Innovative Leadership means that together with the help of others you become aware of what God is doing by listening to each other and listening up to God.  You align and submit yourself with him as you design and make plans.  You believe that God will use your conversation, your imagination and ideas to move you out in a direction that you have never gone before, confident that God is going before you!  Like Acts 15:28 you should be able to say, ‘it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us’ to move in this direction.

When it comes to understanding what Innovative leadership is all about it is important to come back often to our definition:

We discern God’s will together, strategically initiating creative new direction.

Innovative Leadership

• To discern means to perceive or recognize something
• Together means not going at it alone.  Leaders aren’t lone rangers.
• Strategically means carefully designed or planned to serve a particular purpose or advantage
• Initiate means to cause or begin something – it requires action
• Creative involves using the imagination or original ideas
• New means not existing before, recently discovered – “we haven’t gone this way before, seen or experienced this before”
• Direction is a course along which someone or something moves.

Innovative Leaders work together like a body

Paul says in I Corinthians 12 that Jesus is the head and we are the body, making it clear that part of our purpose as the body of Christ is to manifest or reveal the mind of God.  In order to know God’s mind we need to ‘discern God’s will together’ so we can be strategic and move together as one.

Creativity is thinking up new ideas, innovation is doing new things.  We want to take God ideas and carry them out!

How many of you disqualify yourself from being an Innovative Leader?  How many of you think, ‘I am not in a ministry or leadership role, therefore, I don’t really see a need to take time to discern God’s will together with others to strategically initiate a creative new direction’?

Being in full time ministry for over 20 years I learned that I was prone to seek God will for direction when I was preparing a sermon, a meeting, the budget, a youth event, and summer camp. But when it came to the home front, or the neighbourhood I lived in, I considered that my leisure time. Who needs to seek God’s will about what I do in my leisure time?  Let’s just play and relax!

I am convinced that God has plans, thoughts, and desires for your family and for those in your sphere of influence.  An innovative leader is not limited to a role or position in the church.  An innovative leader is aware of his or her role in their family, (and workplace) and together with their family, discerns God’s will so they can be strategic.  Acts 17:26-27 says that God was very strategic in choosing where you were born and where you live now.  Seek him as a family to know his strategies for you at this moment in history.

Acts 17:26-27

From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live. He did this so that they might seek God, and perhaps they might reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

The truth is, everyone can be an Innovative Leader!

You’ve heard the definition of insanity, ‘doing the same thing over and expecting different results!’ If you want to change the direction of your life, you are going to have to change your thinking.

Romans 12:2

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Whatever your life looks like, you are not alone. Yet too often we suffer alone, unwilling to invite others in or to ask others for help.  

We are encouraged to discern God’s will TOGETHER, listening to him, trusting him and then following him in obedience.