Author: dsedlacek

What do we mean by “supervisor”?

In traditional Western business, a supervisor is someone who provides instruction and evaluates performance. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, developed out of “scientific management” principles identified in the early 20th century. (e.g. Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911). Today, many businesses and organizations follow different models of supervision and management.

We don’t believe Western business practices are necessarily worthy of emulation. Just as mental health professionals and educators use supervision in specialized ways, so do we. Rather than one who is responsible to instruct and evaluate the conduct of another, we define a supervisor as someone who comes alongside a fellow global worker to support their development and effectiveness.

The words “come alongside” tells us that relationship is central to supervision. Although supervisors may not live in the same location as those they supervise, they invest time and energy to understand who they are, their joys, frustrations, challenges and victories, how they are called to be as well as what they are called to do. The supervisor relationship grows over time, with mutual respect, understanding and trust.

“To support their development” indicates that the one being supervised is a learner, one who is changing and growing toward the likeness of Christ. This is a discipleship process, but it is not a master-follower relationship. Both supervisor and supervisee are followers of the Way. Through active listening, powerful questioning, and consistent encouragement, a supervisor facilitates the growth process of those they supervise. The supervisee remains in the driver’s seat of their own growth and development, choosing what to put energy into, what to lay aside, and how they will pursue the goals and callings they have been given.

“To support their effectiveness” reminds us that fruit is a natural outcome in the life of one who remains in the vine, to the one who is a faithful and humble follower of Christ. We know that those outcomes are outside of our control, and often the fruit that comes is not what we expected. The Father has a way of producing much more beautiful and meaningful fruit than we could imagine. So while the supervisor will help the supervisee to identify goals, clarify priorities, and create plans, they will do so in the knowledge that effectiveness is in the hands of Another.

Learning Cohorts

In April 2019, we held our first Learning Cohort for cross-cultural workers. The topic was Cross-cultural Leadership. We managed to do this cohort two more time before pandemic arrived, for a total of 45 cross-cultural workers from three organizations. In February 2020, just as COVID-19 began to enter global consciousness, we held our first cohort on Multicultural Teamwork.

Our Learning Cohorts follow a hybrid approach – both in-person and virtual components are integral to the cohort. We are happy to announce that we are going “live” again, with a new Multicultural Teamwork cohort beginning with a gathering on February 27-28, 2023 in Prague, Czech Republic.

These two cohorts were developed side-by-side, to complement each other. The goal in both is to equip people to grow their awareness, skills, and character as they work in partnership with people of cultures different than their own. Most people would benefit from both cohorts, and either is a good starting point. Please read the pages on each cohort to learn more about them, and let us know if you are interested!

Cross-cultural Leadership

Multicultural Teamwork

the rage over church planting

Once upon a time, “church planting” was all the rage in missions.  As a prospective missionary and young seminary student in the early 90’s, I was caught up in all the excitement. We fervently embraced C. Peter Wagner’s provocation, “The single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches.”(Church Planting for a Greater Harvest).  Rare was the mission agency that didn’t highlight its commitment to establishing the body of Christ among the unchurched.

My secret fear was that I could never become a church planter.  I didn’t have the gifts one of my professors and other church planting experts said were the pre-requisites of an effective church planter. But two things gave me hope.  First, a missions recruiter (today we would call him a missions coach) visited campus and told us that his organization was looking for people who loved to teach the Bible. Why? Because teachers make great church planters.  Still, I was doubtful: I recognized this was a shrewd appeal tailored to students of a seminary known for turning out Bible teachers, and I guessed that teaching wasn’t the only gift needed to plant a church.

Second, a missionary couple in Japan invited my wife and I to join them for a year to help them plant churches.  One year seemed like a good investment of our time.  By the end of that year, I learned that my guess was correct: teaching was not the only gift needed to plant a church.  But it is one of the gifts, and my experience taught me that God had given me other gifts that could contribute to this ministry. My commitment and calling to church planting became a settled reality.

Four years later, my wife and I re-embarked for Japan with a long-term vision: to plant churches in unchurched areas of Japan.  Japan didn’t have many churches, so there was a plentiful supply of unchurched areas to choose from.  There were compelling arguments made to go to the smaller towns of Japan that had not even one church.  There were equally compelling arguments to go to the larger cities where you could find a handful of small churches, but in which unchurched communities abounded.  

For Kathy & I, the compelling invitation came from a Japanese church with a vision for planting churches in partnership with missionaries in unreached communities. We moved to a city in southwestern Japan to start one of these churches, and planted ourselves in a neighborhood of 30,000 people with no known Christians and no church. 

11 years later, in our little corner of the world, a church had been born and our work as “church planters” in that community was complete. But now it was the late 2000’s, and the words “church planting” had lost their magic. Wagner’s 1990 book was no longer the cutting edge of missiology.  My organization began to emphasize making disciples, because it is possible to gather people together in something called a “church” without introducing people to a transforming relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Our fundamental calling as disciples of Jesus is to make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20).  We make disciples by proclaiming Jesus and showing people how to follow Him within a community of other disciples – the church.  Where churches exist, churches need to practice the calling to disciple-making.  When we make disciples in a place where there is no church, there is also need for church planting.

The term may not be all the rage anymore, but church planting is still a critical element of doing mission. There are still hundreds of communities in Japan, and in countless other regions around the world, where there is no church.

I’m thankful for the missions recruiter on my seminary campus who told me that teaching God’s Word was vital to planting a church, and for the missionary couple who invited us to get a taste of church planting with them in Japan. Both were members of members of the same organization, and it was an easy choice for us to follow in their footsteps.

Shift into Focus

I’m having a seriously hard time keeping my focus. I start to write a few paragraphs about something important to me, but I get distracted two sentences in . . .

In order to stay focused, I’m making effort to re-focus. Thankfully, TEAM has a mission statement to help me: Our mission is to partner with the global Church in sending disciples who make disciples and establish missional churches to the glory of God.

TEAM’s mission statement captures our commitment to disciple-making and church planting. Each member of TEAM spends our time and energy in different ways, but we all contribute toward this common goal. As a Senior Director, I spend the bulk of my time and energy to encourage and equip other leaders in TEAM. I do this so that they can encourage and equip others, so that we can together see more people following Jesus and growing together in community with other believers. That’s why we’re here.

I’ll never forget seeing “Schindler’s List” when it came out in the early 1990’s. There was a movie, too, but I’m talking about a brief magazine article about a young church planter in Germany. God gave this church planter a list of people in his community to pray for and pursue for the sake of the gospel.

As an aspiring church planter, this little article reminded me that ministry is about people: people with faces, people with names, people with families, people with joys and sorrows, people who know Christ and people who don’t yet know Christ. The focus of what we do is the people to whom we have been sent.

“Schindler’s List” helped me to focus during many years of preparation (seminary, support-raising, language study) and throughout my subsequent years of ministry in Japan, and the Czech Republic. Over these years, my list has included names such as Marcus, Naomi, Chie, Hiroko, Oki, Yasu, Kazu, Non, Masa, Shoji, Jan, Richard, Mira, Jana, Michael, Jirka. Who is on your list?

This little article that left a lasting imprint on me was in a magazine published by TEAM, and the church planter was Diet Schindler.

30 years later: Diet is still with TEAM, still serving Christ in Germany, and still inspiring and equipping others to make disciples. He’s written a new book, Shift: The Road to Level 5 Church Multiplication. I bought it here today, and I encourage you to check it out. You can also find it and other great resources for disciplemaking ministry at exponential.org. May Diet’s book and exponential’s resources help us keep our focus!

Keep listening,

David

Leading God’s Way?

leading the way God leads vs. leading the way God calls us to lead

I will lead blind Israel down a new path,
guiding them along an unfamiliar way.
I will brighten the darkness before them
and smooth out the road ahead of them.
Yes, I will indeed do these things;
I will not forsake them.
Isaiah 42:16


I don’t believe we are called to lead in the same way as God. How could we do that? He is all-powerful. Omniscient. All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Jesus.

Not I. My role is to be a servant. Mine is a humble role. And yet I am also called to have courage, because I follow this God who leads his people down unfamiliar ways, towards the darkness. He gives us light for the path as we walk, but doesn’t often illuminate the path ahead of us. He will smooth out the road, but we will still encounter bumps. He is trustworthy. My role is to trust Him.

Leaders have power. They may have authority by virtue of their position. They may have power because of their experience or expertise. They may have influence because they produce results. Whatever the source of power may be, leaders have it. What will we do with it?

I believe God calls leaders use their power to give power to others. I think that’s His way for me.

Making Teams Work in Missions

We just finished a webinar for Missio Nexus on “Making Teams Work in Missions.” If you missed it, a recording will be posted on the Missio Nexus website here within the next week.  I spoke about the challenges teams face, and what we can do to help teams succeed:

  1. Deploy real teams.
  2. Get the right people on our teams.
  3. Build healthy teams.

These are topics that I covered on our old website, Building Healthy Teams, which no longer exists. We are gradually bringing some of the old content, including many resources for team building, into this new site.

He taught us to love one another

I’ve heard/sung “O Holy Night” four times in the last week. Some Christmas songs get tiresome during the holidays, but not this one. This song of hope, and faith, and awe towards the One who came to earth has always been one of my favorites. Since Sunday night, when I sang the hymn for the fourth time in a space of five days, the first line of the third stanza has been reverberating in my soul:

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace.

I want to live and lead like Jesus. Jesus followed the law of love, and asked his followers (who would become leaders) to do the same. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus was a peacemaker; He proclaimed blessing upon all who would be the same. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”

May this week give you many opportunities to love those around you, and to make peace in Christ’s name.

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, Let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever, His power and glory evermore proclaim.

for the fascinating history of “O Holy Night”, look here.

Fake it ’til you make it?

Today, my sons are were flying home for Christmas.  Their flight was just cancelled, and we will wait at least another 24 hours to see them.  One airport story begets another . . . a brief encounter with a magazine headline at a gift shop in the Frankfurt airport a couple of years ago.  It was the Harvard Business Review, with these words enticing readers to open their magazine: “The Problem of Authenticity: When It’s Okay to Fake it Until You Make It.”

I had just finished my dissertation, which included a long section on authentic leadership. On seeing the arresting headline, several thoughts simultaneously passed through my mind.  I wrote them down as soon as I sat down at the gate, but they’ve stayed on my computer ever since.  So today, in honor of my sons who are spending an extra day in Chicago, here’s my gut reaction to “The Problem of Authenticity: When It’s Okay to Fake it Until You Make It.”

1. It’s NEVER okay to fake it.

2. It’s NOT that important to “make it.”

3. Or, maybe we would should recognize that every day is an opportunity to “make it” with the important things in life.

4. There are many problems with authenticity.  For example, the many temptations to give it up.

5. It IS important to step out of one’s comfort zone (that’s one of the things advocated by the article).

What happened next

After the scolding, I took a few days to reflect on the underlying causes and the environment of our conflict.  And I developed a few actions steps.  So I did what I decided to do: I made a greater effort to listen to both of my colleagues, I apologized to Z____ for making a significant decision without him, I called the pastor of the mother church and asked for his advice and mediation, and I bathed it all in prayer.

By listening to my younger teammate, I was able to gain additional perspective on what was happening and I learned that this was not primarily a problem of what I had done or said.  I still needed to apologize for the thing that I had done, but I knew we needed external support.  I spoke with the pastor of our mother church.  We had launched a church plant with the agreement that our leadership team of three was under the spiritual authority of the elders of the mother church.  So going to the mother church was a clear call to help us move forward.

I explained to the pastor what had happened, and he also heard from the other two members of the team.  I asked him to lead us in a meeting of reconciliation: an opportunity for each of us to lay our grievances before each other, to listen to those grievances, and to decide how to move forward in our relationship.  The pastor agreed, and he scheduled a meeting for the three of us, plus him and one other leader from the mother church.  I knew this wouldn’t be an easy conversation, but it was an opportunity for us to honor one another and also an essential step in the life of our small church plant.

At this point, no one in the church outside of our spouses new that there was a conflict in our team.  But the three of us could not continue to lead the church unless we found healing in our relationship.  Beyond relational healing, the conflict revealed that we also had some significant differences of opinion about how to be a church.  We obviously needed to work through these differences and re-establish a shared vision for the church.  It was not a given that we could do so, but in any case the first priority was a restored relationship.

On the day before our meeting, I received a call from the mother church pastor.  He said that Z____ had cancelled the meeting.  I asked him when we would reschedule.  He said, “David, I’m not sure we will reschedule.”  I said, “But, we must!”  I believed it was absolutely necessary that we at least have a meeting to attempt reconciliation.  But the pastor said that it probably wasn’t realistic.

I knew  this meant that we had lost a teammate. Indeed, it was so.  Z____ never returned to our team or worshiped with our church again.  We never had a meeting for reconciliation.  Our church leadership was now a team of two, and we worked closely together for several more years.  The church continued to grow.  I think I became a little more quick to listen and a little more quick to offer and to seek forgiveness.