The mature alone can transform at the highest levels necessary to produce kingdom leadership at an international and national level, by submitting to a team higher than their own leadership, composed of very diverse dispositions and prepared perspectives.
The mature kingdom leader can never measure his or her maturity in leadership by their personal maturity, but rather by the maturity of the people they lead. As well, a mature kingdom leader can never measure the maturity of their leadership by how well their own mini-movement matures when God’s purpose in that assignment always assumes that it will eventually become a living sacrifice to a higher kingdom movement.
The mature kingdom leader must transform most when he or she is most mature, when they have the maturity to sustain the highest levels of transformation. The final stages of their transformation will always be the greatest and most disruptive because their maturing leadership must dump into a kingdom purpose greater than their own.
Blending Leadership at the International and National Level
Jesus had a “zealot” among His original kingdom leadership team. Jesus did not attempt to recruit a team of “finished products” but to blend a team of diverse dispositions.
Kingdom leadership teams with the international and national scope of blueprints will certainly contain blended dispositional types, men and women with some characteristics, as important as, and as fundamental to function as, their callings as apostle and prophet.
We continue to have people “on a crusade,” with a zealot mentality, mixed in at the foundational levels of kingdom leadership. We have “zealots” because God chooses them, because their Providential pathway of preparation places them into position to give that perspective to the entire team. We have “zealots” and all the other authentic dispositional types because God knows that is healthy and important to the implementation of His strategy for nations and regions.
The chemistry of the teams allows for blending of these strategic dispositions, and the entire team must submit to the total team chemistry. Jesus seeks to establish this total team chemistry when He sends, prepares, and positions these chosen ones.
When kingdom teams form, a constant and consistent method of the adversary called ‘anything but that’ will operate to limit the full function of the team. Most often, that fundamental method gains some measure of success through unresolved disagreements within the team about strategy, emphasis, and style more than substance, philosophy, and purpose. In short, the dynamics that bring strong leaders to this level of kingdom authority also contribute to their individual reluctance to trust other leaders due to the diversity of personality or dispositional types they encounter at this level.
We may look on in disgust when these clashes play out and think, “God needs to do a better job of selecting His leaders and their assignments.”
God looks on and thinks, “Time now for the big boys and girls to learn to play well with others.” That is, God knows only mature leaders can receive transformation at the levels needed to function internationally and nationally.
Simon the Zealot advocated a revolutionary response to Roman rule carried over from the days of the Maccabees. Yet, Jesus recognizes that His Father has given Him this man to disciple into a kingdom leader. While Simon Peter embraces this kind of passionate aggression, his brother Andrew and Philip, for example, might be much less inclined toward a “let’s get out there and kill some Romans” point of view.
Immediately we consider God’s ways in selecting the leadership team of Jesus, we discover that He intentionally throws diverse dispositions together, and the chemistry of kingdom leadership at the international and national levels should anticipate and allow for this blending, an ice-crushing, pulverizing, noisy, and sometimes shocking process.
Mature Leaders Sacrifice Their Mini-Movements
At present, we have them all: Andrew’s “just win as many souls as you can before the end,” Simon’s “let’s pray until Jesus kills a bunch of people,” the Thomas “an aliens/illuminati/nephilim conspiracy runs the universe,” Matthew’s “turn in next hour as we raise more funds to pay for the show that raises more funds” and the immature John’s “all we need is love cause we aren’t that certain Jesus will hurt a flea” as well as the other dispositional tendencies of Jesus’ kingdom team operating in our generation.
The chemistry of these various mini-movements fails to blend that well, standing afar off from one another, demanding that Jesus change His team selection process: “Surely You don’t expect us to sacrifice our distinctives as a mini-movement and work with those bozos, right?”
Jesus waits submission of all these factions He calls together, a submission of their matured strengths. He desires all these exaggerations to give way to a more Biblically sound approach. Without any exaggeration. Without the fine-tuning of exaggeration that maturing these mini-movements produces, that inevitably sets false expectations about God’s expectations.
While it is very hard to abandon the exaggerations since you’ve been writing and preaching about them for years in order to build the mini-movement you lead, the mature kingdom leader must make a sacrifice of the matured mini-movement because Jesus is producing a kingdom movement. Picture the kingdom movement that will incorporate a transformed Simon the Zealot with a transformed Andrew with a transformed John the Beloved with a transformed Simon Peter, etc.
Contrary to popular assumptions, the personality types cannot blend when they are immature at the level needed to produce the final product; only after the dispositional types have matured can the highest levels of transformation be applied to their leadership.
In the kingdom the adage, “It is hard to teach old dogs new tricks,” never even enters the picture because the kingdom reality is the exact opposite: “Only the experienced are prepared to learn new strategic responses at the international and national levels.”
The most mature must experienced the greatest personal and leadership transformations in the height of their maturity in order for their leadership to bring the kingdom movement into its fullness and fulfillment.
Only after the Providential pathway produces the properly positioned kingdom leader alongside those Jesus has sent to represent His kingdom movement in their generation – only then can the mature leaders submit to the blending of chemistry that will blast back the limitations of mini-movement exaggerations and prepare the way for the Lord’s kingdom movement!
A solid six months of “we were wrong in these assumptions” among all those affected would more closely reveal the condition of the disciples at the point of Pentecost. Jesus spends 40 days after Resurrection explaining the kingdom, yet they still couldn’t figure it out strategically. After Pentecost, they would still minister only to Jews for a decade and a half before the first non-Jew would be born anew, and they would still hammer out the proper approach to kingdom by strong confrontations over exaggerations of their preconceived conclusions.
Only by allowing a blending of leadership chemistry would they reach the proper weights of balance, and the more they fought the insertion of leaders at odds with their points of view, the more they frustrated themselves personally and the kingdom universally. Only by making their matured leadership a sacrifice to the greater kingdom leadership strategies of Jesus did they achieve the highest of their personal purposes.
Greater maturity of Divine Purpose requires that the most mature experience the highest levels of transformation in the seasons of kingdom’s greatest days of expansion.
