H2H Pre-Conf 1 - Tribes and leadership

The first session of this year's House2House Pre-Conference was interesting and raised a lot of questions. It was led by Tony Dale and he began by demonstrating with a show of hands that perhaps 10 or 15 percent of those in the room were from megachurch or medium size church organisations, with one or two in mission work and the remainder house church people.

We watched Seth Godin's video from the TED Conference, you can view it yourself below.



The pre-reading for the House2House network leaders meeting was Seth Godin's book 'Tribes' in which he goes into much more detail.

With this to set the scene, Tony led us through a series of thoughts based on Seth's analysis of what a leader does. He referred to Romans 15:18-21, Paul felt what Seth describes as 'I can't stand the status quo'.

Here are one or two of the key thoughts.

We need to be heretics. Jesus was a heretic. He had a lot of trouble with the establishment of his day. We change things by telling a new story, people are waiting for something new, we need to connect people who share the same vision. Jesus did all these things.

Here are some quotes from Seth's book.

• Heretics are the new leaders, they get out in front of their tribes.
• It's more fun to make the rules than to follow them!
• It's profitable, powerful, and productive to make change.
• Managers make widgets, leaders make change.
• Great leaders embrace deviants by catching them doing something right.
• Growth doesn't come from persuading the most loyal members of other tribes.
• Tearing others down is never as helpful to your movement as building your members up.

We then did a number of exercises in small groups, testing some ideas out and commenting on them. Why wouldn't we do things the way Jesus did them? Should we focus on the masses or on the ones who stick out as different?