As a guy that learned Luke wasn’t one of the 12 disciples while teaching 4 year old Sunday school at Kairos, it has been an honor to go from the bowels of Georgia Avenue Sunday school to serve three years on the Kairos Leadership Team. Before I attended my first meeting in the Van Eaton’s basement I wondered what could a guy with more biblical questions than scripture based answers possibly bring to the table and help lead our church? Thankfully, I learned there are many roles and needs within church leadership and that questions among community brings you closer to God. Below are a few leadership takeaways from my last three years (in no particular order):
- The church’s vision statements took hours of hard work to craft. Living up to them will take lifetimes of constantly checking ourselves.
- Moving buildings and joining the Presbytery caused a lot of uncomfortable discussions and pain. None of which were taken lightly.
- Kairos staff and leadership try to have faithful discussions and intention behind all aspects of our church. This doesn’t mean the results always pan out as envisioned, but power struggles and politics are not a factor.
- There are very few rubber stamp approvals. Leadership members ask a lot of thoughtful questions. Things are discerned (sometimes probably to a fault).
- The before and after of our current building is quite remarkable. God is at work in many ways inside and outside Kairos walls.
- Our A/V equipment has a strobe light mode that would be super cool to work into a service. Problem is I was there for the A/V tutorial and can barely turn on the machines.
- God is at work at Kairos.
- Creating budgets, explaining budgets, and trying to steward our budget resources is not for the faint of heart.
- In Leadership Team meetings we spent this past year with several people leading a study of Ephesians. Biblical text can be studied in many different ways. Ephesians sparked many thoughtful discussions around how the coming of Jesus put Jews and Gentiles on equal footing and how unity and equality today is no less challenging than in Jesus’ time.
- My wife will have heated discussions with me about anything Kairos. Heated discussions are not fights.
Overall I learned that leading a church can be hard work, with more questions than answers, but time spent around Jesus, community, and prayer always ended up being life giving, even if I was tired or stressed going into it. I leave my three year Leadership Team term better prepared to be a disciple at our church, but also in our world.
– Colin Edwards