Leadership, across the board, is in bad shape.

There’’s good news and bad news…

From the Harvard Kennedy School Center For Public Leadership:

Bad news — The decline in confidence reached its lowest in 2008, when only 26% of Americans said our leaders were effective and doing a good job. Last year (2010), for the third year in a row, overall confidence in leadership remains significantly below average: only 38% believed our leaders are doing a good job.

Good news — Beneath this statistic, however, is a countervailing trend that began last year; despite what some see as an excessively baleful media portrayal of the nation’s prospects, confidence in our leaders” effectiveness has increased by 12% since 2008.

A Gallop poll recently showed trust in Congress to be a paltry 12%. And the Church has shrunk to its lowest level in years – 48%. Regardless of where leaders lead, credibility is at an all time low, and the consequences constitute an epidemic.

Ken Blanchard says we live in a world that is in “desperate need of a leadership revival.” He’’s right, and that is why PRISM Leadership exists. We see that when the Church functions as it was designed to, it is truly magnificent. The phase we use often is, walking in you full redemptive calling. We want to help you get there.

What Will Leadership Look Like In This Next Season?

At PRISM, we see 3 key characteristics…

1.  Effective change managers. Churches can either make change a proactive decision or a reactive compulsion. Nehemiah is an example of extreme effectiveness at change management. If you have read (Harvard Professor) John Kotter””’’s classic book, Leading Change, you will find it to be, basically, a teaching outline of Nehemiah’’s leadership/change process.

2.  Committed to emotional health. Emotional health is the capacity to express the full range of emotions appropriately – and must be integrated with our discipleship processes. Significant components of emotional health include self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. Ephesians 4:15 expresses the epitome – and goal of emotional health, “but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.”

3.  Teach and preach sound doctrine. The formation of the Jerusalem church described in Acts (5:20, AMP) identifies a core commitment to sound doctrine, “Go, take your stand in the temple courts and declare to the people the whole doctrine concerning this life (the eternal life which Christ revealed).” You may have heard the phase “moralistic, therapeutic deism”[1] over the last couple of years. While the phrase is a description of what the authors found to be the most common religious beliefs among American youth, the phrase has also come to characterize a profound weakness in the preaching and teaching ministries of many North American churches.