By Amy Butler
As a loving parent interested in knowing what my children like, my ongoing and increasingly unsuccessful attempts to understand the teen-aged mind led me last week to go with them to see the new movie The Avengers.
If it had been up to me, I probably would have chosen another film. For one thing, watching the chaotic pace of the action was enough to make me motion sick. For another, it seemed to take an interminably long time for those superheroes to figure out that they could get a lot more done by working together instead of wasting time by showing off their own special superpowers.
The main plot of the movie is this group of superheroes ends up saving the world from the forces of evil. I assume this is the plot of most superhero movies, but I couldn’t say for sure.
Anyway, I noticed that most of the story focused on the superheroes’ inability to get along with each other. It takes until the very end of the movie until the group finally begins to get their act together instead of using their powers in competitive and nonproductive ways.
When they finally do figure out that working together is better than competing with each other, it all gets very exciting as they save the world just in the nick of time.
I thought of the movie during a seminar I attended on leadership in the church. The presenter told us that the days of individual, “superpower” leadership are long gone. Instead of superstar individuals brought in to fix things, it takes groups of leaders who cultivate qualities of excellent teamwork in order to solve problems.
Play fair, trust, accept, forgive: these are the qualities that excellent leaders bring to the team table. They recognize that the superhero model won’t cut it and that successful leadership of an organization instead takes a team of variously gifted leaders who work together to display those qualities among themselves.
The best organizations are led by teams of leaders who play fair, value trustworthy interaction, accept each others’ differing perspectives and forgive each other when they fail.
Surely the same is true for churches. No one superhero leader can come in and save the church. It takes a whole team of Christ-followers who together put our pride to the side and tap into the power of God in the world. Together we play fair, we trust each other, we accept one another, and we always forgive each other.
Somehow I doubt my children came away seeing The Avengers the same way I did, but I left the theater hoping that we who hope to be part of God’s efforts to save the world can also somehow put our competitive natures aside and get to work together ushering in God’s kingdom.
And I really hope we don’t have to wait until the very end to figure it out.
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