Craig Robertson entered the business world with the idea of integrating what he was learning at church into his work. What he discovered was a successful leadership model that could be applied to the church.
Today, he’s a founding member and the executive director of Spiritual Leadership Inc. (SLI), which helps leaders create transformative church environments where people in any role can discover and act on their calling.
Before co-founding SLI in 2000, he was chair and CEO of OGETA Services. He has also served as technical director of Ogden Environmental and was founder and president of Lightpath Inc.
Robertson spoke with Faith & Leadership about applying spiritual principles to church and corporate leadership. The video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.
Q: Your career journey to spiritual leadership work has been through the business world. What leadership lessons have you learned along the way?
One, the hallmark of great leaders is the ability to articulate the journey in relationship with Christ. Two is that leaders are constant learners. We build our lives in ways that crowd out those two functions. Yet those are the foundations for leaders who work on adaptive problems, or problems that don’t have easy answers. That’s needed to build community.
The basis to how movements grow is that you have deep relationships and you’ve got the ability to learn together. Those two things, coupled with the more traditional understandings of leadership, provide a foundation for what we call generative ministry.
Generative ministry is the ability for the DNA of a group to [be passed on], multiply and grow. If you think organically, a seed falls on the ground and grows into a tree, which drops more seeds. That’s what I mean by generative.
Q: What lessons from the corporate world did you bring to bear in your work with Christian leaders?
I’m not sure which had more of an effect on my understanding of leadership -- the corporate world or the church’s influence -- as I was growing as a young leader.
I started a company based on hearing a calling at church, so I got into it a bit differently than some people do. I didn’t start off dreaming about being a business owner. It was something that I discerned as I was trying to find my way forward with the gifts that I had.
I knew that I wasn’t called to preach or teach, and pastoral care didn’t seem to fit me, but I felt God pushing me in the direction of leadership. St. Luke United Methodist Church [in Lexington, Ky.,] has been my home church for 25 years. The idea in starting my business was to integrate what I was learning there with what I was doing in the business world.
Q: How did you become interested in questions of leadership in the church?
It was in a conversation with God and asking, “God, what do you want me to do?” I wanted to find something that I could attach my energies to that would make a difference. The answer that I got was, “If you could affect the leadership of the world, then you’d have the greatest chance of making the biggest impact.”
In the beginning it was very, very foggy. But with each step I took toward it, it became more refined. I had sold my company to a large company, and Greg Survant -- the gentleman that I had journeyed with -- and I had been working with a pastor for a number of years. We shared our leadership concepts with him and he mentored us spiritually.
We recognized this co-mentoring that was going on. It scared us a little that we would have that important of a role in the church. I had always assumed that this calling would just take me into the secular parts of our world. In fact, it made me very uncomfortable to think that we would have a role in leadership in the church.
But one day in 2000, I took an assignment to be the leader of a new company in Atlanta and was moving from Lexington. Not knowing that, Greg asked if I wanted to start on what we had planned on doing in retirement now. I said, “Greg, I’d love to do that, but I can’t. I’ve just taken this position.” Two weeks later, the NASDAQ crashed and starting new companies was not popular.
We discerned that it was time to begin. We started with one pastor when he came to ask for help.
After three years, we had so much interest and so many people wanting what we were doing. We still haven’t advertised, and our organization has grown to work in approximately 15 of the [United Methodist] conferences around this country, 10 at the bishop and cabinet level. We’ve got projects from children’s ministries and all different ethnicities. We’re starting projects overseas. The number of coaches that participate with us has grown to about 50.
It’s taken off. The only way we can explain it is that God keeps opening these doors, and we’re crazy enough to walk through them.
Q: Based on your experiences, are there common perceptions about leadership that you think are wrong?
Our predominant Western-culture understanding of leadership looks like command and control. Our heroes on television are characters that are able to perform way beyond the norm. That’s probably the single biggest obstacle that we deal with, versus a person willing to help others discover their calling and utilize their gifts to the fullest in the role of leadership. Our measuring systems within our church and within our culture are around heroic leadership. [But] everybody has capacities, and so if you want to limit the growth of whomever you lead to your [own] capacity, heroic leadership is the approach to take.
It manifests itself in busy schedules. Statistics bear out that most of us only lead a small group, no matter how large the organization is. That’s probably the single greatest myth that we are constantly chipping away at -- that you’re promoted into your title because of some credentialing that you’ve been through and now it’s your job to single-handedly pull this organization out of the dust.
Q: What makes an effective and faithful Christian leader?
One of the things that I find as a hallmark surrounding Christian leaders is trust -- they’re surrounded in a community of trust, and they’re not alone.
The other big thing is that they have an innate sense that to be effective they have to be willing to cross into cultures other than their own, and they have to become experts at crossing cultural boundaries.
The third thing is that they have an innate sense that there is a force much larger than themselves that they are in partnership with, and so they’re expecting the miraculous. Risk is never a fun thing. But when you get to see the work of God in action, it’s an amazing thing.
Q: Your background includes a great deal of entrepreneurial leadership. Describe the role of entrepreneurialism in Christian leadership.
It’s part of a wiring, and it’s part of a gifting, where what is interesting and exciting is still to be discovered. It’s the recognition that it’s OK not to know everything.
Some personalities are more comfortable with that than others. Order, clarity and simplicity are the enemies of someone who’s comfortable with chaos and ambiguity. Those things have to be held in tension.
Another good reason for community is to have trusting relationships that balance the perspectives at hand, so that you have more of a God picture than a Craig picture or an entrepreneurial picture. We tend to gravitate toward people like [ourselves]. Putting people that aren’t like us into close proximity where they help steer can be uncomfortable, but you can have healthy conflict. That’s part of our understanding of what great teams look like.
Entrepreneurialism comes out as a characteristic of an individual, but it needs to be one aspect of a team. Not everybody needs to be entrepreneurial.
Q: When you think about the church 10 years from now, what do you hope it looks like?
Like transformed lives. Radical transition happens for people at every level of the Christian journey. It’s not just that first step from unbeliever to believer. Some of my favorite transforming moments are when seasoned leaders reconnect their devotional life and are born again 30 years into their ministry and set free from the patterns that are holding them in place, and they become unstoppable forces again.
We tend to tilt toward the beginning part of the journey as being where we look for most transformation. But in transformative environments, what you would see is an increasing number of people discovering their calling and acting on it. It takes a great deal of bravery by people who are mentoring those entering into that and a great deal of relationship to facilitate that.
Q: Describe more specifically what this transformed church would look like.
My best description is that it looks out of control. I went to a funeral of a homeless man, and I listened to who I thought was a pastor of the church. It wasn’t. It was a layman giving this beautifully clear, articulate description of the gospel.
The homeless man had been killed in an accident. His family didn’t know where he was, and the church found them. There they all sat in this room and were presented with [the gospel]. I gave my life to Christ again that night. It was beautiful and simple, and it was a layperson who had built a relationship with this homeless man.
That’s what the church looks like -- a group of people who bind themselves together. They hold hands and take responsibility for moving forward with the kingdom. It can be a small, rural spot in the middle of nowhere or a huge, metropolitan setting where a church is involving thousands.
Some of my favorite stories are those from a dying place where the average age feels like it’s around 140 years old. You can’t get a conversation going to save your life, but put them on a solid diet of sharing with each other -- “How is it with your soul this week? How is it with your mission this week? How can I pray with you? How can we together learn and find our way forward?” -- come back six months later, and they’ve come alive. They’ve become transformed. They glow. I love that.
That’s what the church looks like in the future. It pops up in businesses. It pops up everywhere, and people lose the notion that it is somehow tied to somebody’s profession. It becomes our responsibility, each and every one of us.
Q: What leadership role does a bishop need to play in the church today to bring about the church you envision?
Given an area of responsibility, we are to model the way forward. And so I understand in great detail the definitions of how our church fits together, but my definition would be that when you’re given a role like a bishop, a district superintendent, a pastor or a small group leader in a church, you’re given a role and responsibility over a certain demographic, a certain geography, a certain set of people -- and you become responsible for their growth. You are the church.
And so to find our way forward then -- to understand the roles at every level of the church as being responsible for the souls, for the progress, for the health, for the dynamics -- that’s each of our roles. And so it’s a process of, number one, being able to articulate our own journey with Christ.
“Here are the struggles I’m having. As I sit with Christ this morning, and I look at the expanse of what I’m up against and I look at the expanse of who he is compared to who I am, I see this gap.”
It’s out of that that our compassion is born and it’s out of that compassion that action comes. And so we have to be principled leaders at every level of the church. It ought to be modeled the same at any level.
