A Critique of Webber’s “Built the Designer” Approach to Leadership Development

Dear Mr. Webber,

Some friends of mine came home very excited after they attended a seminar you gave on your “Build the Designer” approach to leadership development. They gave me the literature they’d picked up and urged me to read it. When I settled in my easy chair it was with an attitude of “OK., let me get my mind around this model as it clearly excites some of us”.

First of all, I appreciate your humility when describing actual results to date. I understand you are utilizing this model in your church and, according to my friends’ reports, it is being utilized by some in such diverse places as Iran and China. However, you did not actually claim that the model has proven to be more successful than other models.  You are also very right when you state that “leadership development is highly complex and very little understood”.

Having said that, however, I’m afraid that your paper left me disappointed, and that for the following reasons:

Please don’t build your model in contradistinction to a straw man

Your “4 P” characterization of academic institutions consists of little more than sloganeering and sharp contrasts. You state, for instance, that the old goal of education was “academic capacity” by teaching courses related to biblical knowledge, something you dismiss rather cavalierly: “Of course this did not prepare students well for the practical demands of ministry”, in contradistinction to your “new goal” of “building the whole person”. In truth, all the institutions where I was trained (both Christian and secular ones) sought much more than “academic capacity”, something you yourself admit: “Many seminaries and Bible schools have recognized this (i.e., that information transfer by itself does not build spiritual life, character and practical ministry capacity) and are complementing their classroom agendas (information) with a variety of intentional spiritual relational and experiential dynamics (transformational).”  You then go on to describe your “new paradigm” of spiritual, relational, experiential and instructional balance. My question is, “where is the genuinely “new” element?”

Allow me to share an old, 1970s paradigm of teaching. When I was a student at Prairie Bible College we had to attend classes, to be sure. However, there were also daily prayer and intersession sessions for the world at large (where I received my call to the Middle East). There was one-on-one mentoring/discipling by faculty members. We went on regular visits with staff members to do street and prison ministry. Various staff families took it upon themselves to be “surrogate parents” for lonely students. The school organized internships with churches—my internship featured hugely in my decision NOT to go into the pastorate. If that little Bible school operated that way back in the 1970s what, I repeat, is the essentially “new” element in your model?

Please don’t think that Prairie is unique. None of the schools of higher education I have attended in the West (6, not including 2 universities in the Middle East) nor any of the institutions where I currently teach (5) have “mere information” as their goal. All share your goals of multiplication, holistic development, giving the right people the right training, the provision of flexible options, close liaison with local churches, life-long learning, and effective evaluation. To suggest otherwise is simply not true.

Please don’t give me simplistic, unsubstantiated analysis

The fact that Wales today, in spite of its revival over a century ago, is “one of the most secular countries in Europe” (is that even true? Proof please!) really due to some kind of leadership problem? Are you actually suggesting that if the Welch had had the opportunity to embrace your “new model” the revival would still be rocking Wales?

You state that your approach is “a clear and accurate biblical model” of leadership training. However, your claim that, “biblically, the primary unit of leader development is the local church or cluster of churches” is completely unsubstantiated, as is virtually everything else you say.

You makes much of the fact that yours is, in fact, the model Jesus Christ used—and is thus ideal model. The anachronism seems lost on you, inasmuch as the church was not founded until Pentecost. A much stronger case could be made for Paul’s roving missionary team. I don’t, in fact, understand why you don’t use him as your model, as the peripatetic apostle seems to fit your paradigm better than our Lord. As for me, I see multiple models of leadership training in the Bible.

Your statement that the only three things Jesus came to do while here on earth was to die on the cross, to proclaim the kingdom and reveal the Father, and to build a team of emerging leaders (“And that’s all he did”) is so simplistic, I urge you to take a course in Christology. Could it be that Christ was as much–possibly even more–interested in fulfilling the law on our behalf during the course of his life than in “leadership development”?

Another interesting-sounding, yet unsubstantiated claim or yours is your intriguing “law of decreasing relearns” which you describe in your parody of the “train the trainer” approach as follows: “the effectiveness of the training decreases, often quickly and dramatically with each passing on”.

I can personally attest that this is not necessarily so. I happen to be involved internationally in the training of trainers in the area of language acquisition. Some of those I have trained have turned out to be better trainers than I am, just as I am better in some areas of applied linguistics than some of those who trained me. By encouraging the trainers to take my constantly evolving material, apply it to their context and develop it further (including dropping what doesn’t work in their world) my own material has been hugely enriched.

And how accurate are your claims about the current “crisis in the quantity and quality of leaders” we are supposedly experiencing? Could things actually be getting worse in certain places and better elsewhere? What are the trends? Local statistics please! Please don’t make wide-ranging claims for your model on the basis of unsubstantiated generalities.

Furthermore, to suggest that in more traditional methods of teaching/learning leaders are not taught to design but taught to repeat and that their own developmental processes are not nurtured “so that they turn disillusioned to the next outsider who comes along promoting his new and improved” method is an insulting parody.

And that leads me to my next point:

Please don’t insult me

You insinuate that leaders who went through more traditional training programs did not turn out healthy (“we must build healthy leaders” italics in original; “A new goal – the healthy Christian leader” ). You also suggest that many leaders trained in the old ways “may accomplish much but never amount to much”.

Of course we are all acquainted with major failures in leadership. Nevertheless, your caricatures are pretty off-putting for someone who has had the privilege of working with lots of wonderful, often older, godly Christian leaders—men in academia, the pastorate, mission leaders—healthy in body, soul and spirit, men who have amounted to much, whom I greatly respect and who were trained in very traditional ways. Sadly, you appear not to have had the joy of meeting such men.

Your paragraph on vertical and lateral thinking is also quite insulting. None of the numerous teaching institution I have attended or the various schools where I am an adjunct faculty just keep “digging deeper and deeper to make it a better hole”. We are constantly reevaluating and rethinking content, delivery, student-facilitator interaction, internships, etc. All are as interested as you are in providing a wholistic spiritual environment, an experiential context and a relational web—and are quite intentional as to how they get there. ( Note: I recently asked my daughter why she would repeat her year at Prairie Bible College if she had to. Answer: “Because of the wonderful sense of community…”).

You, however, seem keen to use the most derogatory terms when referring to more traditional forms of education: they are “disconnected academic institutions” with “inherent limitations” who “indoctrinate in training materials” people whom “we are likely to seat in neat rows behind desk and lecture interminably” using “merely a set of curriculum along with preformed implementation strategies” with “some token attention” paid to other things. And when all is said and done, we may even “forbid the poor indigenous leader from ever changing the program, requiring them to teach exactly the same thing exactly the same way”. Please don’t compare the best of yourself with the worst of others…

You go so far as to suggest that other forms of training don’t provide those “Aha” moments as students suddenly realize the relevance of something or other to their situation.

Please don’t feed me your holier-than-thou saccharine spirituality

“In the new paradigm, union with Christ, the cross, suffering, holiness and dependency on the Holy Spirit are at the center of all our leader development. The Person of Jesus Christ is the Beginning and End of all Christian leadership and leader development”. Mr. Webber, please give me a break…

I, for one, will need much more from you before I am prepared to place your notions on personal interaction, mutual exploration, coaching, “resourcing”, networking, development, etc. on the same page as the printing press.

Forgive me for asking: did you have a bad seminary experience that you haven’t gotten over yet?

Sincerely,

Peter Pikkert

Money and the Incarnation

Here a few quotables from Victor Shepherd in an interview with the July-August 2008 issue of Faith Today:

“Jesus doesn’t belong to the left or to the right. He’s preoccupied rather with the kingship of God. He’s concerned with upholding the Old Testament, which is full of references to the horror of poverty and the fact that poverty ought not to exist at all among God’s people.”

“The New Testament is preoccupied with a cosmic power struggle and money is regarded, by far, as the biggest spiritual threat.”

“The opposite of love is not hatred. The opposite of love is indifference.”

“Under capitalism people devour people. Under communism it’s the other way around.” (Quote from Emil Fackenheim)

“Any dialogue that comes out of a conversation beteen capitalism and communism still has an entirely naturalistic future. And, as a naturalistic future, it still doesn’t represent the Kingdom of God. Therefore it isn’t the long-term solution to anything.”

Albanian Proverb

He who eats alone dies alone.

Beggars Matter

You’re not supposed to give beggars money—every one knows they’ve got loads of money stashed away somewhere, right?  They’re simply exploiting us hardworking people… And you must absolutely not give anything to the little beggar children; giving them money encourages those who exploit them, and thus simply increases the problem!

However, whenever I pass one of these numerous human wrecks—the doubled over old woman, the man without limbs, the doleful young mother with a dirty baby sucking an empty feeding bottle, the half-naked, snot-nosed toddler holding out a grubby hand and looking hopefully at you with big, brown eyes—I feel vaguely uncomfortable, guilty even.  What if these people really are needy…?

In fact the really needy people far outnumber those reduced to begging.  Most of the really poor people still have too much self-respect to beg.   Statistics bear this out:

According to the Turkish Statistics Organization (Turkiye Istatistik Kurumu: TUIK) 25.5% of the population of Turkey in 2004 lived below the poverty line.  That’s 18 million people.   According to TUIK about one million people go hungry.  A 2005 World Bank report states that 58% of the population of Turkey lives on $4.30 a day, 20% of the population on $2.15 a day. 

I don’t know how that is possible.   Nor do I know what I, personally, can/should do about it…

Give to beggars…?

Source for statistics: Radikal, Dec.5 2006.

“Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World” ( 2005) by Nicholas Ostler

A look at history as seen through the varying fortunes and unique characteristics of the world’s great languages: Akkadian, Aramaic, Phoenician, Sanskrit, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, English, etc.  A fascinating, engaging read for anyone interested in the interrelation of language, culture and conquest.

Bittersweet Coincidence

Virtually all levels of Turkish society have reacted with outrage at the decision of the French parlament to criminalize the denial of the Armenian holocaust by the Ottoman Turks during World War I.  Within hours of that decision the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel prize for literature.   Pamuk has himself been in court, charged under a controvesial law, the infamous number 301, which criminalizes criticizing the undefined concept of “Turkishness”.    His crime: acknowledging the Armenian massacres.

Those interested in grasping something of the conundrum that is modern Turkey can do no better that reading his novel “Snow”.

Why Jesus chose Fishermen

It was not by chance that Jesus chose His first followers among fishermen. The fisherman, who spends the greater part of his days in solitude and encompassed by pure waters, is the man who knows how to wait. He is the man of patience who is not pressed for time; who casts his net and leaves the rest to the Almighty.
Giovanni Papini