Supervision

Have just started reading Rolland Allen's "Missionary Methods". He writes a great description of the failed attempts by 19th century missionaries to start local churches. He is quite scathing about the habit of giving too much responsibility and money to indigeonous churches without also thinking about how they are supported and overseen. He basically argues that local Christians were set up to fail...
We do much the same to people in contemporary British churches. The pattern is for volunteers to take on jobs, but there is no custom of regular supervision - in fact many of our volunteers would regard supervision as an insult... and yet I am increasingly convinced that good quality supervision is absolutely crucial to the development of truly productive and fulfilling ministry. I have often been made aware of volunteers who are not doing what they were asked to do, but I have no non-threatening way of helping them to develop. I can also think of Lay Readers and NSMs (in other parts of the world) who were serious problems for their communities - because no patterns of accountability or supervision had been established... They became disfunctional.
As I look back over my ministry, I suspect that the greatest growth has taken place when I have been able to provide quality supervision... and this goes for volunteers as well as "paid" ministers. By supervision, I of course mean the model used by the Diocese which includes management, support, mediation and education - not just telling people what to do.
Rolland Allen had a point, I think, and we really ought to have taken note of it by now. Afterall, he was writing in 1912!
The interesting question would be how you would run a church in such a way that everyone received this kind of support. It would require different patterns of leadership and ministry, but just imagine how the Spirit could be released to work...
Another perspective on this could come from another book I've been reading, "Headless Chickens, Laid Back Bears" which discusses how people can become more productive and relaxed by better Time Creation. The writer, Gordon Wainright, discusses a range of different techniques. The first of these is "feedback". He devotes a whole chapter to a discussion of how regular continuous feedback steadily improves performance - although he can't always say why... (This relates to the need for Christians to use feedback/supervision to keep them rooted in reality). He also has a great chapter on "Anticipatory Scanning Techniques"... More on this later, I suspect...