Recently I was reading an excerpt from, “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” in the Utne Reader, a journal of the alternative press. It seems an inevitable challenge to large organizations: they forget the reason for their existence. As Margaret Wheatley put it in A Simpler Way,

"Most people have a desire to love their organizations. They fall in love with the identity that is trying to be expressed. They connect to the founding vision. But then we take this vital passion and institutionalize it. We create an organization.

“The people who loved the purpose grow to disdain the institution that was created to fulfill it. Passion mutates into procedures, rules and roles. Instead of purpose, we have policies. Instead of being free to create, we impose constraints that squeeze the life out of us. The organization is frozen in time. We see its dead and bloated form and resent it for what it prevents us from doing."

In too many organizations relationships get rationalized; purpose becomes planning; and meaning is buried by media. But at root what is often happening is the sacrifice of ends in favor of multiplying means. We fail to keep the vision alive in our living relationships and ways of being. We begin in the Spirit but end in the law.

It hit me as I was reading the article in Utne that whoever has the power to determine our measures of success determines the future of our movement. In theological terms, the telos determines the ethos. The ends we envision form us as a people. The culture we create is really determined by how we imagine our future, the future that is really God’s kingdom among us.

One of the consequences of the recovery of a missional frame has been a renewed emphasis on the nature of the Body as a communion – a community. Coupled with this movement toward a relational frame we are shifting our measures from quantitative to qualitative, from numbers to narratives. We end up with a much greater sensitivity to people. But I wonder at times if this isn’t another manifestation of our self-focused culture. I wonder if where we should really be focused is telos. Questions that get us there are like these: Where is all this going? What is God’s end point? What does it mean that all things will be summed up in Christ? What will it look like for the kingdom to come?

It seems to me that all kingdom leadership should be eschatological. We lead from the future, the future presence of the kingdom. We lead with greater or lesser knowledge of where God is taking us. In this sense all our leadership is secondary (it is God’s kingdom and he determines the end), and it is

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about gaze - an imaginal frame — but one still located in space.

I’ve written about “leadership gaze” in the past as well as borrowing from Alan Roxburgh and his thought regarding leadership spaces. Roxburgh argued in his Missional Map-Making series that the primary metaphor for leadership must be spatial. He writes that, “Leadership functions in a certain kind of space rather than out of a set of definitions, formulae or assumed Biblical types… Without attention to this matter of the space in which leadership dwells, it is impossible to understand or shape a missional leadership in our late modern context…”

I find this helpful, because it highlights for me again the dualism of sacred versus secular spaces, explaining in part why our leadership gaze turned inward. When our imagination became bound by four walls we either neglected the gospel of the kingdom completely or subsumed it under our thinking about church. The corrective is to recover telos: to lead from the future. So CS Lewis wrote, “In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose.”

Frost and Hirsch offer us some help in ReJesus, with an alternate lens on the NT word for church, ecclesia. Far from defining a gathering for some spiritual purpose divorced from life in this world, the root meaning of ecclesia connects to shalom. They write, “An ecclesia was a gathering of wise community leaders, brought together by their common vision for the harmony and well-being of the wider community.” (32)

“We think that to be the sent people of God we will have our neighborhood’s best interests at heart. We think Christians should see themselves as sent by Jesus into the villages of which they’re part, to add value, to bring wisdom, to foster a better village. In short, to participate with the work of Christ all around us.”

I like that. It takes leading from the future and deposits it squarely in the real world of sails and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. Finally, the leadership metaphors of space and gaze come together in a single prayer: “Father in heaven, your Name is Holy. Let your kingdom come, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”