My son and I have a guilty pleasure. From time to time we binge-watch Star Trek. I know, as a far as guilty pleasures go, it’s not that guilty. One of our favourite enemies on the Next Generation series’ is the Borg. For those of you that don’t watch the program, let me explain who the Borg are and what they do.

The Borg are an unrelenting super-race who are pretty much indestructible. Rather than just killing and removing all other alien species they prefer to assimilate them. To assimilate in this case means to turn other alien species into more Borg. Everyone is implanted into a collective mind. The whole society is connected through their minds, and they are one. One mind, vision and mission made up of billions of individual persons. This means that if a human is assimilated their thoughts become part of the Borg too. Thus our enemy in the show last night had managed to kidnap one of the most in-the-know captains of the human race. The Borg now knew all of the battle routines and agendas of humankind. What’s more, the Borg were able to adjust their technology to make it so that human laser weapons couldn’t penetrate their force-field defense system.

I found myself thinking why don’t the humans just return to their old weapons, like knives, guns and swords. Then it dawned on me that because the Borg had captured and assimilated this special captain, they would also know about swordplay and how to have a swordfight. My genius wasn’t so genius after all, but then I heard a small whisper into my spirit:

A swordsman perfects his body not just his brain.

A good sportsman, musician, or swordsman in this case, isn’t a professional just because they know the sport. They train their body continuously to build something into their muscles called muscle-memory. When a young person decides to start learning a martial art, they begin with some routines that train their body and muscles to move in a particular way. It’s the same with most sports and other physical professions. My son has recently picked up his guitar again to find that he can play it with ease today, after spending so many hours practicing in the past, he now has bigger fingers and can play chords that his fingers had become used to without even looking at where he’s putting them.

Captain Picard, of the starship Enterprise, had his thoughts transplanted into the Borg beehive, but even if the community wanted to play an instrument, or use a sword, like he did they wouldn’t be able to due to muscle-memory alone. In the same way when a new leader comes into a Church he/she may have some great ideas, or a culture that they have built in a previous job or Church, but a brain transplant for a Church won’t make it good at seeing out those ideas or behaving in a manner that is indicative with the culture from which that brain came.

How does this effect the way that we bring vision or culture to a Church?

When A New Team Member Or Pastor Comes In

When a new guy or girl joins a team they often come with some differences in the way they think and act. Differences are actually really good for the team because it’s no good having a bunch of yes-men around a leader. We need diversity.

However, sometimes that new team member feels it’s their responsibility to ‘sort out’ their new environment, and sometimes even their team leader or their team. The first thing to say is that some things don’t need changing, and certainly if you’re a team member coming into a new environment there’s a chance you might need to be assimilated into the vision of the Church or business before you understand the needs of the community. At this point you might love the members of the community enough to make changes at their speed rather than going in like a bull in a China shop.

I remember going on a placement to my home Church for a month whilst at university. I behaved like I knew everything about building Church and they knew nothing. The worst thing is that I massively respected the team there and thought they were great and doing a great job. My blue-eyed, bushy-tailed naivety meant that I just came across as arrogant and stupid.

As a leader I have been successful enough to build a bit of team around me, and to need some more team members. The amount of people that have come onto a team at some point for a long time, or a short time, and tried to tell me how to best do my job is crazy. If you’re joining a community as a team member it might be worth noting that you’re probably there due to the success of the team leader. You should want to learn how they did it.

This love thing is the same for a new team leader coming in to the environment. Another thing a new team member/leader needs to know is that a Church or business won’t be at it’s best until it has been trained for a long period of time. If you try to go hard too quick you can hurt the body and put it out of the game for a period of time. Take for example when you go to the gym. I like to lift weights and if I go to the gym and lift my personal best after a couple of months out of the gym I would be in pain for literally two or three weeks. The next day I might not even be able to move. It’s the same with a community of people. If you work them too hard when they’re not used to your workout, you’ll injure or even lose some of them.

When A Pastor Leaves

As much as we need to train the Church’s muscles to accomplish a vision, or to have what we might call a Kingdom culture in the community, there’s a bonus of a long ministry that has been committed to growth. When a chicken loses its head it keeps running around for a while. They say that when a person loses their head, their body keeps behaving in a certain way, like breathing, without the brain. Some bodies even continue to move.

A community of people is the same. When a leader leaves his/her post the community often keeps on behaving in the way they were trained. This can be great for the community or it can be the death of a community.

When I was at university studying theology we spent around six months at a small Church near Tewkesbury. When we arrived at the Church it was clear that they really wanted to reach out into the community around the building, so when we started doing some outreach and speaking to our neighbours we sort of gave the Church the permission to do the same. Not only that, but we also showed them that getting the Church out of the building was a key to reaching out to the locals. We taught them a new principle by getting out there ourselves. When we left the Church to do a placement elsewhere it was lovely to see the Church continue to get out of the building. We had trained the Evangelism muscle with a principle that they carried on doing. It’s now seven years on and I love following what they are doing on Facebook.

That’s the great thing about muscle-memory in the Church. The not so good thing about muscle-memory in the Church is when the community turns round and says something like ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ when a new team leader brings some changed principles. I’ve known a few leaders that have suffered and ended up quitting because of an immovable group of people or elders in a Church community. If you’re struggling with this at the moment I’d come back to what I said earlier – you need to spend some time loving the community before you can make any changes. Some people need to know that they can trust you love them before they’ll let you bring any change, or even accept your vision/mission.

If you’re trying to get someone to leave their tambourine at home, you might need to visit them a few times a week for coffee to show them that you love them first. One way that we won the heart of a member of our congregation was to visit the family home regularly, which eventually led to several members of the family making commitments to follow Jesus.

I could speak more about this and give a few more examples from ministry and leadership in secular businesses, but I’m not quite the expert and I’d like to leave you with my paraphrased words of the Apostle Paul:

You may be gifted beyond anyone we’ve ever seen, but if you have no love your vision, words, or actions will just sound like a clanging gong.