I recently had a conversation with a respected mission leader and friend which included a question he asked me on missionary formation. We brainstormed for a while and he asked me share my thoughts with him about that challenge. What follows is a lightly edited version of my response to him, which I pray might be helpful.
No ministry formation, missionary or pastoral, is faithful unless there is a deep, personal, ongoing experience of the gospel in the missionary or pastor’s life. That can never be ignored, or assumed.
For that reason we always begin with a right understanding of God, the gospel, our adoption (Sonship), and how servant leadership is defined by Jesus in the gospels and not by worldly models. What I see as often missing in that grounding is taking time for a robust focus in "knowing yourself." Calvin said that without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God, AND that without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self. In our practice we have found that using the RightPath behavioral assessment instruments is a powerful tool to those ends. I use it with clients and mentors to give them a baseline for all we do in coaching. It provides a framework to intelligently apply the gospel to their own and other's behaviors. It can lead to repentance, humility, and a soft, teachable heart. My friend’s experience with us as we took him and his wife through the instrument was a motivation for his question about missionary formation.
Why do we use this method? We do this because it is possible to believe that if I have the gospel right, and a proper view of biblical leadership I'm good to go. I'll just apply those principles. But when we train and form leaders only that far—even when we provide them with good feedback, form a cohort, and have a good facilitator—we can leave them with some potentially gaping, and even crippling blind spots. In a group those blind spots can even be shared. The work we do together centers upon how their temperament and personality operates in relationships, and how that affects their leadership. We coach and practice with leaders, helping them see how the way they lead affects team morale, ministry fit, and longevity. Habitual behaviors, especially under stress, are seen by others but most often not so clearly themselves.
My friend told me they had experienced the RightPath as an excellent, accessible tool to give people clear and accurate self-awareness. It also gives teams that same accurate other-awareness in their relational context leading to understanding, appreciation, effective communication style, and good ministry fit. This is foundational to Emotional Intelligence and I believe it also forms the foundation for the humble learning posture required in Cultural Intelligence: shedding cultural biases, blind spots, and cultural pride. All of these are critical for a missionary, and often overlooked in local mission contexts as in church planting.
For pastoral teams, missionary teams, and team leaders I suggest that the RightPath 360 is an even greater tool in addition to the RightPath 4 and 6. It utilizes a wide sampling of raters from among managers, direct reports, peers, and others to describe how a person's leadership "lands" in someone else's experience and gives the opportunity to compare that with one's self-assessment. It even provides for anonymous, honest constructive written feedback.
