In NCD training events over the years I've made use of various anonymous profiles from churches to illustrate some of the dynamics, patterns and lack of patterns that can be found. During these interactions I've had many people pose theories about how they would expect that you'd see certain quality characteristics tending to track with each other in the results. For example, "Adam, I would imagine the database would show that Passionate Spirituality and Inspiring Worship Service both tend to be high or both tend to be low in a given church." I must say it is enjoyable to be able tell them that there are about as many exceptions to those theories as confirmations. One thing we know from the NCD database is that churches have an incredible capacity to produce the widest (and wildest!) range of combinations across their results. This is a beautiful reminder of just how rich and diverse the Christian church is in its attempts to fully express the Kingdom of God on Earth as it is in Heaven. And that there is always more for all of us to learn and discover.

One result combination that has often met with puzzlement is where Gift-based ministry is at the top of a profile with Empowering leadership at the bottom. At first glance, it seems paradoxical. How can you have gift-based ministry without it being empowered by the leaders? What on Earth does that look like in reality?

Gift-based Ministry coming most naturally to a church and Empowering Leadership coming least naturally according to their NCD Survey result.

What makes this combination even more puzzling to some is that it is actually the most common combination when empowering leadership is the minimum factor. In those cases, gift-based ministry is the maximum factor 35% of the time. So, far from a statistical anomaly, it is a scenario that needs to be reckoned with.

As is often the case, the positioning of the quality characteristics on page 2 of the Summary Guide compass is highly instructive. Not surprisingly, gift-based ministry sits in the heart of the Service realm. Empowering leadership, however, sits on the border between Fellowship and Service.

Gift-based ministry sits at the heart of Service. Whereas Empowering leadership is a combination of Fellowship and Service.

Empowering leadership is about passing on power to people. Such a process implies a connection. Just as electricity will arc across a space if the conductors are close enough, the amount of power that flows from one person to another will depend (among other things) upon how up-close and personal those people are to each other. If empowerment is attempted without a commitment to deepening fellowship between co-laborers, much energy will be lost into the ether.

Where this relational dimension is under-developed, ministry can tend to be about "helping the leaders to get things done". This can manifest itself in anything from: viewing the leaders as gurus; or dirty delegation where people basically end up doing what the leaders don't want to do; or the case where the people are off busily doing ministry not really knowing what the leaders are on about. In a less dramatic form, it leads to congregations where you can walk in and sense the separation between the leadership and the laity. It may not present as having any signs of conflict. More so that it just feels a bit like a company where there are the bosses, the workers and everyone knows their place and stays in it. Not quite a family working together embracing all of their rich diversity and peculiarities with power freely flowing from those who have it to those who need it.

Those who lead churches with profiles like that under consideration tend to understand empowering leadership primarily about "getting things done". That is, the empowerment of tasks. If you unpack their comments about what they understand to be empowering leadership, you will usually discover that delegation is a key factor. As is so often the case in NCD, the problem with this is not that it is incorrect, but that it is incomplete. To delegate is to be more empowering than to not delegate. But it misses the point of the Fellowship dimension of Empowering Leadership. Empowerment in the context of fellowship is about the empowerment of people, from whom service and ministry will flow all by itself. Empowerment is therefore at least as much (if not more as the diagram above would suggest) about relationships as it is about tasks.

Rather than just being about delegation, empowering leadership is about collaboration which is, in itself, a more encompassing concept. Collaboration will almost invariably lead to delegation. However delegation can quite easily be done at arms length (or at an even greater distance if you either don't really like people or have even been instructed as a leader to keep your distance from the congregation). Collaboration implies that it is just as important what is learnt while working together as is the achievement of a goal. Put another way, by taking a collaborative approach, you get things done and end up with more people capable of doing them. It is an achievement of results as well as the growing of capacity to see even more of those results achieved in future. So those task-minded people who fear that the Fellowship dimension of empowering leadership is about cuddling each other while imagining you're doing something practical need not fear. It is very practical in both the short and (more importantly) the long-term.

To be fair on the leaders who are dealing with NCD results like those described here, some concession must be made. After all, congregations who are deeply committed to using their gifts to serve others have greater needs and expectations when it comes to being empowered. They are fruitfully giving out more and therefore have even greater need to be replenished and supported in what they do. What a wonderful problem to have! To press the point though, this "problem" is even "worse" than that, since the more you empower such people in ministry, the more they will achieve, the more people there will be to empower (as your church inconveniently grows), and the more empowerment that will all require. As a leader, you could feel like it's five steps forward and four steps back. But what is the alternative? Empower less? Leave things as they are? By facing such a challenge you are at least still one step ahead. However, the longer you delay addressing the challenge the more likely that net gain will reduce to a half step, a shuffle or a standstill.

Really, the only choice you have as a leader in a church like the one described above is to make the transition in your head, hands and heart from seeing the "equipping of his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up" as one of things that you do, to being the thing that you do. No surprise that the guru of this was Jesus. In the face of relentless pressure on his time, he was so focused on equipping through teaching and modeling that he progressively reduced the size of his class. This ensured that his equipping was of the highest possible quality and that it therefore increased the capacity to grow more leader-making leaders, enough so as to kick off a revolution on planet Earth.

Like Jesus, who are "the 12" (i.e. the disciples) with whom you will intensively collaborate?

And who are "the 3" (i.e. Peter, James and John) you will draw nearest to and into whom you will place your most intensive empowering investment?