The three pillars – Envision, Enable, Embrace are all critical for leadership. As fundamental a need as they are, though, mere mortals very rarely have all three. We usually only have one and a half of them – we’re good at one, mediocre at a second and weak at a third. That is why God looks to leadership teams. Church leadership in the New Testament is built on elders (plural), not the pastor (singular). A good example is Paul directing Titus to appoint elders (plural) in Titus 1:5. Another is Paul’s engagement with the elders in Acts 21.
That is not to say that there can’t be a head among the leadership team. There can be and there should be. But there needs to be more than one leader. The fact that there are three roles to fulfil does not necessarily mean there should be three leaders in a team. Two can work just fine if they have different primary strengths, with the third pillar covered by the sum of their two secondary strengths. There can be more than three people too if the pillars are properly covered. With large leadership groups, it’s worth bearing in mind that there can be a majority voice of one pillar that damps the voice of the others. Consciousness of the need for diversity is the antidote.
The strength of the different leadership pillars is that they see things differently. The challenge of the different leadership pillars is that they see things differently. We are often in greatest need of the person who frustrates us most. Envision finds Enable infuriating, “Every time I start getting excited about an idea, he tells me why it can’t be done.” Enable finds Envision exasperating, “We haven’t even got the current initiative sorted and we’re already dreaming about the next quixotic endeavour.” The gifts of leadership are a subset of the fuller gifts of the church that we read about in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. If we are going to succeed we have to hear and value otherness.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
1 Corinthians 12:17-21
I distinctly remember working in a student ministry context where we had the mix we needed. But I was blind to the value of it. A colleague and I leant to the Envision and Enable pillars. We had another two colleagues firmly in the Embrace camp. Sadly, we looked at our Embrace colleagues as slackers who never seemed to do anything but hang out with students, whiling away the hours over coffee. They looked at us in our desire to set goals and get things done, wondering if we even had the love of God within us. Together, we had the making of a great team, but we just didn’t know it. We need to value the other pillars, no matter how counter-intuitive they are to us.
We also need to learn to value the leadership pillar God has given us. Most of us have had a model of leadership held up before us as the model of leadership. That might have been a pioneering Envision or a deeply empathic Embrace. We also tend to want the gifting that is most revered in our tribe (often Envision or Embrace). We kill ourselves (and others) trying to fit that model. Or we give up altogether. God has made us and gifted us according to His good pleasure. When we embrace His gift to us, we are liberated to lead in our strengths, alongside others who lead in theirs.