The question of empowering people versus encouraging people cuts to the heart of my ministry philosophy and how I wish our ministry would function as far as it concerns our leaders, volunteers, and student leaders. People always say I am a great encourager. However, I have found that true encouragement can be found in empowering others. My studies in organizational leadership from the corporate world have helped me refine how I practice empowerment in the church.
In quoting W.A. Randolph, Fred Luthans, a scholar in organizational behavior, states the definition of empowerment as “recognizing and releasing into the organization the power that people have in their wealth of useful knowledge and internal motivation.” Another scholar defined it as “releasing the knowledge, experience, and motivational power that is already in people but is being severely underutilized.” These definitions of empowerment from the corporate world help one begin to understand what empowerment is all about and why and how we need to empower people in the church. For me, this ultimately means that I am nurturing ways in which others can lead within our ministry and use their God-given gifts for the church.
There are other vital elements of empowerment from the corporate world that can be applied to the church and relate to nurturing others to lead. For example, trust is a key issue in relation to empowerment. Those who write about empowerment in the corporate world note that trust is a two-way street where managers and employees have to believe in each other. They also discuss trust in reference to releasing the power within an individual. In doing so, they state how management must ensure individuals that they will be trusted within the empowerment process.
Finally, trust also comes from the sharing of vital information that equips employees to be informed to make important organizational decisions and lead themselves. Within a youth or any ministry setting, it is the difference between a ministry being just (youth) pastor centered and having other leaders, such as volunteers, lay leaders, and student leaders who are empowered in trust to lead and execute the ministry as shepherds also, rather than being spectators.
When trust is practiced with those we empower, we are also breeding loyalty to organization. As one business executive put it, empowerment is an act of trust that functions positively to breed loyalty in an organization. Perhaps then, engagement is a more precise definition of the loyalty that results from empowerment. Nancy Lockwood, another scholar, notes in relation to this that “employees who are highly involved in their work processes, such as conceiving, designing, and implementing workplace and process changes, are more engaged.”
Many ministries have issues with retaining effective volunteers. Perhaps empowerment can be one way to breed a loyalty of effective volunteers. It has surely helped in our ministry. We have volunteers who serve over the long haul because they feel a real sense of loyalty because they are empowered leaders.
Finally, organizational design is also a key element of empowerment. If an organization is to nurture empowerment, then it must provide the framework for it to flourish. Ministries that are more vertical or top-down in nature do not promote empowerment. However, horizontal organizations and leadership structures speak to ways that an organization can promote empowerment. Hence, as far as ministry in a local church, this means that ministries must be led by more than just the head youth pastor or lead pastor. Rather, leadership must be spread among different avenues and people.
Similarly, ministries can be designed to foster empowerment in their organizational design so that volunteers, lay leaders, and student leaders will be vital parts of the leadership of the ministries. Ultimately, this may be challenging to some leaders who have been engrained in a top-down leadership structure. However, if this is not done, the empowerment of others will never be nurtured, and the gifts and talents of many will not be utilized.
Helpful Resources:
Immerse: A Journal of Faith, Life and Youth Ministry
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I had coffee with a good friend this week who is an assistant pastor at a church. Recently their staff team went on a “retreat” together. As soon as they got in the van, the senior pastor began to cast the vision for the fall and upcoming year. Sadly, the tasks and goals lists just kept coming. There was little praise or encouragement for the year just finished, and there was no dialogue about problems and hurdles for the upcoming year.
My friend thought they’d get a chance to reconnect personally, get encouraged, and have some fun. He was expecting a year-in-review, some honest dialogue about what they’d been doing, and perhaps a little empowerment to get them going on the next things. But the entire weekend was task oriented, not relationship based.
The sad thing about most ministries is that we are too often asked to do our jobs and just “git ’er done”…with very little encouragement, much less the money or people power to do it well. What we really could use is a large glass of encouragement and gallon of empowerment; the freedom to do our jobs and do them well without being micromanaged. (And it would also be nice to have some time to recover in order to keep going!)
How does one empower someone else? Easy, really—help her see that she has power to begin with or give him true power without using it to control him. Know the gifts people have and allow them to use those gifts in ways that they will succeed.
Too often we encourage people—students, friends, our own kids—but we don’t help them attain what we’ve encouraged them to do or be. We don’t help them get the tools they need to do the tasks at hand. We cheerlead, but we don’t set them free to engage on their own terms. We encourage without empowering.
So, what does it mean to empower? Giving power and authority, enabling someone to do something in a positive way.
In order to empower someone, we often have to give up or give away our own power or status. We have to decrease so others can increase. It means letting someone else lead, teach, create.
And to encourage? Giving someone the courage and confidence, the hope to go forward. Sometimes it’s a real pat on the back; sometimes it’s a verbal blessing; sometimes it’s listening and actually hearing someone’s story.
What do I really want? Both! Don’t you? Please encourage me, and then empower me to do it well! Give me the tools I need to get the job done. Enable me to have the time, space, and tools to succeed. Give me honest feedback. And provide me with the resources I need to do well. Set me free to try and fail. And then encourage me to get up and try again.
Why doesn’t this happen more often on church staff? The reasons are simple and sad.
• When we get power, we never want to give it away.
• Others are a threat to our power and want to take it for themselves.
• The design of most churches is to be an expression of one person’s vision, held accountable by a group that doesn’t understand the real inner workings and problems of a church staff.
• What we really want is to have enough people and therefore enough money. If what I do doesn’t obviously lead to more dollars, what I do doesn’t matter.
While this is reality in many places, we all know it’s not kingdom living. Maybe you and I can’t change the system overnight, but this can and must change. What can we do?
• Change the definitions and lose the fear of power and giving it away.
• Learn and practice taking the time to listen to each other and give good feedback to those we work with.
• Model the behavior we seek. Encourage others and give away power.
• Help others to see their gifts and allow them to use them!
• Help our students, our communities, and ourselves see our mission and use our gifts outside the church building—being the church in the real world.
• Build a real support system outside the church staff where we can get authentic feedback, courage, and hope.
Let’s choose to encourage and empower others as we long to be encouraged and empowered ourselves.
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Empowering and encouraging seem indelibly connected to me. I think the core to encouragement is really seeing another, hearing another, and acting with and for another. I think we all feel encouraged when this happens.
And I think this kind of encouragement has rich theological significance. Being seen, heard, and acted with is what makes us human because we confess that God sees us, hears us, and acts with and for us. God does this within Godself first. As Trinity, God sees self, hears self, and acts with and for self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Encouragement is central to love; and at the core of Godself is the love between Father, Son, and Spirit. But the love of encouragement always sends, and sending is empowering.
You’re a bad parent, even if you love your kids, if you don’t send them out into the world. We prosecute people who say they love their kids so much they locked them in the basement and never let them out into the world, never empowered them to be selves. Love always empowers to be sent into the world.
But this sending (to give it circular flavor) has to be connected to encouragement. You’re also a bad parent if you say, “I don’t give a darn what you do, just go out and have fun,” giving no support or encouragement in being sent.
So God’s love, as Trinity, sees, hears, and acts then sends. When God sees, hears, and acts God sends—first Godself and then, through Godself, us. Swept up into the love of God, encouraged, we are empowered to participate in God’s movement in the world.
And we see this most clearly in the second person of the Trinity being sent into the world as fully divine and fully human. Jesus is empowered by the loving encouragement of the Father to go into the world. He is sent to be human so humanity might know that God always see, hears, and acts and, in knowing, might participate in God’s own love, also being sent (empowered) to love and encourage those in the world, to witness to God’s action.
This means that God, through and in Jesus, encourages us to be human. God encourages us to face our questions, to be honest about our limits, to seek God within our human journey as we are sent and empowered by the Spirit to encourage others. So then in ministry, we empower people by encouraging them to be human, to live honesty in search of God—not in perfection but in their questions and doubts. The God of the cross empowers us by comforting and encouraging us that God is with and for us in our deepest sufferings and longings. We encourage and empower people in our ministry when we invite them to be human and, in their humanity, to search for a God who will send them into the world to love it, through the empowerment of the Spirit.
This is the problem with disconnecting encouragement and empowerment. To tease them apart can lead to spiritual abuse. Without encouragement, you don’t really care about the humanity of your adult leader, just that he or she is empowered to do the tasks you have for them—if you’re honest, to make you look more successful. So you can try and try to empower them, but if they never feel encouraged, never feel seen, heard, and acted with, then they can never really do ministry. Because, in the end, you’re inviting leaders to be sent into the lives of young people, to empower young people by encouraging them, by being with and for them as God—as Trinity—is with and for us.
But you also can’t encourage adult leaders without sending them, without empowering them. How often do we tell adult leaders that they’re super important to what we do and then never give them any leadership, never allow them to take ownership? To have really encouraged them is to give them the ministry, to trust that their empowerment to be human with and for young people, to go and encourage young people, will be the fullness of the ministry of the Trinity.
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