Calvin O. Butts, III: "The Language of Leadership is the Language of Love" - A Faith & Leadership
The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts has been pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church since 1989. In his time at the church, he has been a leader in its Harlem neighborhood and in the city of New York, both as a pastor and as one of the founders of the Abyssinian Development Corporation.
The church was founded in 1808 and has been a center of the Harlem community since it moved in the 1920s to its current location, where under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. it grew to become what was then the largest Baptist congregation in the world. Powell was succeeded by his son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first black man to be elected to Congress from New York.
Butts worked under Powell's successor, Samuel Proctor, and in 1989 helped found the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC), which has been instrumental in creating $600 million in affordable housing, businesses and schools in Harlem.
Butts is also president of the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury.
Q: You've been part of an institution with an incredible history and tradition, and yet you've pushed that institution to do innovative things in your community. How do you balance that?
Well, I guess I've been blessed, because I came to a congregation where everyone -- at least in the 20th century -- before me had been so innovative. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was the one who convinced the church to move from its 40th Street location in midtown Manhattan to Harlem.
Adam Clayton Powell Sr. built this huge megachurch, which was new. Nobody had ever seen this before, particularly in the African-American community.
His son [Adam Clayton Powell Jr.] came in with fresh vision, big personality, new ideas. He became chairperson of [the U.S. House of Representatives] Education and Labor [Committee]. He was really the architect of the Great Society, or one of them. And he was pastor at the same time.
Then, after he left, Dr. Samuel Proctor came along and had been a premier educator. He brought that energy and thrust of dedication and knowledge. So -- new ideas, concepts, community development -- that's the nature of Abyssinian.
I was blessed to come to a congregation where people were used to challenges, and they were used to following leadership, and they were used to visionary -- following a vision and building something new. So when I came with the rhetoric of the 60s and the dream of Dr. King and I was going to implement the dream, you know, people said, "OK, let's go."
For congregations where those kinds of traditions don't exist and it's more staid, I think it's the ability of the leader to make the ear into an eye. The preacher has to present the word of God so forcefully and dramatically that people can see it. You've really got to invest in helping people to see what can happen.
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Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
CONGREGATIONS, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Calvin O. Butts: The language of leadership is the language of love
The pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the nation’s most historic churches, offers leadership advice for pastors who want to make a difference in their communities.
The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts has been pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church since 1989. In his time at the church, he has been a leader in its Harlem neighborhood and in the city of New York, both as a pastor and as one of the founders of the Abyssinian Development Corporation.
The church was founded in 1808 and has been a center of the Harlem community since it moved in the 1920s to its current location, where under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. it grew to become what was then the largest Baptist congregation in the world. Powell was succeeded by his son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first black man to be elected to Congress from New York.
Butts worked under Powell’s successor, Samuel Proctor, and in 1989 helped found the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC), which has been instrumental in creating $600 million in affordable housing, businesses and schools in Harlem.
CONGREGATIONS, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, PASTORAL LEADERSHIP
Calvin O. Butts: The language of leadership is the language of love
The pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the nation’s most historic churches, offers leadership advice for pastors who want to make a difference in their communities.
The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts has been pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church since 1989. In his time at the church, he has been a leader in its Harlem neighborhood and in the city of New York, both as a pastor and as one of the founders of the Abyssinian Development Corporation.
The church was founded in 1808 and has been a center of the Harlem community since it moved in the 1920s to its current location, where under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. it grew to become what was then the largest Baptist congregation in the world. Powell was succeeded by his son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first black man to be elected to Congress from New York.
Butts worked under Powell’s successor, Samuel Proctor, and in 1989 helped found the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC), which has been instrumental in creating $600 million in affordable housing, businesses and schools in Harlem.
Butts is also president of the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury.
He spoke to Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School to deliver the Gardner C. Taylor Lecture(link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: You’ve been part of an institution with an incredible history and tradition, and yet you’ve pushed that institution to do innovative things in your community. How do you balance that?
Well, I guess I’ve been blessed, because I came to a congregation where everyone -- at least in the 20th century -- before me had been so innovative. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was the one who convinced the church to move from its 40th Street location in midtown Manhattan to Harlem.
Adam Clayton Powell Sr. built this huge megachurch, which was new. Nobody had ever seen this before, particularly in the African-American community.
His son [Adam Clayton Powell Jr.] came in with fresh vision, big personality, new ideas. He became chairperson of [the U.S. House of Representatives] Education and Labor [Committee]. He was really the architect of the Great Society, or one of them. And he was pastor at the same time.
Then, after he left, Dr. Samuel Proctor came along and had been a premier educator. He brought that energy and thrust of dedication and knowledge. So -- new ideas, concepts, community development -- that’s the nature of Abyssinian.
I was blessed to come to a congregation where people were used to challenges, and they were used to following leadership, and they were used to visionary -- following a vision and building something new. So when I came with the rhetoric of the 60s and the dream of Dr. King and I was going to implement the dream, you know, people said, “OK, let’s go.”
For congregations where those kinds of traditions don’t exist and it’s more staid, I think it’s the ability of the leader to make the ear into an eye. The preacher has to present the word of God so forcefully and dramatically that people can see it. You’ve really got to invest in helping people to see what can happen.
It’s that way about our transition from this life to life everlasting. You’ve got to help people see heaven. They’ve got to see it not only with the eyes in their head but with the eyes of the heart. They’ve got to see streets paved with gold, or water as clear as crystal. You’ve got to see it and sense it. That’s the power of the Word, and that’s -- it’s the preaching of the gospel that exudes love and best wishes for the people.
You know, we want the best for you not only in this life but in life everlasting, life beyond this life. We want the best. We want you to be saved now. We want you to enter into eternal life now, into the kingdom now, but also to see what it can be, and then what you can do here. You can bring beauty out of ashes. You can create a table, you know, in the wilderness.
You can do whatever it is you want to do with God, and so you can take old housing that’s deteriorating and make it into new housing. You can build better educational institutions. You can create businesses so that people can work and eat and make a living, and that’s the role.
So if you’ve got a congregation that’s kind of staid and the tradition says all they do is worship and then close up the church and go home, it becomes the primary responsibility of the person of God who stands in that pulpit, through the proclamation of the Word, who sees the need that’s around him, to begin to move the people, and you must move them with love. You must move them with love.
The language of leadership is the language of love. Love for God, love for themselves and love for their fellow human beings. You know? And you can do everything else -- you can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, you can give your body to be burned, you can give everything to the poor -- but if it’s not motivated by love, it’ll take you nowhere. It profits you nothing.
It’s your responsibility. That’s what God has called you to do, to convince people of the love of God and to show them that their faith, if it does not produce works, is dead. And what are those works?
Well, what’s the need? And the need -- it could be housing, it could be education -- that’s the real responsibility of a leader.
Q: One of your innovations is the creation of the community development corporation. How did you come up with the idea?
As a younger minister, somewhere around 23 years of age, I would gather with the young people of our block, 138th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcom X boulevards, to play games, to dance, to have fun. We’d play basketball, stickball, skelly, whatever. We’d dance to the music of James Brown.
Generally on Friday, one of the members of our church, Ernestine Brown, would come to the window. She lived on the first floor of an old tenement, and she’d call the young preacher -- me -- and she’d present me with an aluminum foil package. Inside the package would be some freshly fried whiting fish and some bread pudding. I would take that and I would sit on the steps, the stoop of her building, and I would eat, and the fish and bread was so delicious, so heavenly delicious, that it became a ritual and I would expect it.
One Friday after a year or so, Ernestine was not in her window, and I wondered what had happened. She’d moved. She’d moved because the landlord had stopped caring for her building. No heat, no repairs; plumbing was broken. And then it really hit me -- it was not only her building.
We learned that landlords were abandoning their buildings. Their plan was to let the buildings fall to the tax rolls. Then they would form separate corporations and come and buy them back from the tax rolls under another identity, and then by that time the rent control would have been lifted and they would tear some of the buildings down, build market-rate housing, and gentrification would begin.
Well, when we discovered that, we said, “This is not acceptable.”
Of course -- you have to forgive me -- I was thinking about my fried whiting and bread pudding. But on a much more serious level, we were thinking about the members of our church who were being displaced, and many of them would not be able to find a place as Ernestine did.
So we spoke to our local City Council person, Frederick Samuel. He knew what was happening, because of his position with the city, and he partnered with us. We’d get a building for a dollar, work with a developer, a builder, renovate the building and [create] affordable housing.
We’ve been able to build 2,000 units of affordable housing. We’ve been able to build a supermarket. It’s hard to imagine that people can live in a community in the 20th and 21st century and not have a supermarket.
Most of the people were living in a welfare economy. That is, you pay more for a quart of milk; you pay more for a loaf of bread. And you were stuck, because you couldn’t travel to places where they had supermarkets, fresher foods, lower prices. We built one.
If you build housing where families can move into, you build supermarkets, you have to develop other commercial businesses, because people need pharmacies. They need shoe repair shops. People need hosiery stores. Well, if you’ve got families and commercial establishments, the other thing that you really need for family is schools, and the schools were in bad shape.
Because of our long history, because of the advocacy of one of our pastors, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and the tradition started by Adam Clayton Powell Sr., we were able to work with the teachers union in New York and the Department of Education to develop a new school, a new model, and that’s the Thurgood Marshall Academy. It’s a lower school, middle school and high school. It was the first new high school built in Harlem in over 50 years.
It was the result of a vision of a better community, a community-based, faith-based organization that could implement the vision, and the result of the influence of a community-based, faith-based organization within the city that could negotiate with government and private industry.
Q: What advice would you give to pastors who are interested in community development?
Abyssinian Baptist Church is the world’s first megachurch. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. had built Abyssinian into the largest Protestant congregation in the world. And while it does not rival today the 10,000- and 20,000- and 40,000-member churches that are around the country, it still has a very large congregation.
With a large congregation, you have many talented people -- lawyers, physicians, accountants, developers. The human resources that we have in our congregation allowed us to have a lot of in-kind help. Bringing these educators -- college professors, school teachers -- around the table and discussing some of the problems that faced us in the community also helped to build our development corporation.
The church took the leadership. We implemented the vision, and it has paid off greatly. There have been some challenges along the way, and we’re facing some challenges now as a result of the recession and other things, but we’re still strong, and we’re still negotiating, and we’ve been a model, because before us there really were no faith-based organizations of this size.
Q: What were the challenges as you scaled up?
Make sure that you have within your congregation the human resources that can help you. If you don’t have the human resources at that level, make sure that you have the material resources to afford the people who can help you.
Because once you move from a smaller operation into a more complex operation, once you begin to bring in public dollars and private dollars, you’re going to have to have the accounting, because not every not-for-profit is operating ethically, and the watchdogs are keen.
I am arguing for individual churches to be very careful about going too far, because it is extremely difficult to navigate and maintain a large operation without the resources.
I’ve learned that the hard way. I was looking and talking early on about having revenue streams apart from individual fundraising efforts to support your operation, but if you don’t have those revenue streams, you will discover that you are constantly trying to raise funds to keep in place an ever-growing organization.
It is often better for a number of churches to get together to form a community development organization not run by any pastor. I learned that the hard way.
You will always, in these community development organizations, run into ethical challenges and emotional challenges. [For example,] it’s an affordable housing project, but then one family is still having difficulty paying the rent. What do you do with people who can’t pay rent? Well, they should be evicted till we can find some way. Well, you don’t want the pastor evicting them. You don’t want to be in that kind of dilemma. And there are other kinds of challenges that will come up.
Q: You’ve mentioned learning things the hard way, and you’ve certainly come a long way since you were sitting on the stoop eating fried fish. How have you adjusted as a leader?
First of all, I had to understand more completely the systems of government with which I had to deal. I had to understand how the municipal government or the state government worked, and the federal government. So I had to expand my knowledge.
I had to negotiate my role as a prophet with my role as a statesperson. There’s a little compromise in that. I had to take more seriously the delicate position in terms of the exposure of the faith-based organization, of the faith organization, to potential attacks from the world. In other words, I had to increase the whole armor of God.
One thing that I preached to other ministers in a dogmatic way early on was to say to them, “Don’t become the chairperson of the board. Don’t become the executive director. Leave that to the men and women, laypeople. You leave it alone so that your prophetic voice is not compromised.”
Then around the celebration of our bicentennial at the Abyssinian Church, I was approached and they said, “Well, you know, the church is going to be 200 years old. You’re the founder of the development corporation; why don’t you become chairman of the board just for a year or so?” I said, “OK. For marketing purposes, OK.” And after the year was up, I should have left, and I didn’t.
And what that did was put me in a position whereby the compromises and the negotiation positions that I knew were coming -- because I had said so, so many times -- confronted me. And I became more of a statesman, I guess, than a prophet. I became more susceptible to compromise than putting forth what I considered to be the strong position of the Lord, and all of a sudden I was the one to respond to the cries of the community and questions about why we did this, why we did that.
It put me in an unusual position that did not allow me to exercise the kind of leadership that had brought the development corporation into being in the first place, because it would have threatened revenue streams.
Now, so I would say to the ministers who are -- who need to be in a prophetic position all the time, able to speak truth to power, “You don’t need to be fettered by the restrictions that will come as you have to negotiate the secular world in these situations. You need to be free to exercise your full leadership as inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that’s one of the challenges of community development.”
Q: You’ve been talking about the tension between the secular and the spiritual arenas of leadership, and I know there has been speculation as to whether you would run for office.
Well, there was -- and I guess there still is -- some tension within me about whether or not to run for office. I got as close as calling a church meeting one year to find out what the congregation thought, and it was split right down the middle almost, between young and old.
One of the reasons it was split is because many people had watched the career of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as he was pastor of Abyssinian, and his last years were very difficult. I still think he was right. He was vindicated by the Congress, though he was never returned to his chairpersonship. But the older folks said, “Look, we don’t need to see another one of our ministers go through something like that.”
The younger folks were saying, “Yes, let’s go; we’re ready.” But when you’ve got a divided congregation like that, you know, the best thing to do is just leave it alone, and I walked away. I said, “No, I won’t run.”
If the U.S. Senate became a possibility, maybe we would look at that. But then, you know, after a certain age, you begin to wonder whether or not you really should. The Congress, not the Senate so much, but particularly the Congress and the City Council and those beg for younger people -- 40, 50. I’m beyond both of those, so I’m not sure …
But a good politician never says “never.”
Monday, July 27, 2015He spoke to Faith & Leadership while at Duke Divinity School to deliver the Gardner C. Taylor Lecture(link is external). The following is an edited transcript.
Q: You’ve been part of an institution with an incredible history and tradition, and yet you’ve pushed that institution to do innovative things in your community. How do you balance that?
Well, I guess I’ve been blessed, because I came to a congregation where everyone -- at least in the 20th century -- before me had been so innovative. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was the one who convinced the church to move from its 40th Street location in midtown Manhattan to Harlem.
Adam Clayton Powell Sr. built this huge megachurch, which was new. Nobody had ever seen this before, particularly in the African-American community.
His son [Adam Clayton Powell Jr.] came in with fresh vision, big personality, new ideas. He became chairperson of [the U.S. House of Representatives] Education and Labor [Committee]. He was really the architect of the Great Society, or one of them. And he was pastor at the same time.
Then, after he left, Dr. Samuel Proctor came along and had been a premier educator. He brought that energy and thrust of dedication and knowledge. So -- new ideas, concepts, community development -- that’s the nature of Abyssinian.
I was blessed to come to a congregation where people were used to challenges, and they were used to following leadership, and they were used to visionary -- following a vision and building something new. So when I came with the rhetoric of the 60s and the dream of Dr. King and I was going to implement the dream, you know, people said, “OK, let’s go.”
For congregations where those kinds of traditions don’t exist and it’s more staid, I think it’s the ability of the leader to make the ear into an eye. The preacher has to present the word of God so forcefully and dramatically that people can see it. You’ve really got to invest in helping people to see what can happen.
It’s that way about our transition from this life to life everlasting. You’ve got to help people see heaven. They’ve got to see it not only with the eyes in their head but with the eyes of the heart. They’ve got to see streets paved with gold, or water as clear as crystal. You’ve got to see it and sense it. That’s the power of the Word, and that’s -- it’s the preaching of the gospel that exudes love and best wishes for the people.
You know, we want the best for you not only in this life but in life everlasting, life beyond this life. We want the best. We want you to be saved now. We want you to enter into eternal life now, into the kingdom now, but also to see what it can be, and then what you can do here. You can bring beauty out of ashes. You can create a table, you know, in the wilderness.
You can do whatever it is you want to do with God, and so you can take old housing that’s deteriorating and make it into new housing. You can build better educational institutions. You can create businesses so that people can work and eat and make a living, and that’s the role.
So if you’ve got a congregation that’s kind of staid and the tradition says all they do is worship and then close up the church and go home, it becomes the primary responsibility of the person of God who stands in that pulpit, through the proclamation of the Word, who sees the need that’s around him, to begin to move the people, and you must move them with love. You must move them with love.
The language of leadership is the language of love. Love for God, love for themselves and love for their fellow human beings. You know? And you can do everything else -- you can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, you can give your body to be burned, you can give everything to the poor -- but if it’s not motivated by love, it’ll take you nowhere. It profits you nothing.
It’s your responsibility. That’s what God has called you to do, to convince people of the love of God and to show them that their faith, if it does not produce works, is dead. And what are those works?
Well, what’s the need? And the need -- it could be housing, it could be education -- that’s the real responsibility of a leader.
Q: One of your innovations is the creation of the community development corporation. How did you come up with the idea?
As a younger minister, somewhere around 23 years of age, I would gather with the young people of our block, 138th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcom X boulevards, to play games, to dance, to have fun. We’d play basketball, stickball, skelly, whatever. We’d dance to the music of James Brown.
Generally on Friday, one of the members of our church, Ernestine Brown, would come to the window. She lived on the first floor of an old tenement, and she’d call the young preacher -- me -- and she’d present me with an aluminum foil package. Inside the package would be some freshly fried whiting fish and some bread pudding. I would take that and I would sit on the steps, the stoop of her building, and I would eat, and the fish and bread was so delicious, so heavenly delicious, that it became a ritual and I would expect it.
One Friday after a year or so, Ernestine was not in her window, and I wondered what had happened. She’d moved. She’d moved because the landlord had stopped caring for her building. No heat, no repairs; plumbing was broken. And then it really hit me -- it was not only her building.
We learned that landlords were abandoning their buildings. Their plan was to let the buildings fall to the tax rolls. Then they would form separate corporations and come and buy them back from the tax rolls under another identity, and then by that time the rent control would have been lifted and they would tear some of the buildings down, build market-rate housing, and gentrification would begin.
Well, when we discovered that, we said, “This is not acceptable.”
Of course -- you have to forgive me -- I was thinking about my fried whiting and bread pudding. But on a much more serious level, we were thinking about the members of our church who were being displaced, and many of them would not be able to find a place as Ernestine did.
So we spoke to our local City Council person, Frederick Samuel. He knew what was happening, because of his position with the city, and he partnered with us. We’d get a building for a dollar, work with a developer, a builder, renovate the building and [create] affordable housing.
We’ve been able to build 2,000 units of affordable housing. We’ve been able to build a supermarket. It’s hard to imagine that people can live in a community in the 20th and 21st century and not have a supermarket.
Most of the people were living in a welfare economy. That is, you pay more for a quart of milk; you pay more for a loaf of bread. And you were stuck, because you couldn’t travel to places where they had supermarkets, fresher foods, lower prices. We built one.
If you build housing where families can move into, you build supermarkets, you have to develop other commercial businesses, because people need pharmacies. They need shoe repair shops. People need hosiery stores. Well, if you’ve got families and commercial establishments, the other thing that you really need for family is schools, and the schools were in bad shape.
Because of our long history, because of the advocacy of one of our pastors, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and the tradition started by Adam Clayton Powell Sr., we were able to work with the teachers union in New York and the Department of Education to develop a new school, a new model, and that’s the Thurgood Marshall Academy. It’s a lower school, middle school and high school. It was the first new high school built in Harlem in over 50 years.
It was the result of a vision of a better community, a community-based, faith-based organization that could implement the vision, and the result of the influence of a community-based, faith-based organization within the city that could negotiate with government and private industry.
Q: What advice would you give to pastors who are interested in community development?
Abyssinian Baptist Church is the world’s first megachurch. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. had built Abyssinian into the largest Protestant congregation in the world. And while it does not rival today the 10,000- and 20,000- and 40,000-member churches that are around the country, it still has a very large congregation.
With a large congregation, you have many talented people -- lawyers, physicians, accountants, developers. The human resources that we have in our congregation allowed us to have a lot of in-kind help. Bringing these educators -- college professors, school teachers -- around the table and discussing some of the problems that faced us in the community also helped to build our development corporation.
The church took the leadership. We implemented the vision, and it has paid off greatly. There have been some challenges along the way, and we’re facing some challenges now as a result of the recession and other things, but we’re still strong, and we’re still negotiating, and we’ve been a model, because before us there really were no faith-based organizations of this size.
Q: What were the challenges as you scaled up?
Make sure that you have within your congregation the human resources that can help you. If you don’t have the human resources at that level, make sure that you have the material resources to afford the people who can help you.
Because once you move from a smaller operation into a more complex operation, once you begin to bring in public dollars and private dollars, you’re going to have to have the accounting, because not every not-for-profit is operating ethically, and the watchdogs are keen.
I am arguing for individual churches to be very careful about going too far, because it is extremely difficult to navigate and maintain a large operation without the resources.
I’ve learned that the hard way. I was looking and talking early on about having revenue streams apart from individual fundraising efforts to support your operation, but if you don’t have those revenue streams, you will discover that you are constantly trying to raise funds to keep in place an ever-growing organization.
It is often better for a number of churches to get together to form a community development organization not run by any pastor. I learned that the hard way.
You will always, in these community development organizations, run into ethical challenges and emotional challenges. [For example,] it’s an affordable housing project, but then one family is still having difficulty paying the rent. What do you do with people who can’t pay rent? Well, they should be evicted till we can find some way. Well, you don’t want the pastor evicting them. You don’t want to be in that kind of dilemma. And there are other kinds of challenges that will come up.
Q: You’ve mentioned learning things the hard way, and you’ve certainly come a long way since you were sitting on the stoop eating fried fish. How have you adjusted as a leader?
First of all, I had to understand more completely the systems of government with which I had to deal. I had to understand how the municipal government or the state government worked, and the federal government. So I had to expand my knowledge.
I had to negotiate my role as a prophet with my role as a statesperson. There’s a little compromise in that. I had to take more seriously the delicate position in terms of the exposure of the faith-based organization, of the faith organization, to potential attacks from the world. In other words, I had to increase the whole armor of God.
One thing that I preached to other ministers in a dogmatic way early on was to say to them, “Don’t become the chairperson of the board. Don’t become the executive director. Leave that to the men and women, laypeople. You leave it alone so that your prophetic voice is not compromised.”
Then around the celebration of our bicentennial at the Abyssinian Church, I was approached and they said, “Well, you know, the church is going to be 200 years old. You’re the founder of the development corporation; why don’t you become chairman of the board just for a year or so?” I said, “OK. For marketing purposes, OK.” And after the year was up, I should have left, and I didn’t.
And what that did was put me in a position whereby the compromises and the negotiation positions that I knew were coming -- because I had said so, so many times -- confronted me. And I became more of a statesman, I guess, than a prophet. I became more susceptible to compromise than putting forth what I considered to be the strong position of the Lord, and all of a sudden I was the one to respond to the cries of the community and questions about why we did this, why we did that.
It put me in an unusual position that did not allow me to exercise the kind of leadership that had brought the development corporation into being in the first place, because it would have threatened revenue streams.
Now, so I would say to the ministers who are -- who need to be in a prophetic position all the time, able to speak truth to power, “You don’t need to be fettered by the restrictions that will come as you have to negotiate the secular world in these situations. You need to be free to exercise your full leadership as inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that’s one of the challenges of community development.”
Q: You’ve been talking about the tension between the secular and the spiritual arenas of leadership, and I know there has been speculation as to whether you would run for office.
Well, there was -- and I guess there still is -- some tension within me about whether or not to run for office. I got as close as calling a church meeting one year to find out what the congregation thought, and it was split right down the middle almost, between young and old.
One of the reasons it was split is because many people had watched the career of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as he was pastor of Abyssinian, and his last years were very difficult. I still think he was right. He was vindicated by the Congress, though he was never returned to his chairpersonship. But the older folks said, “Look, we don’t need to see another one of our ministers go through something like that.”
The younger folks were saying, “Yes, let’s go; we’re ready.” But when you’ve got a divided congregation like that, you know, the best thing to do is just leave it alone, and I walked away. I said, “No, I won’t run.”
If the U.S. Senate became a possibility, maybe we would look at that. But then, you know, after a certain age, you begin to wonder whether or not you really should. The Congress, not the Senate so much, but particularly the Congress and the City Council and those beg for younger people -- 40, 50. I’m beyond both of those, so I’m not sure …
But a good politician never says “never.”
In Pursuing Pastoral Excellence, pastoral counselor and educator Paul Hopkins helps pastoral leaders make a lasting and positive difference in the lives of the people and communities they serve. The heart of this book is the stories of seven ordinary pastors whose leadership has become extraordinary. Their stories not only highlight important characteristics and practices that nurture fruitful pastoral leadership, but they invite readers to examine their own stories, to think about the value of longevity in ministry, and to enhance the enduring impact of their own pastoral leadership.
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Enhance Your Leadership: Learning with Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Foundations of Christian Leadership
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Through Foundations of Christian Leadership, we aim to help Christian leaders explore their gifts and cultivate the practices that are essential for spurring transformation within Christian organizations. The program is best suited to those who have been in a leadership position for fewer than five years. Join up to 30 participants from nonprofit organizations, congregations, mission agencies, seminaries and denominations for two residential sessions and two online sessions over the course of four months.
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The application deadline is August 7, 2015.
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Ideas that Impact: Pastoral Leadership
Pathways to Leadership that Lasts from Pursuing Pastoral Excellence by Paul E. Hopkins
Excellent pastors inevitably have specific skills in ministry that contribute to their effectiveness. Beneath these skills, however, are the more important qualities of personality and practice of leadership that foster enduring transformation. Seven seem particularly important.
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Pathways to Leadership that Lasts
In her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, historian Debby Applegate tells the story of how Beecher became, during the middle of the nineteenth century, deserving of Abraham Lincoln’s claim that he was “the most influential man in America.” His passionate preaching against slavery made him a champion of the abolition movement, and in the fight for racial justice, he was a forerunner to an even more famous clergyman of recent times, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Beecher, the son of a “fire-and-brimstone” preacher who early in life appeared unpromising compared to his more talented siblings, spent most of his career as a parish pastor preaching a gospel of unconditional love. His most enduring pastoral labors built Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church into one of the country’s most dynamic congregations. And although his later years were tainted by allegations of infidelity with a parishioner, his leadership was undeniably a powerful ecclesiastical and cultural force that changed people’s lives and paved the way for modern American Christianity.
Pastoral leaders, whether saintly or even deeply flawed, have transformed the world in sometimes visible, and much more often quiet ways for two thousand years. Pastoral leadership can and should be nothing less than a fundamental resource in healing and saving the world.
How to carry out that important leadership, however, is not so clear. Human diversity and the wide range of theological and ecclesiastical expressions of the ministry of Jesus Christ foster an incredibly rich spectrum of strategies and tactics for the exercise of pastoral leadership. Effective pastoral leaders today will likely draw upon a wealth of leadership theories and tools, but the fundamental focus of their work—their fruit—must be transforming the lives of people, churches, and the world.
Fruitful pastoral leaders are not only faithful stewards of the talents they have been given; their leadership will also have lasting impact in the lives of people, congregations, and communities. No one leader provides a universal model for effective ministry, of course. All carry out their diverse ministries in ways congruent with their own personalities, their skills, and the distinctive situations in which they have been called to serve. Fruit is always grown and harvested locally, after all, and the leadership pastors offer and the results of their work are no exception.
Excellent pastors inevitably have specific skills in ministry that contribute to their effectiveness. Being an engaging preacher, providing sensitive pastoral care to members, running effective meetings, conducting lively worship services, teaching interesting classes—skills like these are central to pastoral success. Beneath these skills, however, are the more important qualities of personality and practice of leadership that foster enduring transformation. Such leadership may take different forms in each situation, of course, but the pattern of pastoral leadership that characterizes excellent pastors always seems to include at least the following seven elements:
- They feel called to holy purpose. Vision and purpose go hand in hand. Vision is born of imagination, an ability to see beyond present circumstances and resources. Through deft skill, determined force of will, and persuasion, often leavened by heroic courage, leaders engage those around them in the pursuit of such an ideal, invigorating people and organizations in ways that bring to life that which began as a mere idea in the leader’s mind.
- They are dependably authentic. Authenticity is being who you really are, as fully and appropriately as possible. To be authentic is to recognize that we all have many aspects of self, just as a gemstone has multiple facets. For the apostle Paul, authenticity meant acknowledging the inner struggle between that which he wanted and that which he hated. For the psychologist Carl Jung, it was recognizing that the persona a person wears for the world masks the shadow, which is hidden from the world, and yet both are aspects of the whole self. Living with authenticity is to acknowledge that we are all complex beings who work to be in the world as honestly as possible, restraining in appropriate ways those parts of ourselves that may interfere with chosen purpose.
- They nurture trusting relationships. Pastors who have the courage to risk genuine authenticity and who nurture open relationships with a wide range of people are more likely to find their own lives enriched and their ministries enhanced. Enduring leadership thrives out of such an environment. For most ministers, formal or informal clergy peer groups are an accessible and effective means of growing in capacity for trusting relationships while also supporting and equipping participants for the work of ministry.
- They live as generous servants. Loyal service to people and to the standards of a profession is essential for the growth and maintenance of the church. Countless followers of Christ have faithfully served in such ways for centuries and so have extended the reign of Christ. These generous servants deserve to be celebrated. But the fruit of such service is greatly enhanced when accompanied by other characteristics of excellence in pastoral leadership, especially the gift of creativity, which emerges from sharing authenticity in warm human relationship.
- They have been creatively adaptable. Performing an adult baptism by immersion without drowning the convert, or understanding the complexities of biblical criticism or even a church budget—these are skills that can be taught and practiced. Leading a neighborhood church’s adjustment to serving an ethnically and economically changing neighborhood—truly adaptive change—requires more creative thinking and experimental action. Coping with a church’s longstanding systemic conflicts, which may even scapegoat the minister, calls on the depths of a pastor’s patience, insight, and resilience. Such pastoral challenges may require not only a significant deepening of those resources but also a creativity that envisions new possibilities for being church.
- They display disciplined persistence. Disciplined persistence may be out of vogue in this age of instant gratification. Becoming a “one-minute manager” generates more attention than developing strategic plans for the next ten or twenty or one hundred years. It’s not just sticking around for the long haul that makes a difference, though. It is also the disciplines of work and dedication to core values and regular prayer that make a lasting difference.
- They practice faithful spirituality. Spirituality must be practiced faithfully. It’s the constant attentiveness to spiritual dimensions of life and the thoughtful exploration of Scripture and theology and devotional literature that sustain the spirit, just as communication and chores and even arguments sustain a marriage beyond romantic nights of dancing under the stars.
__________________________________________________________
Adapted from Pursuing Pastoral Excellence: Pathways to Fruitful Leadership by Paul E. Hopkins, copyright © 2011 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Church Growth: Shifting Your Leadership Style by Alice MannAlthough you may be excited by the prospect of continued growth, ministry may become more stressful and less satisfying in a growing congregation. How should you respond? First, explore your own gifts and sense of call. Not every pastor will be effective or find satisfaction in a program-size church. But if you discern a call to shift your approach to ministry in response to growth, here are some changes to make.
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Church Growth: Shifting Your Leadership Style
If you are sole pastor and your congregation’s average attendance is 150 or more, you probably already feel pretty stretched by:- Keeping up with non-crisis visitation and counseling
- Tracking visitors and incorporating new members
- Providing leadership for adult classes, groups, and committees
- Managing clashing expectations (Older or longer-tenured members often want a “single cell” of informal fellowship. Younger or shorter-tenured members may expect a variety of high-quality programs.)
- Stepping up to more complex processes for planning and communication
1. Change your priorities. In a pastoral-size church (51 to 150 people at worship), building one-to-one pastoral relationships usually comes first. At program size (151 to 400 people), your priorities will be high-quality Sunday worship, lay leadership development, and reliable systems of member care and involvement (including strong lay teams for pastoral care and new-member ministry).
2. Negotiate expectations. Not all members will accept this shift. Some will feel abandoned, or accuse you of being uncaring, ambitious, and unspiritual. You will have to gain skills for negotiating expectations with your board (and with the denominational officials to whom dissatisfied members may appeal).
3. Clarify your vision. The advantage of a program-size church (significant programs targeted to different kinds of people) also creates its challenge (managing multiple styles, expectations, and projects). You must take more initiative to ensure that:
- Your board can articulate what the church is primarily here for (purpose/mission) and where it is called to go (vision). Typically, boards become nervous during a transition, realizing they can’t keep everybody happy. Your board probably needs help to develop for itself better processes of recruitment, orientation, and meeting design.
- Key subgroups stay in face-to-face communication with each other. Liaisons tend not to work well. In worship planning, for example, key music leaders, ushers, church school teachers, and clergy may need to meet quarterly to work out seasonal worship plans. You might organize a semiannual “leadership forum” where leaders of groups and programs share goals, negotiate calendars, and solve problems. By sharing aspirations, program leaders can support each other’s efforts and minimize unhealthy competition for time, space, and money.
Creating durable structures of ministry. Like an architect, you may encounter the imaginative challenge of design and the practical adventure of installing new systems to sustain effective ministry.
Developing a leadership cadre. Like a coach, you can take pride in the growth of the leaders you mentor and the teams you guide.
Building consensus. Like a politician, you come to know people’s aspirations, interests, and “hot spots,” and help forge coalitions to accomplish important work.
If these prospective satisfactions leave you cold, you may want to search for another setting that better fits your gifts and aspirations. If you feel energized by the possibilities, then make a plan for your professional development and find a mentor who can help you fulfill your call to a new style of ministry.
Leaders are Lovers by Herbert Anderson
The contemporary emphasis on differentiated leadership needs to be balanced by connective leadership in order to form and sustain vital faith communities. When so many boundaries have been erected to keep people safe or diminish diversity or resist change, how do pastors practice boundary crossing for the sake of a new and vital future?
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Leaders and Lovers by Herbert Anderson
This article re-examines the attention to boundaries in ministry that has emerged in recent decades partly as a necessary response to the violation of trust in the pastoral bond and partly because differentiated leadership has been promoted as a way of diminishing debilitating congregational anxiety.
Boundaries are necessary for ministry, but so are bonds. If, however, being a connected leader is as important as being differentiated, how are bonds established and maintained between minister and congregation that will make it possible for them to do the work of God separately and together? My proposal is this: leaders are lovers. Pastoral bonds are as important as pastoral boundaries because connected leaders are differentiated lovers.
There are many dilemmas confronting congregations and pastoral leaders in this time. Balancing between stability and change is a particularly perplexing challenge. When people who gather to worship say “it is good to be here,” they are usually hoping for stability more than change. On the other side, pastoral leaders are often discouraged because congregations are reluctant to change quickly. Honoring tradition and promoting nostalgia about the past are often interpreted by fearful people as a sign of fidelity. By contrast, pastoral leaders promote openness to an uncertain future and the willingness to be surprised by God as marks of vital faith. In order to survive, congregations declare their desire to increase membership even though they dread the change such growth brings. What kind of leadership will foster hospitality inclusive enough to penetrate the walls of separation among people and between generations erected out of fear? The emphasis ondifferentiated leadership that has dominated recent literature on ministry needs to be balanced by connective leadership in order to form and sustain vital faith communities. When so many boundaries have been erected to keep people safe or diminish diversity or resist change, how do pastors practice boundary crossing for the sake of a new and vital future?
The Dilemma
The current tension between fostering bonds and honoring boundaries is an unintended consequence of several factors. The professionalization of ministry with a greater emphasis on distance than intimacy is one. The emphasis on maintaining boundaries is also a necessary corrective to sexual misconduct among clergy. The emphasis on boundaries has made ministers more cautious about trusting or building the empathic bonds that sustain vital relationships. Moreover, the growing incidence of burn-out among pastoral leaders has resulted in a focus on self-care and clearer boundaries between one’s personal and professional life. Patterns of relating in ministry have also changed as more people in pastoral leadership identify themselves as introverts and more congregations think about themselves as a small corporation with the pastor as the chief operating officer. These patterns of practice have tilted the balance in ministry toward distance more than intimacy, boundaries more than bonds, differentiated more than connected leadership.
There are also larger forces affecting congregational life and ministry. Interdependence and diversity pull modern life in opposite directions. Glocalism, the unavoidable linkage between global and local realities, intensifies our awareness of dependence on one another. Simultaneously, the visibility of the world’s diversity in our families and neighborhoods and churches makes the cooperation that interdependence requires more difficult. In this new environment, inclusion is critical but complex and connection is inevitable but demanding. In this time when we are challenged by far greater diversity than we have previously had to live with, we need leaders, as Jean Lipman-Blumen has observed, who will “emphasize bothmutuality (a focus on common interests and values) and inclusiveness (the willingness to include even those very different from the rest, without requiring their homogenization).”1 This essaybuildson this understanding of connective leadership.
Pastoral ministry is not, however, simply about connectivity: it is a response to the invitation to love one another as generously as we have been loved by God. The biblical story is an account of God’s relentless pursuit out of love despite the human resistance to being loved. The “good news” we proclaim imperfectly is God’s extraordinary love, always creating and covenanting, always redeeming and reconciling, always seeking and holding. In response to the generous love of God, pastoral leaders are lovers who seek to embody the passion of God who broods over humankind like a jealous lover, longing for connection.
This extravagant and persistent love of God is mirrored in the work of pastoral leaders to love people with imperfect generosity. The lectionary Gospel text for my last Sunday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, Washington after three years on the staff as the Director of Pastoral Care and Congregational Life was from Luke 6:27-38. It includes these words of Jesus: “Give and it will be given to you…for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” These words of Jesus could be a mantra for leaders who are lovers. I was astonished by the way my imperfect loving was received and returned because it is not always so. Loving people who may not love back is a particular challenge in the work of ministry. Pastoral leaders are free to love others without holding anything back when they are confident that they will not lose themselves in the loving. If you give generously, you will get back generously. Ministry is housed in that promise even though it is not always apparent.
Connected Leaders and Differentiated Lovers
Pastoral leaders needed for this time are both self-differentiated and able to connect authentically with individuals and communities of faith. Differentiation is about self-definition, clarity of goals, and the capacity to remain an “I” in the midst of “we”—particularly when a congregation (“we”) is overwhelmed with anxiety. Being a differentiated leader is more than keeping distance. The ability to be a connected non-anxious presence in the midst of the swirling anxiety fueled by a faith community’s response to diversity and change is the mark of a differentiated lover. In A Failure of Nerve, Rabbi Friedman defined differentiation as “charting one’s own way by means of one’s own internal guidance system, rather than perpetually eyeing the scope to see where others are.”2 But differentiation is not enough. We also need connective leaders, capable of walking with people through change and forming complex communities that recognize their need for one another in a diverse and interdependent world. In a world connected by technology but fragmented by diversity, pastoral leaders need to be able to build communities with permeable boundaries that include more than exclude. Being differentiated lovers and connected leaders are both necessary.
If pastoral leadership is both connected and differentiated, boundaries and bonds are paradoxically linked. In themselves, boundaries do not foster the compassion that nourishes the bonds necessary for building and sustaining faith communities. And yet bonds require clear boundaries to endure. It is difficult to be close to people if we need to assert boundaries often. If we start with boundaries, then we must keep asking how to nurture the compassion and empathy that connects us to others. If we start with boundaries, we will need to keep asking how to nurture the kind of pastoral bonds that have the potential for healing—lest we do no good. If we start with generating mutuality or if self-sacrificing generosity is our aim or if compassion is the focus of ministry, then we must keep asking about respecting boundaries—lest we do harm.
The aim of the process of differentiation is freedom for community. A leader needs to understand how groups function and how human systems evolve. A leader is also aware of irrational needs communities will have that prompt people to establish dependent relationships of deference to authorities in stressful times. Pastoral leaders in this time need to emphasize bothmutuality (a focus on common interests and values) and inclusiveness (the willingness to include even those very different from the rest without requiring their homogenization). Being a connected leader means loving the people you lead while remaining differentiated and integrating those two perspectives with a single-minded passion. The Law of the New Covenant is about love as well as self-differentiation that makes loving possible.
The feeding of the 5,000 as recorded in Matthew 14 illustrates the need to integrate boundaries and compassionate love in the practice of ministry. Large crowds had followed Jesus even though his intent was to be alone some place. As always, the Gospel writers give us a picture of the compassion of Jesus who is moved by the needs of the people who follow him. The disciples are protective of Jesus and want to set clear boundaries. Jesus ought not to feel responsible to feed these people who trailed after him, the disciples argued. That story brings together two absolutely essential and equally significant dimensions of pastoral ministry for our time: compassionate lovers and differentiated leaders.
Challenging Boundaries as the Work of Ministry
While boundaries are crucial to insure that distinctions are preserved and people are not violated, there is a sense in which the work of pastoral ministry includes challenging the boundaries we erect that exclude or separate people. A boundary, as I am using it here, is an invisible separation that preserves and respects and protects particularity between individuals and among parts of any human system. While it is crucial that boundaries are respected so that people are not violated or abused, it is equally necessary for the sake of community and human wholeness that boundaries are permeable. When the distinctions we make between race, gender, ethnicity, or class become impermeable barriers that separate people, violate human well-being, and impede community, pastoral leaders will challenge those boundaries in order to heal and restore the human family. When the boundaries people erect out of fear are walls that separate, the work of ministry is to encourage people to cross boundaries and live beyond their fears.
Almost everything about our lives in a technologized society pushes us away from each other. When we help people cross the barriers that fragment life, we invite them to be open to something greater than what can be felt or seen or touched. When congregational loyalties and denominational distinctions and religious differences become barriers that prevent people from coming together for the common good, it is necessary that religious leaders cross those boundaries for the sake of the whole. In the new globalized context, we will need faith communities that will challenge tribalism and establish permeable boundaries of difference instead of boundaries of territory. The desire to embrace transcends the boundaries that are necessary to preserve identity.
Challenging boundaries as a work of ministry is risky. In order to set aside a barrier that has protected us or a prejudice that has made the world seem secure, we wager some or all of our security. Barbara J. Blodgett warns us that entrusting ourselves to another can be a bumpy road. “Trusting others always involves risk.…Trusting other people always makes us in some way vulnerable to them.”3 People entrust each other with themselves or with things they value and this bonds people with one another. But this intimacy that is practiced in communities of faith also makes us susceptible to wounding and being wounded. Because of the level of intimacy that should exist in congregations, no church is completely safe. When abuse occurs, it must be punished. When violations of trust occur, they are honestly recognized. The way to minimize harm is to be ready for it.
At its best, ministry invites people to be integration seekers who transcend even the boundaries of time we erect between past and future. The phraseintegration seeker comes from Robert Larkin, an Episcopal priest and a practicing physician who has had considerable experience holding together what others might keep separate. He described integrating the several dimensions of his life this way: “Most people I know who do two or three vocational things talk about boundaries and barriers, I seek to make one part of me inform the other part. It is both an internal and an external dialogue. I want my medical practice to look different from those who are not ordained. I would like my preaching and my sense of sacrament to be informed by healing in ways that only a physician could come at the question.”For Larkin, tending toward wholeness and integration leads to boundary crossing was a way of life: “I don’t want my being a physician not to inform who I am as a priest; I want who I am as a priest to inform what I am as a physician. I want who I am as a human being, middle class, getting some grey hair now, not to be excluded from my emerging vocation as priest and my continuing vocation as a physician.”
His deep passion about vocational integration and personal wholeness is reflected also in the concern about the fragmentation of modern life: “I see in many ways reactions against fragmentation and not a trajectory toward further fragmentation. People are saying ‘No, I can’t take it any more, I am sitting in my house, I work from my home, I write to my girl friend, I have text-messages every fifteen minutes from my lover, and after a while you say ‘enough of it.’” What about sharing a glass of wine? This perspective, Larkin readily admits, is informed by his vocation as a physician. He encounters people who are facing a life-threatening circumstance and desperately want to make sense of sixty years of life in the next six minutes: “It’s terribly intimate because I am dealing with some the deepest, darkest questions of human nature and I must do it quickly.”Critical pastoral life moments also evoke deep compassion and require trustworthy bonds as pastors seek to help people transcend barriers that diminish and gather the fragments of a life into an integrated whole.
Building Bonds of Trust One Story at a Time
Pastoral leadership depends on trust and trust is built story by story as pastors listen to people tell about their lives. Being a trusted authority depends on how much we hear more than what we do or say. Careful listening breeds trust. And trust makes it possible to deepen the affectional bonds between pastor and congregation. To trust someone and to be trustworthy both depend on the willingness to risk being vulnerable with one another.
For four years, Pastor Jon Mackey listened to the needs, concerns, and desires of the people at St. John’s Church. When he first came to the congregation, he held several listening sessions to gather the concerns of different groups: the young adult group, the school parents, the governing council, and the pastoral staff. Pastor Mackey knew that his authority at St. John’s depended in part on how well he met their expectations. He understood that “they need to be liked by me” before they were willing to trust his pastoral leadership. When he buried three parents of children in the parish school, Pastor Mackey began to feel trusted. He was comfortable being the leader and equally determined to give that authority back to the people of St. John’s. Here is how Pastor Mackey said it: “I am not a good pastor because I am smart or witty or popular. I am a good pastor because the parish has endowed me with the opportunity to be their pastor. My authority is rooted in and born out of the community. When I am clear and the congregation is clear about my own authority, I can give back to them.”
Careful listening to stories of people helped Pastor Mackey understand the culture of the congregation and the particular needs of its members. More than that, he was a connective leader who understood the importance of building bonds with people he loved and served. Congregations receive their pastoral leaders, but pastors and other leaders must receive the congregation as well. Pastoral leaders take the people with whom they minister into themselves, hold them respectfully and lovingly, and send them out into the world. Reciprocal intimacy in pastoral work is always risky. When pastor and congregation entrust themselves to one another, it is a “unique sort of relationship because of the risk it incorporates.”4Relationships in congregations are aware of the risks of trusting while ignoring the awareness at the same time. For example, we overlook the risk of being changed in order to listen to the stories of others,
Doug Purnell succeeded someone who had been the minister of St. Ives Uniting Church in Sydney, Australia, for just four conflicted months. Doug himself had been downsized from a teaching job he loved. Both the congregation and their new pastor needed to be loved. He used his work as an artist to introduce himself to the nominating committee of St. Ives in this way:
I offer no big plans. I can only promise to live honestly, openly, and deeply as your spiritual leader. I will love the people given to my care. I will lead the best worship I am capable of. I will listen to the people of the congregation and the community. My understanding of ministry is like standing in front of a canvas with brush in hand but no preconceived plan. If I listen deeply to the paint, occasionally, just occasionally a miracle happens and something very new and unexpected emerges.
Doug Purnell and the congregation of St. Ives together fashioned a creative ministry inspired by his vision and sustained by his competence and an enduring bond of affection between the pastor and a parish that had given up on itself. Doug’s story adds the dimension of competence to the process of building an enduring bond. Members of Doug’s congregation identified his particular competence around the use of time, seeing a project to completion, and being able to help them vision a new future. For others, competence may include understanding others, setting limits without discouraging dreaming, or making a realistic strategic plan. Loving fosters important bonds, but loving is not enough. Pastoral leaders will be regarded as trustworthy if they are competent in the work they are called to do.5
Congregations and pastoral leaders who seek to embody the vision ofconnective leadership in which both bonds and boundaries regularly intersect to sustain vital ministries will inevitably experience the challenges of radical hospitality. When hospitality is deep enough and wide enough, it dismantles our consumeristic tendencies to reduce the other to a commodity to be used or dispensed with. There is also a reversal of visions and roles. What we thought was private becomes public and the guest is the host. The stranger-guest is not only welcomed but moves to the center and host is relegated to the margins. It is what Jesus did when, through fabled invitations, he wagered discipleship on fishermen, prophetic mission to a Samaritan divorcee, and teaching roles to children. Hospitality then becomes an experience of crossing boundaries for the sake of more inclusive bonds and communities of faith.
Eric H. F. Law has described the benefits of boundary-crossing for the sake of a more inclusive community in a very compelling way. It is a risky process, he suggests, that often moves us beyond the margins of safety as we have defined them. And yet a newly negotiated boundary for faith communities, in which there is time and space in which “to take into consideration another’s needs, interests, experience, and perspective,” will lead to a clearer understanding of ourselves as well as others. 6 It is the way of Jesus, who always invited his listeners not to be limited by fear in order to cross the boundaries that exclude. When we practice hospitality in such a boundary-crossing way, we welcome something unfamiliar and unknown into our lives that may expand our world and deepen our faith. We will also discover grace beyond safety.
Leading in the Face of Finitude
Congregations face an uncertain future. Declining membership and diminishing resources means that more and more must be done by fewer and fewer people. For some faithful believers, the changes in congregational life are like the death of the church they knew and loved. In reality, the church we remember is more often the product of nostalgia than the work of the Holy Spirit.
Because many congregations today are preoccupied with their own survival, I believe we need pastoral leaders who will turn our attention away from the fear of death and scarcity to a larger vision that transcends even our death. We need leaders who are lovers who are nonetheless comfortable with finitude and death because they know that is in the loving that treachery begins. They are finite leaders who will handle the unrealistic expectations of followers to effect immediate solutions to complex problems or provide an invincible shield against death.
Declining membership and an uncertain future are not the only signs of finitude and death. The existential paradox that is reflected in human patterns of boundaries and bonds or in leadership that is both connected and differentiated has been described as individuality within finitude. As Ernest Becker has described the human paradox, the human one “is out of nature and hopelessly in it…he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with towering majesty, and yet he goes back in the ground a few feet…to rot and disappear forever.”7 When pastoral leaders and congregations struggle to find a common vision, the unspoken conflict is often over the unnamed but inescapable reality of human limitation. In order to live honestly and creatively with finitude, we need pastoral leaders who can forge compelling visions that will carry people through besetting conflict and uncertainty.
Finite leaders do not wear a seamless garment. They understand that light still shines through a cracked window pane and coffee tastes just as good out of a chipped mug and a fractured church can still bear witness to the Gospel in a fragmented world. Change is so rapid that perfection is neither possible nor desirable. Being good enough becomes sufficient for faithful and effective pastoral ministry. One pastor said, “I don’t have time for excellence. It may happen anyway by the grace of God but most of the time I find myself saying ‘that’s good enough for me’ because there are two more matters awaiting my attention.”
Unless the expectations of excellence in ministry are modified by a realistic assessments of pastoral competence and parish demands and the resilience of a paradoxical vision, it may become its own tyranny. God’s love has no limit: human love is finite. The expectation that pastoral leaders will embody God’s agape is often the source of disappointment for members of a parish and discouragement for clergy. The unlimited love of God is expressed through limited pastoral leaders. Pastoral relationships, like all human relationships, are impermanent and imperfect.
From a Biblical perspective, however, excellence is about one thing: love. At the end of I Corinthians 12, after outlining the variety of gifts of the Spirit and the many members of the body that must work together for the common good, Paul concludes with these words: “But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (I Cor 12:31). What follows in chapter 13 of I Corinthians is a ringing testimony to love. David Bartlett has observed that the insistence on excellence in ministry is driven more by business models of leadership than a biblical approach to ministry.
When Paul writes to the Church in Corinth, excellence has to do with agape. And that’s a word the church has to keep saying: that leadership has to do with love, with the up-building of community and not always with strategic goals, charts, and managerial stuff.8
Despite all the complexities and disappointments of human love, social and relational wisdom must be added to self-differentiation as essential for effective ministry. Leaders are finite lovers. Every pastoral leader needs to be competent in connecting. This wisdom comes from recognizing the power of relationships and the need for human beings to be in community without losing particularity and identity. The complexity of life and faith requires both integration and differentiation. Noted University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has summarized this human task in the following way: “Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality.”9Connected leaders are diffferentiated lovers.
This essay grows out of years of conversation and collaboration with Edward Foley, OFM, around the larger theme of “Imperfect Excellence in Ministry.” I am grateful for his willingness to use some of the shared ideas in this text. The brief vignettes are adapted from longer interviews and used here with permission.
Discussion Questions
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Leaders and Lovers by Herbert Anderson
This article re-examines the attention to boundaries in ministry that has emerged in recent decades partly as a necessary response to the violation of trust in the pastoral bond and partly because differentiated leadership has been promoted as a way of diminishing debilitating congregational anxiety.
Boundaries are necessary for ministry, but so are bonds. If, however, being a connected leader is as important as being differentiated, how are bonds established and maintained between minister and congregation that will make it possible for them to do the work of God separately and together? My proposal is this: leaders are lovers. Pastoral bonds are as important as pastoral boundaries because connected leaders are differentiated lovers.
There are many dilemmas confronting congregations and pastoral leaders in this time. Balancing between stability and change is a particularly perplexing challenge. When people who gather to worship say “it is good to be here,” they are usually hoping for stability more than change. On the other side, pastoral leaders are often discouraged because congregations are reluctant to change quickly. Honoring tradition and promoting nostalgia about the past are often interpreted by fearful people as a sign of fidelity. By contrast, pastoral leaders promote openness to an uncertain future and the willingness to be surprised by God as marks of vital faith. In order to survive, congregations declare their desire to increase membership even though they dread the change such growth brings. What kind of leadership will foster hospitality inclusive enough to penetrate the walls of separation among people and between generations erected out of fear? The emphasis ondifferentiated leadership that has dominated recent literature on ministry needs to be balanced by connective leadership in order to form and sustain vital faith communities. When so many boundaries have been erected to keep people safe or diminish diversity or resist change, how do pastors practice boundary crossing for the sake of a new and vital future?
The Dilemma
The current tension between fostering bonds and honoring boundaries is an unintended consequence of several factors. The professionalization of ministry with a greater emphasis on distance than intimacy is one. The emphasis on maintaining boundaries is also a necessary corrective to sexual misconduct among clergy. The emphasis on boundaries has made ministers more cautious about trusting or building the empathic bonds that sustain vital relationships. Moreover, the growing incidence of burn-out among pastoral leaders has resulted in a focus on self-care and clearer boundaries between one’s personal and professional life. Patterns of relating in ministry have also changed as more people in pastoral leadership identify themselves as introverts and more congregations think about themselves as a small corporation with the pastor as the chief operating officer. These patterns of practice have tilted the balance in ministry toward distance more than intimacy, boundaries more than bonds, differentiated more than connected leadership.
There are also larger forces affecting congregational life and ministry. Interdependence and diversity pull modern life in opposite directions. Glocalism, the unavoidable linkage between global and local realities, intensifies our awareness of dependence on one another. Simultaneously, the visibility of the world’s diversity in our families and neighborhoods and churches makes the cooperation that interdependence requires more difficult. In this new environment, inclusion is critical but complex and connection is inevitable but demanding. In this time when we are challenged by far greater diversity than we have previously had to live with, we need leaders, as Jean Lipman-Blumen has observed, who will “emphasize bothmutuality (a focus on common interests and values) and inclusiveness (the willingness to include even those very different from the rest, without requiring their homogenization).”1 This essaybuildson this understanding of connective leadership.
Pastoral ministry is not, however, simply about connectivity: it is a response to the invitation to love one another as generously as we have been loved by God. The biblical story is an account of God’s relentless pursuit out of love despite the human resistance to being loved. The “good news” we proclaim imperfectly is God’s extraordinary love, always creating and covenanting, always redeeming and reconciling, always seeking and holding. In response to the generous love of God, pastoral leaders are lovers who seek to embody the passion of God who broods over humankind like a jealous lover, longing for connection.
This extravagant and persistent love of God is mirrored in the work of pastoral leaders to love people with imperfect generosity. The lectionary Gospel text for my last Sunday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, Washington after three years on the staff as the Director of Pastoral Care and Congregational Life was from Luke 6:27-38. It includes these words of Jesus: “Give and it will be given to you…for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” These words of Jesus could be a mantra for leaders who are lovers. I was astonished by the way my imperfect loving was received and returned because it is not always so. Loving people who may not love back is a particular challenge in the work of ministry. Pastoral leaders are free to love others without holding anything back when they are confident that they will not lose themselves in the loving. If you give generously, you will get back generously. Ministry is housed in that promise even though it is not always apparent.
Connected Leaders and Differentiated Lovers
Pastoral leaders needed for this time are both self-differentiated and able to connect authentically with individuals and communities of faith. Differentiation is about self-definition, clarity of goals, and the capacity to remain an “I” in the midst of “we”—particularly when a congregation (“we”) is overwhelmed with anxiety. Being a differentiated leader is more than keeping distance. The ability to be a connected non-anxious presence in the midst of the swirling anxiety fueled by a faith community’s response to diversity and change is the mark of a differentiated lover. In A Failure of Nerve, Rabbi Friedman defined differentiation as “charting one’s own way by means of one’s own internal guidance system, rather than perpetually eyeing the scope to see where others are.”2 But differentiation is not enough. We also need connective leaders, capable of walking with people through change and forming complex communities that recognize their need for one another in a diverse and interdependent world. In a world connected by technology but fragmented by diversity, pastoral leaders need to be able to build communities with permeable boundaries that include more than exclude. Being differentiated lovers and connected leaders are both necessary.
If pastoral leadership is both connected and differentiated, boundaries and bonds are paradoxically linked. In themselves, boundaries do not foster the compassion that nourishes the bonds necessary for building and sustaining faith communities. And yet bonds require clear boundaries to endure. It is difficult to be close to people if we need to assert boundaries often. If we start with boundaries, then we must keep asking how to nurture the compassion and empathy that connects us to others. If we start with boundaries, we will need to keep asking how to nurture the kind of pastoral bonds that have the potential for healing—lest we do no good. If we start with generating mutuality or if self-sacrificing generosity is our aim or if compassion is the focus of ministry, then we must keep asking about respecting boundaries—lest we do harm.
The aim of the process of differentiation is freedom for community. A leader needs to understand how groups function and how human systems evolve. A leader is also aware of irrational needs communities will have that prompt people to establish dependent relationships of deference to authorities in stressful times. Pastoral leaders in this time need to emphasize bothmutuality (a focus on common interests and values) and inclusiveness (the willingness to include even those very different from the rest without requiring their homogenization). Being a connected leader means loving the people you lead while remaining differentiated and integrating those two perspectives with a single-minded passion. The Law of the New Covenant is about love as well as self-differentiation that makes loving possible.
The feeding of the 5,000 as recorded in Matthew 14 illustrates the need to integrate boundaries and compassionate love in the practice of ministry. Large crowds had followed Jesus even though his intent was to be alone some place. As always, the Gospel writers give us a picture of the compassion of Jesus who is moved by the needs of the people who follow him. The disciples are protective of Jesus and want to set clear boundaries. Jesus ought not to feel responsible to feed these people who trailed after him, the disciples argued. That story brings together two absolutely essential and equally significant dimensions of pastoral ministry for our time: compassionate lovers and differentiated leaders.
Challenging Boundaries as the Work of Ministry
While boundaries are crucial to insure that distinctions are preserved and people are not violated, there is a sense in which the work of pastoral ministry includes challenging the boundaries we erect that exclude or separate people. A boundary, as I am using it here, is an invisible separation that preserves and respects and protects particularity between individuals and among parts of any human system. While it is crucial that boundaries are respected so that people are not violated or abused, it is equally necessary for the sake of community and human wholeness that boundaries are permeable. When the distinctions we make between race, gender, ethnicity, or class become impermeable barriers that separate people, violate human well-being, and impede community, pastoral leaders will challenge those boundaries in order to heal and restore the human family. When the boundaries people erect out of fear are walls that separate, the work of ministry is to encourage people to cross boundaries and live beyond their fears.
Almost everything about our lives in a technologized society pushes us away from each other. When we help people cross the barriers that fragment life, we invite them to be open to something greater than what can be felt or seen or touched. When congregational loyalties and denominational distinctions and religious differences become barriers that prevent people from coming together for the common good, it is necessary that religious leaders cross those boundaries for the sake of the whole. In the new globalized context, we will need faith communities that will challenge tribalism and establish permeable boundaries of difference instead of boundaries of territory. The desire to embrace transcends the boundaries that are necessary to preserve identity.
Challenging boundaries as a work of ministry is risky. In order to set aside a barrier that has protected us or a prejudice that has made the world seem secure, we wager some or all of our security. Barbara J. Blodgett warns us that entrusting ourselves to another can be a bumpy road. “Trusting others always involves risk.…Trusting other people always makes us in some way vulnerable to them.”3 People entrust each other with themselves or with things they value and this bonds people with one another. But this intimacy that is practiced in communities of faith also makes us susceptible to wounding and being wounded. Because of the level of intimacy that should exist in congregations, no church is completely safe. When abuse occurs, it must be punished. When violations of trust occur, they are honestly recognized. The way to minimize harm is to be ready for it.
At its best, ministry invites people to be integration seekers who transcend even the boundaries of time we erect between past and future. The phraseintegration seeker comes from Robert Larkin, an Episcopal priest and a practicing physician who has had considerable experience holding together what others might keep separate. He described integrating the several dimensions of his life this way: “Most people I know who do two or three vocational things talk about boundaries and barriers, I seek to make one part of me inform the other part. It is both an internal and an external dialogue. I want my medical practice to look different from those who are not ordained. I would like my preaching and my sense of sacrament to be informed by healing in ways that only a physician could come at the question.”For Larkin, tending toward wholeness and integration leads to boundary crossing was a way of life: “I don’t want my being a physician not to inform who I am as a priest; I want who I am as a priest to inform what I am as a physician. I want who I am as a human being, middle class, getting some grey hair now, not to be excluded from my emerging vocation as priest and my continuing vocation as a physician.”
His deep passion about vocational integration and personal wholeness is reflected also in the concern about the fragmentation of modern life: “I see in many ways reactions against fragmentation and not a trajectory toward further fragmentation. People are saying ‘No, I can’t take it any more, I am sitting in my house, I work from my home, I write to my girl friend, I have text-messages every fifteen minutes from my lover, and after a while you say ‘enough of it.’” What about sharing a glass of wine? This perspective, Larkin readily admits, is informed by his vocation as a physician. He encounters people who are facing a life-threatening circumstance and desperately want to make sense of sixty years of life in the next six minutes: “It’s terribly intimate because I am dealing with some the deepest, darkest questions of human nature and I must do it quickly.”Critical pastoral life moments also evoke deep compassion and require trustworthy bonds as pastors seek to help people transcend barriers that diminish and gather the fragments of a life into an integrated whole.
Building Bonds of Trust One Story at a Time
Pastoral leadership depends on trust and trust is built story by story as pastors listen to people tell about their lives. Being a trusted authority depends on how much we hear more than what we do or say. Careful listening breeds trust. And trust makes it possible to deepen the affectional bonds between pastor and congregation. To trust someone and to be trustworthy both depend on the willingness to risk being vulnerable with one another.
For four years, Pastor Jon Mackey listened to the needs, concerns, and desires of the people at St. John’s Church. When he first came to the congregation, he held several listening sessions to gather the concerns of different groups: the young adult group, the school parents, the governing council, and the pastoral staff. Pastor Mackey knew that his authority at St. John’s depended in part on how well he met their expectations. He understood that “they need to be liked by me” before they were willing to trust his pastoral leadership. When he buried three parents of children in the parish school, Pastor Mackey began to feel trusted. He was comfortable being the leader and equally determined to give that authority back to the people of St. John’s. Here is how Pastor Mackey said it: “I am not a good pastor because I am smart or witty or popular. I am a good pastor because the parish has endowed me with the opportunity to be their pastor. My authority is rooted in and born out of the community. When I am clear and the congregation is clear about my own authority, I can give back to them.”
Careful listening to stories of people helped Pastor Mackey understand the culture of the congregation and the particular needs of its members. More than that, he was a connective leader who understood the importance of building bonds with people he loved and served. Congregations receive their pastoral leaders, but pastors and other leaders must receive the congregation as well. Pastoral leaders take the people with whom they minister into themselves, hold them respectfully and lovingly, and send them out into the world. Reciprocal intimacy in pastoral work is always risky. When pastor and congregation entrust themselves to one another, it is a “unique sort of relationship because of the risk it incorporates.”4Relationships in congregations are aware of the risks of trusting while ignoring the awareness at the same time. For example, we overlook the risk of being changed in order to listen to the stories of others,
Doug Purnell succeeded someone who had been the minister of St. Ives Uniting Church in Sydney, Australia, for just four conflicted months. Doug himself had been downsized from a teaching job he loved. Both the congregation and their new pastor needed to be loved. He used his work as an artist to introduce himself to the nominating committee of St. Ives in this way:
I offer no big plans. I can only promise to live honestly, openly, and deeply as your spiritual leader. I will love the people given to my care. I will lead the best worship I am capable of. I will listen to the people of the congregation and the community. My understanding of ministry is like standing in front of a canvas with brush in hand but no preconceived plan. If I listen deeply to the paint, occasionally, just occasionally a miracle happens and something very new and unexpected emerges.
Doug Purnell and the congregation of St. Ives together fashioned a creative ministry inspired by his vision and sustained by his competence and an enduring bond of affection between the pastor and a parish that had given up on itself. Doug’s story adds the dimension of competence to the process of building an enduring bond. Members of Doug’s congregation identified his particular competence around the use of time, seeing a project to completion, and being able to help them vision a new future. For others, competence may include understanding others, setting limits without discouraging dreaming, or making a realistic strategic plan. Loving fosters important bonds, but loving is not enough. Pastoral leaders will be regarded as trustworthy if they are competent in the work they are called to do.5
Congregations and pastoral leaders who seek to embody the vision ofconnective leadership in which both bonds and boundaries regularly intersect to sustain vital ministries will inevitably experience the challenges of radical hospitality. When hospitality is deep enough and wide enough, it dismantles our consumeristic tendencies to reduce the other to a commodity to be used or dispensed with. There is also a reversal of visions and roles. What we thought was private becomes public and the guest is the host. The stranger-guest is not only welcomed but moves to the center and host is relegated to the margins. It is what Jesus did when, through fabled invitations, he wagered discipleship on fishermen, prophetic mission to a Samaritan divorcee, and teaching roles to children. Hospitality then becomes an experience of crossing boundaries for the sake of more inclusive bonds and communities of faith.
Eric H. F. Law has described the benefits of boundary-crossing for the sake of a more inclusive community in a very compelling way. It is a risky process, he suggests, that often moves us beyond the margins of safety as we have defined them. And yet a newly negotiated boundary for faith communities, in which there is time and space in which “to take into consideration another’s needs, interests, experience, and perspective,” will lead to a clearer understanding of ourselves as well as others. 6 It is the way of Jesus, who always invited his listeners not to be limited by fear in order to cross the boundaries that exclude. When we practice hospitality in such a boundary-crossing way, we welcome something unfamiliar and unknown into our lives that may expand our world and deepen our faith. We will also discover grace beyond safety.
Leading in the Face of Finitude
Congregations face an uncertain future. Declining membership and diminishing resources means that more and more must be done by fewer and fewer people. For some faithful believers, the changes in congregational life are like the death of the church they knew and loved. In reality, the church we remember is more often the product of nostalgia than the work of the Holy Spirit.
Because many congregations today are preoccupied with their own survival, I believe we need pastoral leaders who will turn our attention away from the fear of death and scarcity to a larger vision that transcends even our death. We need leaders who are lovers who are nonetheless comfortable with finitude and death because they know that is in the loving that treachery begins. They are finite leaders who will handle the unrealistic expectations of followers to effect immediate solutions to complex problems or provide an invincible shield against death.
Declining membership and an uncertain future are not the only signs of finitude and death. The existential paradox that is reflected in human patterns of boundaries and bonds or in leadership that is both connected and differentiated has been described as individuality within finitude. As Ernest Becker has described the human paradox, the human one “is out of nature and hopelessly in it…he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with towering majesty, and yet he goes back in the ground a few feet…to rot and disappear forever.”7 When pastoral leaders and congregations struggle to find a common vision, the unspoken conflict is often over the unnamed but inescapable reality of human limitation. In order to live honestly and creatively with finitude, we need pastoral leaders who can forge compelling visions that will carry people through besetting conflict and uncertainty.
Finite leaders do not wear a seamless garment. They understand that light still shines through a cracked window pane and coffee tastes just as good out of a chipped mug and a fractured church can still bear witness to the Gospel in a fragmented world. Change is so rapid that perfection is neither possible nor desirable. Being good enough becomes sufficient for faithful and effective pastoral ministry. One pastor said, “I don’t have time for excellence. It may happen anyway by the grace of God but most of the time I find myself saying ‘that’s good enough for me’ because there are two more matters awaiting my attention.”
Unless the expectations of excellence in ministry are modified by a realistic assessments of pastoral competence and parish demands and the resilience of a paradoxical vision, it may become its own tyranny. God’s love has no limit: human love is finite. The expectation that pastoral leaders will embody God’s agape is often the source of disappointment for members of a parish and discouragement for clergy. The unlimited love of God is expressed through limited pastoral leaders. Pastoral relationships, like all human relationships, are impermanent and imperfect.
From a Biblical perspective, however, excellence is about one thing: love. At the end of I Corinthians 12, after outlining the variety of gifts of the Spirit and the many members of the body that must work together for the common good, Paul concludes with these words: “But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way” (I Cor 12:31). What follows in chapter 13 of I Corinthians is a ringing testimony to love. David Bartlett has observed that the insistence on excellence in ministry is driven more by business models of leadership than a biblical approach to ministry.
When Paul writes to the Church in Corinth, excellence has to do with agape. And that’s a word the church has to keep saying: that leadership has to do with love, with the up-building of community and not always with strategic goals, charts, and managerial stuff.8
Despite all the complexities and disappointments of human love, social and relational wisdom must be added to self-differentiation as essential for effective ministry. Leaders are finite lovers. Every pastoral leader needs to be competent in connecting. This wisdom comes from recognizing the power of relationships and the need for human beings to be in community without losing particularity and identity. The complexity of life and faith requires both integration and differentiation. Noted University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has summarized this human task in the following way: “Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality.”9Connected leaders are diffferentiated lovers.
This essay grows out of years of conversation and collaboration with Edward Foley, OFM, around the larger theme of “Imperfect Excellence in Ministry.” I am grateful for his willingness to use some of the shared ideas in this text. The brief vignettes are adapted from longer interviews and used here with permission.
Discussion Questions
- Are boundaries honored in your congregation or ministry?
- How can you further foster bonds in your congregation or ministry?
- In what ways is your pastorate set up for both bonds and boundaries?
- Interdependence among congregants and pastoral teams is inevitable. How might your congregation move to a healthier place?
- In what ways can you be both connected to your congregation or ministry and still be differentiated as an individual?
- Jean Lipman-Bluman, Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996), 12. Friedman, E. H. in Beal, E. W., & Treadwell, M. M. (Eds.). (1999). A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Bethesda, MD: The Edwin Friedman Estate. The focus on differentiation comes from a family therapist Murray Bowen via Edwin Friedman and Peter Steinke and others.
- Barbara J. Blodgett Lives Entrusted: An Ethic of Trust for Ministry(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 15.
- Ibid., 18.
- The Competent Pastor: Skills and Self-knowledge for Serving Wellby Ronald D. Sisk (Herndon,Virginia: The Alban Institute, 2005).
- Eric H.F. Law, Inclusion: Making Room for Others(St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 42.
- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death(New York: The Free Press, 1973), 26.
- David G. Forney, “Church Leadership in the New Testament and Today: An Interview with David L. Bartlett.” Journal of Religious Leadership, Vol 7, No 1, Spring, 2008, 77.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 221.
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