Go Fly a Kite

How an innocent pastime teaches an essential lesson about church leadership

Yesterday my church recognized my fifteenth anniversary as their pastor. My wife and I were called up in front of the congregation following our worship services and one of our lay leaders said kind things about us. The church applauded and we were given a check, which is always appreciated. It was a nice time, and Pam and I expressed our deep appreciation to a group of people that has loved us through a period of time that has been as challenging for churches and their pastors as any in recent history. The recession of 2008-2009. The politcal environment that has whiplashed from George Bush to Barak Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden and has polarized local congregations as much as it has the nation as a whole. The Supreme Court’s legalization of homosexual marriage, a legal decision with such cultural impact that the nation may never be the same. The shift in religious sentiments that has made America a more secular nation and evangelism a more difficult task. Denominational struggles with waning influence, numerical decline, theological changes, financial crises and sexual abuse. And then—to top it off—COVID. For church leaders, the last fifteen years have been quite a ride.

These years have made several church leadership principles abundantly clear to me and to many other pastors. First, secular leadership models like Management by Objectives are dead. Even if they do manage to build large organizations, they don’t necesarily lead to spiritually mature congregations and our reliance on these models may well be responsible for the weak position many churches find themselves in today. Second, church consultants are as lost as everyone else in the religious environment we now live in and their advice is generally useless. Pastors who lean on consultants instead of trusting their own calling and the wisdom of their congregations may not make it through the coming years. Third, no one really knows what the next few years will hold for America’s churches and their pastors and the best thing we can do—which was the leadership position of pastors for most of the generations before our own—is to face the future with the conviction voiced in that great rallying cry of Hebrews 12:28-29:

Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

In light of the challenges that pastors face today, how are we to lead? What’s the best way forward for us and the congregations that we’re responsible for? I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer for the very complicated questions that many people much smarter than I are struggling with. But I do have an idea what the answer may look like, and I learned it at an unexpected moment from an unlikely source.

A few years ago my family and I were vacationing at the Isle of Palms. While I was out walking on the beach one afternoon, a man showed up carrying a large case. He opened it near the water and pulled out a bunch of kites connected to one another in a frame along with some other bits and pieces. When he got the whole thing assembled, I counted twelve kites dyed in different colors. They started as deep blue then faded into shades of green and yellow. A ribbon streamed from each tail. I had never seen anything like it, so I walked closer to get a better look

At one end a harness connected the assembly to two thick guide lines made of fishing line or something of that sort. The lines ran to two spools that the man held in his hands. “They’re called Dyna Kites,” the man answered when I asked him what the contraption was. I realized then that I had seen similar kites at a distance in the past but had never been close enough to understand how they worked. It took the man a few minutes but when he had everything connected and set up to his liking, he laid the assembly on the sand, backed off about a hundred feet and took the handles in his hands. With a twitch of his wrists, he pointed the kites’ noses up just enough to catch the breeze and a moment later they leaped from the ground and soared into the wind.

I backed off in order to see everything at once: the sea, the sky, the sun, the kites. It was one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever witnessed. More than a tableau of man and nature, there was a spiritual dimension to it that I couldn’t escape. From my new vantage point, the handler was little more than a silhouette against the skyscape and the lines he held were invisible. All that was visible were the kites dancing in the sky. And how they danced! They shot straight up; they dropped like a stone; they swirled in lazy curlicues. They changed directions without warning, swooping from right to left and up and down. I could hear their fabric flapping in unison with their movement—softer when higher up then louder as they dived toward the earth. They would fall to within a few feet of the sand and hover motionless for a few moments like a helicopter about to land then rise so quickly it took my breath away. A group of children gathered, laughing and pointing. They screamed when the kites came so near that they were able to reach up and touch the cloth. Then the man tweaked the line and the kites leaped back into the wind, the streamers lingering just long enough for the kids to feel them slip through their grasp. I could have watched for hours.

Ok, so I’m a preacher and I tend to see lots of ordinary things as examples of ministry. But this was no ordinary experience. Those kites were for me a picture of how pastors can lead their churches—especially in the chaotic times we now live in—and the three pieces to the experience seemed to me to reflect the three crucial components of our work as pastors. First, there were the kites—the most visible part of the whole scene. They were connected so that their different colors made up a single design. The harness that bound them together is what made their flight possible. Without it, they would have floated off in different directions. That’s just how the Bible describes the church—unity in diversity.

The man handling the kites was second. While he was responsible for the kites’ flight, he was hard to pick out from his surroundings, and I had to look hard to distinguish him from the other people on the beach. He held onto the lines and guided the kites into the wind. He was a leader in the same way pastors must be—by placing his charges in the best position for success and not making the church a platform for his own notoriety.

Beyond anything else I noticed that day, though, was the wind—it drove everything. Without it, the kites would never have flown and the handler would have had no reason to be there. Everything I observed on the beach was designed to capture the wind blowing in from the sea. The kites had no other purpose than to fly in it. The handler had no other task than to align the kites so they could catch its power.

The wind, of course, is the Holy Spirit. He is the divine presence in and through the church. In seasons of fear and confusion when we as pastors don’t know what to do, he knows just what to do. When we are weak and helpless and at the end of our resources, he has the energy and wisdom to move our churches forward. He solves problems that overwhelm us. He knows the future when we don’t. He empowers churches to soar and pastors to lead. Apart from the Holy Spirit neither churches nor pastors can do what they’re designed to do.

Maybe church leadership today isn’t as challenging as we think. In the chaos and confusion that the last fifteen years have brought, our main task as pastors is simply to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit and keep our churches aligned with it.

Just like flying a kite.