Morning Joe recently aired an interview with Oprah Winfrey. At one point she was talking about the kind of people she needed to have around her in her attempt to build her cable network OWN. She spoke about the importance of discerning the difference between people who are gifted at talking about vision and people who are capable of executing vision. Leadership, I believe she was intimating, has to do with doing less of the talking about and more of the doing of.
As with most things that I hear, I tossed these comments into the context of the church. In her musings I believe Oprah spoke truth to church and specifically to clergy. We speculate on why people are leaving the church. We speculate on how to get people to come to church. We speculate on why ministry is so difficult. We speculate.
Oprah's contribution to our speculation might be to recommend that we speculate less and minister more. It's not that we shouldn't have our minds engaged as we consider where we are or where we are going. It's more that we have to understand that we are indeed going. It feels at times like we (clergy/church leaders) are driving around in a car. We are often not happy with the car and will share critiques about the construction of the car, the efficiency of the car, where the car should go, but with a lack of attention to the reality that it is indeed a real car and it really is going somewhere right now. To borrow from Oprah, we might benefit from talking about driving the car less and attend more closely to the actual driving of the car.
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