I have known good soups in my life. My memories of snowy winter nights in the hills of western Massachusetts include the taste of my Mom’s amazing beef stew or corn chowder. For the past 34 years, my wife Cheri has sustained our family with, among other concoctions, a great broccoli cheese soup and a potato soup. Then there was this awesome asparagus & crab soup I tried once at Que Viet in north Minneapolis. If you Google their website you will get this description: Minced crab meat with white asparagus in a thick and hearty chicken broth. Price: $3.25.
I had that one bowl of asparagus & crab soup over 20 years ago. I have never forgotten it. I would pay more than $3.25 to experience it again. And the owners of the restaurant have never taken it off their menu in the past 20+ years. It’s a good soup. But consider why:
It is the presence of other ingredients that make this a good soup. Without the crab meat and asparagus, all you have is chicken broth. Is chicken broth good? You bet! And you can go a long way on that alone. Shepherding ministry, like the chicken broth, is an essential base, the foundation for everything we do. The organic, relational aspects of the faith, teaching, preaching, and care ministry is so much a part of what we do that we sometimes call Shepherding leading the church. But is it? I would maintain that Shepherding is a basic part of church organizational design that is incomplete without other “ingredients”.
Another ingredient makes a big difference. You could just add crab meat and call it crab meat soup and that would be so much better than just chicken broth. For all its strengths, adding more chicken broth to chicken broth will never get you something more than chicken broth. Yet this is what we sometimes do. When we want Shepherding to take the church in a new direction and to motivate others to go there, it can’t. That’s the role of real leadership.
Two more ingredients make a much bigger difference. The genius of this soup is the complementary nature of the broth, the crab, and the asparagus. As good as the addition of crab is, it can’t take this soup to what it can be if you add the asparagus too. You could keep adding crab meat (leadership) and at some point you will not like the imbalance of the broth and the meat. What we need is some asparagus (management)!
You may have noticed I called this Part 1 – More to come on these definitions.... Go to north Minneapolis now and buy some good soup!
I had that one bowl of asparagus & crab soup over 20 years ago. I have never forgotten it. I would pay more than $3.25 to experience it again. And the owners of the restaurant have never taken it off their menu in the past 20+ years. It’s a good soup. But consider why:
It is the presence of other ingredients that make this a good soup. Without the crab meat and asparagus, all you have is chicken broth. Is chicken broth good? You bet! And you can go a long way on that alone. Shepherding ministry, like the chicken broth, is an essential base, the foundation for everything we do. The organic, relational aspects of the faith, teaching, preaching, and care ministry is so much a part of what we do that we sometimes call Shepherding leading the church. But is it? I would maintain that Shepherding is a basic part of church organizational design that is incomplete without other “ingredients”.
Another ingredient makes a big difference. You could just add crab meat and call it crab meat soup and that would be so much better than just chicken broth. For all its strengths, adding more chicken broth to chicken broth will never get you something more than chicken broth. Yet this is what we sometimes do. When we want Shepherding to take the church in a new direction and to motivate others to go there, it can’t. That’s the role of real leadership.
Two more ingredients make a much bigger difference. The genius of this soup is the complementary nature of the broth, the crab, and the asparagus. As good as the addition of crab is, it can’t take this soup to what it can be if you add the asparagus too. You could keep adding crab meat (leadership) and at some point you will not like the imbalance of the broth and the meat. What we need is some asparagus (management)!
You may have noticed I called this Part 1 – More to come on these definitions.... Go to north Minneapolis now and buy some good soup!
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