Month: July 2007

A Missionary As General Superintendent?

The way the Assem­blies of God works, our next Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent will almost cer­tain­ly be or have been the pas­tor of a megachurch (I add “have been” because dis­trict offi­cials come pri­mar­i­ly from these ranks).

In fact, some are clam­or­ing for chang­ing our lead­er­ship mod­el to require that our Gen­er­al Superinden­dent be required to serve as pas­tor while serv­ing as our nation­al leader. There’s mer­it to the idea, but I’ve always had a notion in the back of my head that I’ve want­ed to see tried instead: elect a mis­sion­ary as Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent.

The Assem­blies of God is explod­ing world­wide, part­ly due to the lead­er­ship of our mis­sion­ar­ies. Turn­ing to these proven and capa­ble lead­ers seems like com­mon sense to me, espe­cial­ly since we are increas­ing­ly real­iz­ing that Amer­i­ca is a mis­sion field just like any oth­er. We need some­one who is able to sep­a­rate the way they want to do things from the way things need to be done — the very essence of an effec­tive mis­sion­ary.

Why not some­one who has led a nation to revival? None of our state­side lead­ers has that kind of resume, but sev­er­al of our mis­sion­ar­ies have rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence.

Why not some­one who has proven that they can func­tion with lead­ers they did not select them­selves? This, after all, is a key aspect of the Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent posi­tion to which megachurch pas­tors are unac­cus­tomed.

Why not some­one who is accus­tomed to train­ing and coach­ing lead­ers on the ground instead of try­ing to run the whole show them­selves?

The only oth­er can­di­date I think is as well-suit­ed for the job is a dis­trict super­in­ten­dent who has led his dis­trict to health and growth. I expect that Leslie Welk (North­west) and Don Gif­ford (Indi­ana) will both receive nom­i­na­tions on this basis. Jim Brad­dy (Nor Cal / Nev) might also — but I’m a mem­ber of his dis­trict and so I don’t have a good sense of how he’s per­ceived out­side our nar­row lit­tle world.

How­ev­er, I’m bet­ting that Alton Gar­ri­son (for­mer Sup of Arkansas) is ulti­mate­ly going to get the nod. He’s led a megachurch, led a dis­trict, and is pro­vid­ing lead­er­ship on the nation­al lev­el as the direc­tor of AG US Mis­sions.

So there’s a good chance that we’ll get some­one from AGUSM into the top spot — but not because of his con­nec­tion with mis­sions.

As to the oth­er spots I have no idea. In addi­tion to the nom­i­nees I men­tioned above, I’m pret­ty sure John Lin­dell will get nom­i­nat­ed. He may even let his name stand (although I sus­pect this depends on whether or not he can con­tin­ue to pas­tor at James Riv­er). Dary Northrop will prob­a­bly be nom­i­nat­ed. Dan Bet­zer will be nom­i­nat­ed. Bret Allen might get nom­i­nat­ed but he will decline. I would not be sur­prised at all if John Palmer gets nom­i­nat­ed (espe­cial­ly for the AGUSM lead­er­ship role if Alton is elect­ed Gen Sup), but I have no idea if he will accept.

Beyond that, I real­ly don’t know. There are a lot of poten­tial can­di­dates out there, and our desire to avoid the appear­ance of pol­i­tics means that we nev­er know for sure who will be nom­i­nat­ed and who will allow their names to stand.

Speak­ing of avoid­ing the appear­ance of pol­i­tics — the only way to real­ly avoid pol­i­tics is to select our lead­ers ran­dom­ly. Any solu­tion involv­ing vot­ing is extreme­ly polit­i­cal and the only ques­tion is whether or not those pol­i­tics will be pub­lic. In our move­ment we’ve decid­ed that hid­den pol­i­tics are prefer­able to trans­par­ent ones, and more and more of us are unhap­py with the result.

How­ev­er it shakes out, the Assem­blies is in for a wild ride at Gen­er­al Coun­cil this year. Too bad I’m going to miss it…

Electing A New General Superintendent

A friend of mine (Jay New­land) just sent me a fas­ci­nat­ing site talk­ing about the future of the Assem­blies of God: Future AG.

Sites like these are con­tro­ver­sial in our move­ment because we wish to avoid the appear­ance of pol­i­tics — it seems too tawdry for us. But our goal is not to be non-polit­i­cal (as though that were pos­si­ble), but to be wise in our selec­tion process. Con­ver­sa­tions such as those at Future AG can help us make wis­er choic­es, and are there­fore a good thing.

One post was extreme­ly help­ful to me, and so I share it in the hope it will be help­ful to oth­ers as well.

Here is how it will work. When we arrive we will be asked to nom­i­nate some­one for the posi­tion of gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent fol­lowed by the assis­tant gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent, gen­er­al sec­re­tary, AG World Mis­sions exec­u­tive direc­tor and mem­bers of the Exec­u­tive Pres­bytery. Any ordained min­is­ter can be nom­i­nat­ed.

In the past this has been done by writ­ing someone’s name down on a piece of paper, how­ev­er, vot­ing this year will be con­duct­ed elec­tron­i­cal­ly. This should speed up busi­ness con­sid­er­ably. For exam­ple, fol­low­ing an elec­tion results should be avail­able in 10 min­utes rather than the hour or more it has tak­en in the past.

With these changes, it is impor­tant that you reg­is­ter ear­ly. Go to www.ag.org and you can reg­is­ter online before August 3rd. If you miss that date make sure to reg­is­ter imme­di­ate­ly upon arrival.

Vot­ing will require: Reg­is­tra­tion, Vot­er ID Badge, Vot­er Guide­book

Vot­ing del­e­gates will receive a vot­ing num­ber on the back of their reg­is­tra­tion cards, which will give them access to the vot­ing machine.

If one nom­i­nee receives two-thirds of the bal­lots cast by the del­e­gates at the gen­er­al coun­cil, a win­ner will be declared. That is what hap­pened in 2001 and 2005 when Trask was re-elect­ed.

If no one receives the two-thirds major­i­ty, the vot­ing is lim­it­ed to the top 15 vote-get­ters.

If that does­n’t pro­duce a win­ner, the field is cut to the top three.

You might also wish to check out http://www.agleadershipchange.blogspot.com/

Information Overload?

Every so often I’ll hear some­one men­tion in pass­ing that we are over­loaded with infor­ma­tion com­pared to our ances­tors. I’m sure that’s true if you mea­sure “infor­ma­tion” in a very spe­cif­ic way, but I’m not sure it’s as true as peo­ple think it is.

Augus­tine, the 4th cen­tu­ry bish­op, left behind over 5,000,000 words in writ­ing.

That’s 5 mil­lion words.

Many nov­els have 50,000 (the range varies depend­ing on the genre).

He left behind the equiv­a­lent of 100 nov­els. And he’s just one author.

For the edu­cat­ed elite, the ancient world was rife with infor­ma­tion. And, by and large, the stuff they read was more impor­tant than the “infor­ma­tion” we’re so proud of. Most of what we devote our brain­pow­er to pro­cess­ing is from news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and tele­vi­sion… the knowl­edge equiv­a­lent of emp­ty calo­ries.

For all the “infor­ma­tion” we each have at our beck and call, not many of us could muster up 5 mil­lion words.

And since our point in say­ing that we’re so over­loaded com­pared to the ancients is that we’ve got so much more stuff to process than they did, maybe we should­n’t be so smug. After all — we don’t real­ly process the “infor­ma­tion” that bom­bards us. We rush through it and prompt­ly for­get as much as pos­si­ble to get ready for the next del­uge.

The ancients were read­ing and reread­ing and rereread­ing sub­stan­tive works and actu­al­ly under­stand­ing them. And so Augus­tine was able to write 5,000,000 words that peo­ple still mull over today.

We have no idea what infor­ma­tion over­load feels like. If we can­celed our news­pa­per sub­scrip­tions, threw away all our mag­a­zines, and replaced all that read­ing time with reread­ing a hand­ful of sol­id books until we under­stood them thor­ough­ly, then we’d have some inkling of what true infor­ma­tion over­load is.

And since we’ve got so many years of insights beyond Augus­tine to avail our­selves of, and the mod­ern peer-reviewed sys­tem of jour­nals to draw from, we’d be very jus­ti­fied in say­ing that we wres­tle with infor­ma­tion in a way that the ancients nev­er did.

But not now.