toward decline. 
 
Engaging our diverse culture and the inevitable change and transition that will occur in the church might be threatening but the book of Acts shows pretty honestly the pain and the promise of such turmoil.  
 
It is a very difficult time to be a church leader and yet such an exciting one. Godspeed 
 

Thanks for this perspective. It is one thing to intellectually affirm the idea of emptying. It is something altogether different to actually live it.