Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Three Urgent Leadership Questions for Thriving in a Connected World" for Monday, 13 March 2017
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Three urgent leadership questions for thriving in a connected worldA NEW ALBAN BOOK EXPLORES HOW ORGANIZATIONS CAN THRIVE TODAY
Many congregational and nonprofit leaders are still setting annual organizational goals. Good goals (the "what we want to accomplish") begin with good questions ("why is it important for us to accomplish this work?"). We therefore offer a few crucial questions for your organization or congregation to ask as you assess your hoped-for impact this year and beyond. We know that these questions are important, for they flow from for our fresh research on both "start-up" and established congregations across Jewish and Protestant denominations, and nonprofits with historic ties to faith communities, which you can read about in Leading Congregations in a Connected World: Platform, People and Purpose.
What would it mean to make "engagement" an organizing principle and not just a series of activities?
Shifting toward engagement as an organizing principle is to become a community where people come together or take part in something that is meaningful to them. It is a community where passion or purpose hold the community, not membership status.The shift may seem subtle, but this slight change in focus made a big difference in the organizations in our study. Leaders shared with us that the routines of committee work, communications, and programs as they "have always been done" no longer have the holding power to keep people connected to the organization's or congregation's mission.
However, when they shifted their focus from membership to engagement as an organizing principle, it not only ignited the passion of members and participants but it also rippled through the organization and changed the culture as a whole. Pastor Greg Meyer of Jacob's Well, MN, one of the thirty-four leaders whom we interviewed in our book, expressed this idea beautifully when he said, "Of all the things we are stewards of with our community, their attention is one of the biggest, and it is almost the hardest. It is almost easier to get people to give than to get their attention."
Three Urgent Leadership Questions for Thriving in a Connected World
Many congregational and nonprofit leaders are still setting annual organizational goals. Good goals (the “what we want to accomplish”) begin with good questions (“why is it important for us to accomplish this work?”). We therefore offer a few crucial questions for your organization or congregation to ask as you assess your hoped-for impact this year and beyond. We know that these questions are important, for they flow from for our fresh research on both “start-up” and established congregations across Jewish and Protestant denominations, and nonprofits with historic ties to faith communities, which you can read about in Leading Congregations in a Connected World: Platform, People and Purpose.
What would it mean to make “engagement” an organizing principle and not just a series of activities?
Shifting toward engagement as an organizing principle is to become a community where people come together or take part in something that is meaningful to them. It is a community where passion or purpose hold the community, not membership status. The shift may seem subtle, but this slight change in focus made a big difference in the organizations in our study. Leaders shared with us that the routines of committee work, communications, and programs as they “have always been done” no longer have the holding power to keep people connected to the organization’s or congregation’s mission.
However, when they shifted their focus from membership to engagement as an organizing principle, it not only ignited the passion of members and participants but it also rippled through the organization and changed the culture as a whole. Pastor Greg Meyer of Jacob’s Well, MN, one of the thirty-four leaders whom we interviewed in our book, expressed this idea beautifully when he said, “Of all the things we are stewards of with our community, their attention is one of the biggest, and it is almost the hardest. It is almost easier to get people to give than to get their attention.”
What will it require for congregations and nonprofits to hold together diverse communities when social media make them so fragile?
Congregational and nonprofit communities are very fragile these days! When we asked congregational and nonprofit leaders profiled in our book about pressing challenges, they consistently responded with one word: “Community!” We could feel their anxieties around this issue and, from our perspective, for good reason. Congregations are at their best when they are inclusive. Diversity is not its own goal, but a value that enables people to engage with the “other” – a person from another generation, a different background, a spiritual orientation or political view. In that encounter with an “other,” both people have an opportunity to grow by experiencing difference.
Holding together diverse communities requires time and sensitivity. But people involved in congregations and nonprofits may create or be caught in destructive digital debates that can spill over into face-to-face meetings. Alternatively, conversations that happen when people are physically together may continue publicly online, where others who were not present and lack the context can join. While social media have significantly increased opportunities for connection, they have also multiplied the likelihood of misunderstandings. What kinds of “conversations” are effective on digital platforms and which are best held in a physical space? What happens when a professional or volunteer publishes information about an issue that is unintentionally misleading or inaccurate—or simply false? Congregations and nonprofits may be among the last institutions designed to take people from diverse backgrounds, at all stages of life, and grow with them over time. How will they continue to be those places in a fractured world? These questions are urgent and need to be explored openly.
What would it mean for congregations and nonprofits to reorganize more like “platforms” instead of being structured as “top down” hierarchies?
In our book, we recommend that congregations and nonprofits restructure themselves more as platforms, or what we name “Organization 3.0.” Organization 3.0 is a blended model of hierarchy and networks that is present both in digital and physical space, characterized by dialogue, more shared-decision making and creation of content and meaning. It values are based on deep engagement between individuals and organizations. (Spoiler alert: on page 11 we even give the date on which Organization 3.0 first became possible—June 29, 2007.)
The fundamental difference between Congregation or Nonprofit 2.0 and 3.0 is an acknowledgement that the individuals do not need existing organizations to express and explore sacred meaning and purpose. They have the ability to bypass them and find or create new platforms to do so. But if congregations and nonprofits can make the pivot and become platforms for people to engage in purposeful work, they have a good chance of engaging new and existing audiences more deeply. Unlike startups, they have the advantage of doing so in physical and digital space.
Hayim Herring is CEO of HayimHerring.com, whose mission is “preparing today’s leaders for tomorrow’s organizations.” Terri Martinson Elton is associate professor of leadership at Luther Seminary.
Read more from Hayim Herring and Terri Martinson Elton »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERSHIP
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Improvising Leadership
Theatrical improvisation is an apt analogy for the Christian life and leadership, says the Anglican minister and scholar. Both are about trust, faithfulness and imagination.
Faaith & Leadership
Christian Leadership, Arts & Culture, Performing arts
Samuel Wells: Improvising leadership
Sam Wells preaching at Duke Chapel
Theatrical improvisation is an apt analogy for the Christian life and leadership, says the Anglican minister and scholar. Both are about trust, faithfulness and imagination.
Updated: The Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells, former dean of Duke University Chapel, is vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
Contrary to popular perception, improvisation is not about being original, clever, witty or spontaneous but about being so steeped in a tradition that you learn to take the right things for granted, said the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells.
Theatrical improvisation, then, offers important lessons for the church and for institutional leaders, said Wells, author of “Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.”
“Leadership is mostly improvisation,” Wells said. “The mistake is to think that improvisation all happens in your own head.”
Instead, leadership is about forming a state of trust in a community where people can learn to do things they haven’t done before.
“A leader can’t close the office door and dream up this brilliant idea,” he said. “The leader has to listen to what’s going on in the organization and take energy from there and bring energy in response.”
Wells, an Anglican minister and scholar, has served as dean of Duke University Chapel and research professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School since 2005. He announced in December that he will return to England in summer 2012 to become the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
A prolific author and editor, Wells spoke with Faith & Leadership recently about “Improvisation,” one of his 17 books. The video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.
Q: Give us an overview of “Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.”
There has been a lot of theological discourse in the last 30 years about words like “narrative,” “drama” and “performance.” The book contends that “improvisation” is a better word for how we deal with tradition.
It recognizes that we face new circumstances in each generation that the Bible doesn’t give us a script for. It’s wrong to say [Christians] “perform” a script, as if we can do that over and over again. “Performance” suggests a woodenness, a repetitiveness and a lack of dynamism that isn’t true to the church’s experience.
The Christian story is a five-act play -- creation, Israel, Jesus, church and eschaton. We find ourselves in Act 4, and the most important events have already happened. Our role is to be faithful in Act 4, because God will do the rest in Act 5.
All of that is a discourse within academic theology. But there’s also a pastoral dimension to the book that arises out of my own experiences in parish ministry. The most dynamic gift to the church is the Holy Spirit working amongst people who learn to trust one another and see the abundant things that God can do with limited materials. That’s analogous to what happens in theatrical improvisation.
Q: How so?
It’s probably best to start with some of the misunderstandings that people have. Improvisation isn’t about being original, clever, witty or spontaneous.
Improvisation is about allowing yourself to be obvious. It’s about being so soaked in a tradition that you learn to take the right things for granted. People who train in improvisation train in a tradition. They learn to trust one another and to say the obvious thing.
There are two important moments in improvisation -- the moment of formation and then the moment of decision.
For example, take Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who landed in the Hudson River when his plane was hit by a flock of geese. He is the classic improviser. Here he is, he’s just taken off from New York with 150 people on board, and his engines go out.
What does he do? Well, that’s not the moment to look for an extraordinary gift of skill. All he can do is fall back on what he’s practiced hundreds of times in his training.
So he improvises. He’s never been in the air above New York and had his engines go out before. He’s in a new situation where he has to fall back on the formation that’s taken place over decades. So he looks around, he sees the Hudson River, and he thinks, “I can dip down in there. I might hit something, but it’s less of a problem than landing in the middle of Manhattan. I’m going to give it a try.”
It’s a classic moment of improvisation. He’s not being spontaneous, clever or witty, but he’s bringing into the moment all of that shaping over a long period of time. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, and that’s what churches do when they face ghastly situations.
When a half-dozen Amish schoolchildren were killed a few years ago, the Amish had to improvise. They had talked about forgiveness for their entire history, but they’d never imagined that a half-dozen of their children would be wiped out in an afternoon.
They had to improvise. They had to fall back on that deep training, and they found that they had the opportunity to forgive.
So there are those two crucial moments -- formation and decision. What you can’t do is, in the moment of decision, create a tradition. You can’t do that. You can only reflect the tradition that you’ve been created in.
I begin the main section of the book with a famous quotation from the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” That makes the same point, that it was too late by the time you got to the battle of Waterloo in 1815 to form the character of the leaders of the British Army. That had to be done in the schools of England when they were teenagers.
Q: So improvisation isn’t about “making it up”?
When you’re doing improvisation in the theater, what freezes people is that desire to be clever. Actors have to say the first thing that comes to mind, and part of that is being part of a team. You don’t have to produce everything yourself. You have to recognize the spirit that comes about in a team.
That’s an apt analogy for the Christian life. It doesn’t all have to come from you, and it’s not about getting it right in a predetermined sense -- that you can look back and it says in the book that we did it exactly like that. In any relationship, you’re constantly facing situations you’ve never anticipated. It’s about trust, faithfulness and imagination.
Q: Tell us about the improvisation techniques of acceptance and blocking, and especially overacceptance.
These are terms from the language of theatrical improvisation. When a situation comes along -- say, it’s a burglar coming into your home -- there are three things you can do.
1. You can accept; you can say, “Come in -- I was just waiting for someone to rob my home. Have a cup of tea! Do you take cream in your coffee?” That’s accepting. You’re changing your whole agenda to adapt to the new circumstance.
2. Blocking is to get out the revolver and shoot them dead. It refuses to entertain any change to the status quo. I’m exaggerating, but blocking denies the premise of the person that’s coming toward you. It’s just screening them out, more or less.
Blocking is inherently violent. It’s not allowing a space for the other. It usually assumes that you have some way of using power that can block the other. If the Christian community is being faithful, it doesn’t have automatic access to that power. But if it simply accepts, it’s in danger of losing its identity.
3. But there’s this third notion of overaccepting, where you fit the smaller story that has come your way -- which often you didn’t invite or go looking for -- into the larger story of what God’s doing with the world. This happens on all sorts of levels.
In the mid-1990s, not long before she died, Princess Diana was asked by an interviewer, “Will you ever be queen?” It was a crucial question at the time of the breakup of her marriage.
She paused and then said, “Well, perhaps I’ll be the queen of people’s hearts.”
In a subtle way, what she was doing was saying, “I don’t want that paltry queen of England nonsense. That’s beneath me. I can be queen of people’s hearts.”
That’s overaccepting. It’s a clever move on her part, where she’s saying, “I could cry and say, ‘No, I’ll never be queen, because Charles didn’t love me enough, or I didn’t love him enough.’”
But she’s not going to get bogged down in accepting and blocking. She’s going to put it on a much bigger plane.
We see Jesus making similar moves. We see it fundamentally in the cross and resurrection. Jesus doesn’t block the cross by refusing it. He doesn’t simply accept it and go to his death. Instead, God overaccepts the cross in the resurrection.
That’s what takes place in the whole of salvation history. Look at Jeremiah, the story of the potter. The clay was broken in the potter’s hands and then formed into a new and better pot. That’s really how Christians understand the Old and New Testaments. The pot, the covenant, was broken in God’s hands, but God didn’t throw it away.
That’s what we understand Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit and the church to mean. It’s an overaccepting of Israel. It’s not a blocking of Israel and not a simple accepting of the broken covenant, but an overaccepting.
Once you start seeing overaccepting at work, you can see it everywhere. It becomes a whole philosophy of life. It has for me.
Whenever I’m facing a threatening situation, I ask myself, “Why am I attempting to block? Is there a lack of trust? Also, what power do I assume that I can call on that can bring about my desire to block?”
Throughout the centuries, Christian churches have tried to stand in the way of new developments in science, economics, other faiths, or whatever it might be. Many churches are well-known for having an adversarial view, evolution being the most obvious example.
I tend to ask, “How can we overaccept Darwinism?” rather than, “How can we either accept it and say, ‘We’re all Darwinists’ or block it and say, ‘It’s not in Genesis, so we don’t believe it’?”
Q: What are the implications of overaccepting for how Christian institutional leaders think and lead?
One of the mistakes Christian leaders make is that they feel all the energy and the ideas have to come from them. Wherever I’ve been in leadership, something important happens in the first few weeks, and how you respond becomes defining.
When I came to Duke, Hurricane Katrina happened. When I went to my first job in ministry, there was a huge gas explosion, and several members of the congregation ended up in hospital. How you respond speaks everything to your people.
You can’t come in with a blueprint that says, “This is how everything is going to be.” You have to work with the energy that comes to you from the people and from unexpected events.
If you come with a blueprint and something like Hurricane Katrina happens, you can get annoyed and say, “We have important work to do, and these unfortunate incidents are putting us off.”
Well, life is made up of unfortunate incidents. Get over it. Learn to use the energy that comes from unfortunate incidents to define the work that you’re doing.
You can’t allow it to dictate your work, but neither can you try to screen it out. You’ve got to find a way of incorporating it into your story.
Q: Leaders literally have to improvise.
Yeah. Leadership is mostly improvisation. All the things that I describe by improvisation, such as the formation of habits, are what make a good leader. The mistake is to think that improvisation all happens in your own head.
Again, improvisation is not about being clever, original, witty and spontaneous. It’s about forming a state of trust in a community where you can learn to do things you haven’t done before.
A leader can’t close the office door and dream up this brilliant idea. The leader has to listen to what’s going on in the organization and take energy from there and bring energy in response.
Q: At what point does overacceptance become rolling over? Or, from the other direction, is blocking ever acceptable?
Overaccepting is always a balance between blocking and accepting. It’s always a middle course, and it always assumes that you can’t simply accept almost anything without losing your identity, losing all that’s valuable to you.
But blocking usually isn’t an option, and even when it is, it can be for the wrong reasons. Blocking closes down the imagination, just as if I were to disagree with you by punching you in the nose. It’s not the most imaginative way of resolving the issue.
If you think of blocking like that, then it’s about the failure of imagination, the failure of language and the resort to instant solutions to solve problems.
Q: Why is rehearsal so important to improvisation and creativity?
When people say, “Life isn’t a rehearsal,” I say, “But it is, really, isn’t it?” Life is a rehearsal. If we really think heaven is what we say we believe it is, then life actually is a rehearsal for that. So if you think in terms of the five-act play -- creation, Israel, Jesus, church and eschaton -- and of us in Act 4, then Act 4 is really a rehearsal for Act 5. Act 5 is the eternal one. That’s everlasting life.
So, the habits of rehearsal are everything we do in life, and I'm very affected by a lot of stories that encourage me in the belief that most of my life is preparation for crucial moments. I’m not saying I’ve reached a defining moment in my life, but I’ve reached some fairly crucial moments where I had to act from memory.
You’re in a hospital, you’re holding the hand of an 82-year-old woman. All her family are around the intensive care unit, and you know that they’ve just unhooked the machines, so she’s got 45 minutes until she’s going to stop breathing. How do you fill that 45 minutes? That’s what you go to seminary for, to know how to fill that 45 minutes.
I’d say the first thing you do is you sing. You recall something that has been significant in the worshipping life of everybody there, and you sing that, and it puts you in touch with good things about the richness that this woman has brought to everybody’s life. And it’s also a prayer, but it’s a prayer that you know that the woman maybe can still hear, because hearing and touch are really among the last senses to go.
So if you’d never learned that hymn -- in other words, if you hadn’t rehearsed -- how could you ever sing it? So you think, “Well, why do we go -- as you say to teenagers -- why do we go every Sunday and we sing the same boring old hymns?”
Well, there’s an answer for you: because one day you’ll be in hospital with an 82-year-old woman -- and it could be me, actually, that woman -- and you’ll have 45 minutes until she dies, and you’ll be gathered around with everybody, and everyone will be weeping but wanting something important, and you’ll think, “Well, that’s why we sang those hymns, wasn’t it?”
Q: You touched on this earlier, but tell us more about tradition. How does improvisation depend on tradition?
Improvisation can’t work without a tradition. Try improvising without a tradition and you dry up within 30 seconds. Think of humor: what humor almost always does is recover a lost thing from a common experience and reintroduce it in a quirky way.
One notion we haven’t talked about is reincorporation. What reincorporation does is exactly that -- it brings back into the story discarded elements.
The greatest writer on improvisation talks about improvisation being like a person walking backwards. We think about ourselves walking forward into the future, but actually we don’t live like that.
We walk backwards into the future. When we don’t know what to do, we pick up something that we haven’t used. It’s like we go up into the attic and find something we didn’t have a use for before, and then we bring it down and back into our story.
That’s what God does with us. That’s what the Good Shepherd does when he goes and seeks the lost sheep.
That’s how redemption works. That’s how personal salvation works. God finds ways of redeeming even the fact that the brothers sent Joseph down into the pit. “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good,” as Joseph says. It’s a classic reincorporation story.
That’s what heaven is. Heaven is where we discover that all the discarded people and all the discarded parts of our own story come back into the story in glorious ways.
And that’s what tradition is. Jaroslav Pelikan described tradition as not being the dead faith of the living but the living faith of the dead. Our memories are one of our chief resources in the church. Church history and the Scriptures are a coding of that memory. Every time we preach on a Scripture, we’re bringing back into the present something that’s been neglected in the past.
Q: What does living in Act 4 mean for Christian institutions and their leaders and how they conceive their work?
There are several things you can get wrong. The secular mistake is to believe you’re in a one-act play. In a one-act play, you get to make up all the rules, and it’s totally your responsibility to make sure things come out right by the end.
But it isn’t totally our responsibility to make sure things come out right in the end. Our role is to be faithful, not to be effective. Of course, as John Howard Yoder points out, the difference between faithful and effective is artificial. It’s a difference in time scales.
People who are being faithful believe they are being effective on an eternal time scale. People who believe simply in being effective are saying that it only counts if they can see the results in six months or five years or my life span.
But that’s not a five-act way of thinking. That’s a one-act way of thinking.
We can also make the mistake of just living in Act 2, Israel, thinking the Messiah has not yet come, that we have not yet been given a definitive picture of how God is among us.
But living in Act 4 is to live after Act 3, Jesus. We have a definitive picture of how God is among us.
Also, crucially, the other mistake is to forget that Act 5 is still coming. We don’t have to make things finally come out right. Our job is to recognize that the important things in the story have already happened.
Q: If you don’t have to make it turn out right, then being in Act 4 frees you up in all kinds of ways.
It’s incredibly liberating. We don’t have to be constantly asking questions about our legacy. We leave that in the hands of God. We do what is faithful in our generation.
We can’t know what the future will be. All we can do is try to be faithful in the present, knowing that God will take even our failures and make beautiful things out of those in the future.
Stanley Hauerwas says that perhaps the best that Christians can ever hope to do is to make interesting mistakes. Of all his lines, that’s one of the most dear to me -- that all I can ever hope to do is make interesting mistakes. That’s the language of improvisation.
Q: But isn’t the task of leadership to make it all turn out right?
Again, it’s being faithful and being effective. It’s not about trying to get things so clear by the end of Act 4 that we don’t need Act 5. That’s the mistake of lack of faith. Lack of faith says, “Well, God’s not going to come and help, so we’d better get it all nice and tidy so no one can ruin it.”
I’m coming to the end of my time as dean of Duke Chapel, and the big mistake I don’t want to make is to say, “I’m going to get this so sorted that my successor can’t wreck it.” I’ve seen many institutional leaders try to do that, and it’s a fundamentally unfaithful way to conduct yourself.
All you can do is live in Act 4, act as faithfully as you can, do things that are good for their own sake and not because you think you can stitch up the future, and leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.
Yes, there are things that leaders should worry about. But what I hope I’ve never tried to do is to say that I’m going to fix this so that it’s secure and it’s in the bag. You can never put things in the bag.
Q: Tell us more about the importance of reincorporating the lost. How does that shape the task of Christian institutional leaders?
The key figure in reincorporating is St. Laurence, who was a deacon of the Church of Rome in the third century. The magistrate of Rome demanded that Laurence hand over all the riches of the church. He said, “Give me three days,” and he brought in the poor, the blind and the lame. There they all were, but the magistrate didn’t have a sense of humor. He roasted Laurence on a spit.
I named my first child Laurence, because I believe he is a focal saint for the church. That’s a story that should inspire everybody in Christian ministry. It tells us that God gives us everything we need to be God’s followers. What St. Laurence was saying is that in the poor, the blind and the lame, God had given the church its riches.
He wasn’t joking. He was deadly serious. He really believed that in these places we would be given all we need.
So reincorporating is a recognition that God has already done everything that is needed for our salvation. We simply need to go back and remind ourselves of it. We experience life as scarcity, but that’s not because God hasn’t given us enough, which we’re always tempted to think, but because we haven’t put to use the things that God has already given us more than enough of.
Read more from Sam Wells »
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Congregational Leadership as Spiritual Practice
Today's congregational leaders are called to be spirit persons, who wear the mantle of the mystics, healers, prophets, and sages. Claiming our role as spiritual guides is a matter of seeing God's presence and then encouraging its emergence within the congregation.
Bruce Epperly: Congregational Leadership as Spiritual Practice
One day, according to legend, a neighbor observed Michelangelo rolling a jagged boulder up the street and onto his front step. When the sculptor took out his hammer and chisel, and began to strike the boulder, the neighbor was overcome by curiosity. He crossed the street and asked, “What are you doing hammering on that boulder?” To which Michelangelo responded, “There’s an angel inside and I’m trying to let it out!”
This story expresses an essential aspect of congregational leadership. Congregational leadership involves seeing the holy in the congregation’s members and the quotidian activities of the church and trying to bring that holiness out in partnership with God and others. It is relatively easy to see the boulders in our congregations. Every congregation has naysayers, obstructionists, complainers, and, frankly, quirky and grumpy people. Virtually every congregation faces limitations of time, talent, and treasure which can lead to frustration, anger, and hopelessness among pastors. The challenge of congregational leadership is to see the angels in the boulders with which we work and enable our congregants to see the holiness in themselves and one another.
Today’s congregational leaders are called to be spirit persons, to use the language of Marcus Borg, who wear the mantle of the mystics, healers, prophets, and sages. Claiming our role as spiritual guides is a matter of seeing God’s presence and then encouraging its emergence within the congregation. In a time of spiritual challenge, limitations, and frequent polarization, such spiritual vision is the result of a commitment to nurturing awareness of God’s presence in ourselves and others. In the business of congregational life, it is easy to lose our way, focus on product rather than persons, become overwhelmed by the tasks of ministry, and forget that we are always on holy ground as we interact with God’s beloved children.
I have found Mark 6:30-46 one of the most instructive biblical texts for transforming our leadership practices. The disciples have recently returned from their first teaching, preaching, and healing missions. They are elated, but fatigued. In language descriptive of too many pastors’ daily lives, “For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mark 6:30) In response to his followers’ weariness, Jesus does something counterintuitive, given the reality of persons in need. He takes his disciples on a mini-retreat to relax, pray, and reconnect with the source of all holiness. They return, refreshed, and able to be Jesus’ partners in feeding five thousand people. A time of rest restores their imaginations, physical well-being, and spiritual sensitivity.
The final words of the passage describe Jesus discharging his disciples from their duties and going to a mountain to pray. The interplay of action and contemplation characterized Jesus’ ministry that day and throughout the gospels. Spirituality and mission go hand in hand in a truly holistic ministry.
Psychiatrist and spiritual guide Gerald May suggested a spiritual practice that has been helpful in my own congregational and administrative leadership. Whether in daily times of prayer and meditation, or in the midst of a meeting or a busy day, we can tend to God’s presence in ourselves and others through a practice involving pausing, noticing, opening, yielding and stretching, and responding.
Healthy congregational leadership involves, first of all, pausing to become aware of our current experience, including our sense of nearness or distance, from God’s vision for our lives. This week, our congregation on Cape Cod is holding its annual budget meeting, and I’ve noticed myself feeling anxious as I prepare for the meeting. Awareness of my anxiety is an invitation to stillness and prayer for the congregation and my role as its spiritual leader. Noticing involves slowing down to look more deeply at the persons with whom we interact, discovering without judgment both their boulders and angelic spirits. In this spiritual pause, I open to the holiness of persons and situations, and allow myself to yield, accepting this moment as it is, and then stretch to embrace God’s vision as an alternative to my ego’s often defensive and limited perspective. From this deeper vision, I am inspired to respond in a way that brings out what is holy and angelic in me and others. I am able to discern possibilities amid limits, and visualize a great plant emerging from a mustard seed and abundant provisions coming from a mere five loaves and two fish.
This simple, but dynamic, spiritual practice can transform our ministry and enable us to experience every situation as revealing God’s call to healing and wholeness. In just a moment you can move from anxiety to calm and annoyance to openness. My own practice of pausing, noticing, opening, yielding and stretching, and responding is inspired by a form of breath prayer, based on the Gospel of John’s account of Easter night, when Jesus is described as entering an upper room, breathing on his disciples and saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21-22) I breathe deeply God’s Spirit and discover that experiencing the Holy Spirit is always just a moment away.
In the course of my pastoral day, I spend time in my study, working on sermons, newsletters, and bulletins, all of which require a good deal of concentration. It never fails that I will hear a knock on my study door. Rather than feeling bothered, I take a gentle breath, saying to myself, “breathing in, I pray; breathing out, I bless.” In a moment’s time, I am ready to see the holiness of my unexpected visitor. When I go on hospital or home visits, I park as far away as reasonably possible and take time to breathe my intercessions and petitions as I walk. When I come to the pulpit to begin my sermon, I pause a moment to breathe in God’s inspiration and then look out at the congregation, awakening to God’s Spirit in each one.
Congregational leadership involves opening to holiness and seeing angels in boulders. We are always on holy ground and our sense of God’s presence opens us to a world of wonders and possibilities in the challenging and heart-warming adventures of our congregations.
Bruce Epperly is Pastor of South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Centerville, MA. He is the author of over thirty books, including the Alban/Rowman Littlefield texts, A Center in the Cyclone: Twenty-first Century Clergy Self-care, Tending to the Holy: The Practice of the Presence of God in Ministry (with Katherine Gould Epperly), and Starting with Spirit: Nurturing Your Call to Pastoral Leadership.Read more from Bruce Epperly »
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Why focus on developing your staff as leaders?
The challenges congregations are facing require employees, across levels and roles, to exercise leadership skills to understand the situation, make sense of how to respond and involve others to make things happen.
Faith & Leadership
Christian Leadership, Management, Leadership development
Dave Odom: Why focus on developing your staff as leaders?
Bigstock/PapaBear
The challenges facing Christian institutions today require innovative solutions in all aspects of the work. Senior leaders must cultivate the conditions for the work to flourish, which means nurturing talent across levels and roles, says the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
Editor's note: In this reflection, the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity introduces a series on leadership development and explains why cultivating people is a crucial task for today's Christian leaders.
Years ago, several denominational executives summoned me to discuss recruitment for a yearlong leadership development program for young clergy. As the meeting got underway, it became clear that they were particularly concerned by the fact that the program was enlisting youth ministers.
Why, they asked, did I think youth ministers were leaders?
These denominational leaders believed that leadership is limited to people with certain roles and titles, with work that has particular scale and scope. They were -- and are -- not alone.
Training opportunity: Send your staff to Foundations of Christian Leadership (link is external), a formational program that cultivates theological and practical imagination in emerging leaders
In the Industrial Age, American Protestant congregations and related institutions all too often adopted a mechanical view of their employees. Leaders could afford to hire more people and push ineffective or inefficient employees to the side. With labor plentiful, it was far easier to bring in someone new than to cultivate talent within the current employee ranks. Everyone was replaceable.
Today, the distinction between leaders and followers is increasingly complicated in most organizations. In many places, nearly all the employees are involved in producing services, managing budgets and developing relationships.
Given the complexity of the challenges most companies face, innovative solutions are needed in every aspect of the work. Improving services, controlling costs and managing multiple priorities is the work of every employee.
These challenges require employees, across levels and roles, to exercise leadership skills to understand the situation, make sense of how to respond and involve others to make things happen. They also require senior leaders to adopt a new mindset about nurturing talent to prepare employees at most levels of responsibility to work in this increasingly complex environment.
The mindset that informs the way many organizations look at developing leaders is more akin to agriculture than to industry. Those with responsibility for guiding the organization cultivate the conditions for the work to flourish. This means cultivating the people.
In practice, this means considering every assignment as both a project to be accomplished and an opportunity for leadership development. A critical aspect of developing leaders is assigning all employees work that is small enough to do and big enough to matter. In an interview with Faith & Leadership, longtime Reformed Church in America executive Ken Eriks describes executive team meetings in which senior leaders identify staff members who show potential and then look out for assignments that will stretch them, even if such assignments are outside the individuals’ job descriptions.
In the midst of a massive realignment and reorganization, the RCA invested in sending many of its staff to a single leadership conference. Employees also took the same leadership inventory so that they could help each other understand strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Suzii Paynter, the chief executive of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, describes similar efforts with a feedback tool and seminars for the entire staff. When she came into office a year ago, she tripled the number of staff members who report to her and made a plan to encourage individual and team development. Paynter now has a “senior” staff of old hands and younger people. She is creating the conditions for them to help each other as they experiment, learn and experiment again.
Eriks and Paynter have been shaped themselves by the processes they describe. They are receiving feedback and figuring out their own work in the midst of developing others. Cultivating others and cultivating oneself are interrelated.
The phrase “leadership development” often conjures images of a classroom, a ropes course or a psychological test -- and indeed these are valuable exercises. Many initiatives (including Leadership Education at Duke Divinity (link is external), which publishes Faith & Leadership) offer such carefully designed learning experiences.
These experiences are part of Leadership Education’s work, which is to encourage leadership development efforts within the larger, theological vision of cultivating thriving communities that are signs of God’s reign.
In five years of offering such educational programs, we have discovered that congregations and institutions need to encourage particular practices to prepare leaders to navigate current challenges.
Those practices are:
- Making developmentally appropriate assignments
- Adopting a common language to describe the vision for the ministry and the current conditions in the world
- Structuring meetings to reflect the most important aspects of the work
Encouraging experimentation
One strategy that does not move the needle very far in developing leaders is performance evaluation. I have been approached many times to share the “best” performance evaluation tool with a congregation or denomination. The fact is that a conversation is the best tool.
Institutions need a simple, fair system for evaluation and goal setting. It is important to solicit feedback from members or constituents. But the most helpful feedback focuses on needs and opportunities, not the performance of an individual for the purpose of determining the person’s pay. No amount of effort devoted to developing an elaborate performance system will be worth as much as what groups like the Reformed Church in America and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship are doing.
Meeting the challenges congregations and institutions face today requires a strategy that is more basic, radical and ongoing than annual performance reviews. It requires a mindset that can be cultivated by considering what you are learning in the midst of the challenging assignments you face. How can you encourage others to take on challenging assignments and learn from their experiences?
Those denominational executives that I met years ago did not stop my training for youth ministers and all sorts of other staff people in the denomination. Today, that denomination has a host of leaders now assigned to developing programs and addressing challenges. Leadership development is ultimately about preparing future generations for the work.
Read more from David Odom »
Develop leaders with a $50,000 grantLeadership Development Grants from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity nurture an institution's strengths and cultivate innovative leadership development practices. Apply by March 31, 2017, for up to $50,000 to fund a yearlong project to develop your staff and volunteers.
Learn more and apply
THE CHURCH AND MENTAL HEALTH: The Reimagining Health Collaborative at Duke Divinity School Do you feel called to work for the health and wellness of your community? Does your church have health ministries in place, but long to do more? Does your church want to work with other congregations and organizations to develop theologically-based wellness programs in your community?
The Reimagining Health Collaborative invites churches and Christian communities to engage more fully in God's healing and restoring work through innovative and faithful practices of health and health care. This year's cohort will focus on the church and mental health.
Approximately 45% of Americans will develop some form of mental illness - especially depression, anxiety, and substance use. Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents and adults. Living with mental illness, particularly serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is filled with both challenges and opportunities. The church must be equipped and energized to respond faithfully.
Your congregation is a great fit for RHC 2017: The Church and Mental Health if:
Your congregation feels called to learn from and to walk faithfully with persons with mental illness in your congregation and community.
Your congregation wants to explore and discover new models of ministry, and develop a lasting relationship with another organization within your community.
You believe God is at work healing and restoring the world in Jesus Christ, and want to participate in this healing work.
To learn more, please see the program page. Applications must be submitted to DukeTMC@div.duke.edu by April 15th, 2017.
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Leading Congregations and Non-profits in a Connected World: Platforms, People, and Purpose by Hayim Herring and Terri Martinson EltonThis new title in the Alban library shares emerging practices for leading and organizing congregations and nonprofits in our increasingly networked lives. Drawing on studies of congregations across denominations and nonprofits with historic ties to faith communities, Hayim Herring and Terri Elton share practical, research-based guidance for how these organizations can more deeply engage with their communities and advance their impact in a socially connected world.Learn more and order the book »
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VISIT OUR WEBSITE
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 101
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
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