Faith Based Leadership: A Watchmen is a Key and Important Role!

For this blog, I will share a key insight that is sometimes missing and yet it is very critical in Faith Based Leadership.  After sharing it, I will also bring one example I used a long time ago and some readers may remember it.  This is also aligned with the concept I included in Leadership, and it is fundamentally that LEADERSHIP is really about People.  So let me begin with a simple faith-based aspect.  I will illuminate an aspect and then share the experience in my life journey.

Faith Based Leadership:   A Watchmen is a Key and Important Role!

Current Common Aspect for Many:

Some readers will probably have experienced what I am about to point out and that is ok but realize that sometimes in churches or religious groups around; when you attend them, the primary focus is simply teaching you the Scripture references and what a lot of teachers do is to simply give you their interpretation and what they want you to accept. Many of them simply throw a verse at you and try to make you submit to them.  One key thing is, not always, but often missing. 

The One Key Thing:

The One Key Thing that is not always applied is simply this.  True Faith Leadership deals with people not just stories.  What is often not included is the focus on the God and Lord you serve and how you are connected to Him.  This is sometimes missing.  Remember that everything that is done at the Faith Based group needs to be focused on their ongoing relationship with the Lord they serve.  Let me give a good picture and then provide you with how I did this before. 

This first picture is provided by Micah Wood which he truly offered in an interview about the role of “Watchmen”.  Micah has my compliments because he brought some awareness of the brain but also the faith aspects and he introduced 2 roles related to how one uses some information.  Is the information true…. or not?

Micah brought out the definition through this quote - “Watchmen which are people able to discern the voice of God and release it with articulation rather than just watchdogs.”  He brought out 2 examples.  When situations are happening, which are you?

1:         Social Commentators which simply give their response and really focus on themselves and their interpretations or opinions.

2:         Watchmen are rooted in the true friendship of the council of God, and they do respond based on that and their personal interaction with Him.

The reader may remember how I posted quite some time ago as I chatted with my friend Terry at the airport at that time several decades ago.  He knew my spiritual background and was talking about it.  You may remember that we chatted and said that the book is created by God and he said but written by men.  To make a short part of my response I looked at him and said - 

“Terry, if I am God…and I’m Not of Course….but if I was God, could I make that book come out exactly as I intended even though men are writing it?” 

Immediately, he said, “Well yeah because you would have been God” and I simply said, “Well, my friend, Why Would I Lie to Them?”  And that blew him away in a positive way.  I responded as a Watchmen and Terry responded in an awesomely positive way.

Realize that as a key insight and it is true of Leadership, Faith Based Leadership and for Rising Stars.  The Key Insight is:

Leading your organization or team is not just about you doing a couple of things or such or telling your people what to do or any such. True Leadership is much more about connecting with your people in such a way that they want to stay connected and they join to grow and become and reach radical possibilities.

In Faith Based it is also not just expecting God to do what I want, but to connect and sometimes see the amazing, unexpected result God envisioned and activated.

Let me leave you with a couple of questions:

1.     What must you do to become a true Watchman and not a Social Commentator?

2.     What must you do to amend your thinking so that the focus is not just rote factoids but also developed to build and bring to Your People?

Randy Swaim, Coaching for Relevance, LLC