Alban at Duke Divinity School at Durham, North Carolina, United States for Monday, 1 January 2018 "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Follow your stars?" - Alban Weekly
Faith and Leadership
L. Roger Owens: Follow your stars?
Bigstock / Bashkatov
I'm sometimes jealous of those star-following magi we call the wise men. They walk briefly onto the stage of history with one task: pay homage to a newborn king. They have found their vocation, and they pursue it single-mindedly.
Leadership expert Jim Collins would be proud. The magi epitomize what he calls a "hedgehog": they know one big thing. They've discovered what they can do best.
They follow their star.
That's the prevalent vocational advice we give to both leaders and organizations: Focus. Discover your passion. Live and work at that one intersection "where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," as Frederick Buechner famously put it.
I've co-authored a book that gives this very advice to declining congregations: discover the one thing you do best, then prune, prune, prune your list of programs and ministries. And I think it's still good advice.
Most of the time.
Because I know there are leaders who have heeded that advice and yet can't wrestle their communities into committing to just One Big Thing. Their organizations simply won't follow just one star. Their tentacles of service and commitment stretch too far.
And at 42, I look at all my efforts to find that one thing -- my one star -- and realize, sadly, that I'm running out of time. I'll likely never develop a single expertise; my areas of gladness are too diverse for me to acquire complete mastery. I'm condemned to be a generalist, or (as I imagine others call me) a dilettante.That is, until I consider this one liberating possibility: maybe vocation doesn’t have to be a single star. Maybe for some of us -- leaders and organizations -- vocation will be more like a constellation, several stars forming a coherent image, each star burning bright at different seasons of life.
In that case, discerning vocation lies more in finding the pattern among one’s various gifts, passions and gladnesses and letting each one shine brightly at the right time.
I saw this at work in my own life recently. I left a pedagogy workshop to finish my reading for the course I was taking on spiritual writing but instead turned my attention to my application for a spiritual direction training program. I’m also working on leadership, preaching and spirituality syllabi for my seminary’s new curriculum.
And what I’d really love to pursue -- but don’t have the money for -- is a master of fine arts in creative writing. I have a couple of children’s novels outlined.
When I have this many irons in the fire, I feel the weight of Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly’s judgment from 80 years ago: “Before we know it we are pulled and hauled breathlessly along by an overburdened program of good committees and good undertakings.”
But I take heart when I see others who also have many irons in the fire. I’m thinking of a new missional community in an economically distressed borough near where I live.
Three Thursday nights a month, the community hosts a neighborhood meal. They engage in a ministry of empowerment called Circles out of Poverty. They host legal and health clinics, sublet their space to an adult day care ministry, and stay active in community development. They offer two Bible studies a week, and they worship together each Sunday night.
I can imagine a consultant looking at this community and seeing their energy dissipated in too many directions.
But I see something else: a community committed to discerning what God is up to in the wider neighborhood and joining in. It’s a coherent constellation with several stars, because God seems to be up to quite a lot.
And when I’m being generous, I can see the same in myself. Taken together, my interests outline my overarching joy in helping individuals and communities become open to what God is doing in their lives and respond in faith.
Sometimes I do that through writing, sometimes through teaching, sometimes through speaking, and sometimes through sitting with an individual and helping her discern her vocation -- whether a single star or a constellation.
There is a danger that the image of vocation-as-constellation can be used as an excuse for distracting ourselves from our vocations when they get difficult or boring, when acedia sets in. Individuals and communities should remain mindful of this danger.
But a bigger danger I’ve discovered is that the lure of expertise -- the siren call of specialization, with its promise of both mastery and recognition -- might cause the constellation that is my vocation to become lopsided and eventually unrecognizable.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves the gift of ignoring the conventional wisdom, the gift of allowing ourselves to be guided by a constellation -- many stars that form one picture -- without feeling guilty that our vocations don’t conform to the expectations of others.
They are, after all, our vocations, not someone else’s. And who knows? Maybe I’ll write that children’s novel.
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: VOCATION
Faith and Leadership
Warren Kinghorn: Busyness, business and vocation
Bigstock / Madrabothair
Christians are called to be busy -- but not in the way that busy Christian leaders might want to believe. The Christian way to be busy is not busyness but business, says a psychiatrist and theologian.I tell myself that I don’t like to be busy. During demanding stretches of clinical practice and teaching, when colleagues ask me how I am doing, I reply, “Too busy!” and receive, in response, sympathetic and knowing encouragement. When I am fighting multiple deadlines, or waking from one too many nights of inadequate sleep, or lamenting how little I’m able to exercise or pray or simply visit with friends, I dream of the day when I will be less busy.
Actions, though, speak louder than words. The truth, if I am honest, is that I do like to be busy.
In a world that respects production, being busy is a sign that I am productive. In a world in which economic value is a function of demand, being busy is a sign that I am in demand, and therefore valuable. In a world where important people are busy, being busy is a sign that I am important.
Conveniently, being busy also allows me to avoid the burdens of quiet and solitude. If I am busy, I need not face myself or my fears. If I am busy, I can pursue my chosen vocation without ever asking what I am called to do. And even if I do ask, I will not have the time to listen for an answer.
Busyness has become a sort of virtue for modern leaders. We admire leaders who can “multitask” and hold together multiple and competing priorities -- leading and living (maybe even parenting!) all at the same time.
There is a glimmer of Christian truth in this notion of “busyness as virtue.” Christians are indeed called to be busy -- but not in the way that busy Christian leaders might want to believe. For the Christian way to be busy, it turns out, is not busyness but rather business.
The English word “busy” traces its roots to the Old English word bisig, meaning “careful or anxious.” To be busy with someone or something is to care for that person or thing. It is this root that also gives rise to our modern English “business,” which in previous centuries described both the practice of caring and the object of caring, the focus of one’s attention and concern.
This latter sense of “business” is evident in the King James Version’s rendering of the boy Jesus’ reply to his parents in the temple: “I must be about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49). It is also evident in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” when the ghost of Jacob Marley famously rebukes Ebenezer Scrooge. Quite apart from the countinghouse, Marley tells Scrooge, “mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Business in this sense is indeed a Christian good, a fulfillment of the call to care for the needy and oppressed, to steward the earth and its resources, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. Business in this sense is not necessarily linked to institution building, profit making or fundraising --though all of these may be essential to carrying out that call.
But if “business,” understood as concern for God’s ways and faithful care for God’s creatures, is a Christian good, then clearly “busyness” -- the state of being busy -- is not. Busyness is business eviscerated; it is activity with all the trappings of business but none of its content. It is a sham virtue.
When I am busy, I am indeed filled with care for many things. But care for many things is not, in itself, a Christian good. It all depends on for whom and for what -- and why and how -- I care.
If my activity seeks to prove my worth to myself and to others, or to ward off a deeper spiritual hollowness, then it is busyness, a front for idolatry. But if my activity is marked by the sustaining life of the Spirit, if it seeks to honor God and the dignity of God’s creatures, then it is the business of the kingdom of God.
It all depends. Either way, Spirit-breathed activity may look different from what passes for being busy in our day. Jesus may not have looked busy as he walked up the mountain to pray. But with every step, he was busy, filling the time with the work of prayer. Though alone, he was in many ways just as busy as when he was surrounded by huge crowds, healing the sick and feeding the 5,000 at Galilee (Matthew 14:13-23).
In all of this, though, I am encouraged by the example of friends who have successfully navigated the boundary between busyness and business. David Kasali, for example, is a New Testament scholar who left the presidency of an evangelical seminary in Nairobi, Kenya, to return with his wife to his native Democratic Republic of Congo to found the Bilingual Christian University of the Congo(link is external). Against many obstacles, in a region that lacks dependable government or business infrastructure or even reliable electricity, the university is empowering Congolese leaders and local communities to rebuild a country scarred by economic exploitation and civil war.
Dr. Kasali is a man of many cares. But I have heard him speak movingly of a time when, as president of the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology, he became exhausted and took a year to rest and recover. That year, he said, was marked by long and uninterrupted nights of sleep, by quiet walks alone for prayer and reflection, by unhurried time spent with his wife and young family. Describing the tranquil pace of that year, which enabled him to return to Nairobi and eventually do the work required to found the Bilingual Christian University, he said, “It was very, very busy.”
Indeed, it was. But only someone who is busy with his Father’s business, and whose vocation is indeed a call, could say something like that.
Faith and Leadership
VOCATION
Kathleen A. Cahalan: "Calling All Years Good"
Many Christians, if they think about vocation at all, think of calling in terms of young adults. Our churches, schools and campus ministries must embrace a lifelong understanding of vocation and equip their members to engage in the practices of discernment, the professor of practical theology writes in a new book.What would a lifelong perspective do to our understanding of vocation?
This is the animating question in the recently released “Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation throughout Life’s Seasons,”(link is external) edited by Kathleen A. Cahalan and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore.
In the introduction, Cahalan writes that she began exploring a theology of vocation in 2010 through the Collegeville Institute Seminars(link is external). Cahalan, a professor of practical theology at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary, realized that focusing on the young adult years in vocational research and nurture was too narrow a frame for a process that unfolds and evolves over the course of a life.
The following is an excerpt.
A Theology of Calling: Lost but Found
At the outset of the Seminars’ work on vocation, we decided that rather than reframing the idea of vocation and teaching it to people we would first attempt to understand how people, primarily those in churches, understand their life as a calling. What operative notions of vocation exist in the Christian community? Is vocation a meaningful way that people interpret their lives, or is it trapped in outmoded notions from the past? What would be most helpful to people if we invited them to reframe their understanding of vocation, drawing insights from the tradition as well as engaging new frameworks? Or is the idea or very term “vocation” beyond repair and too corrupted by historical interpretations to be of much use to us today?
Over the past five years, under the direction of the Seminars’ research associate Laura Kelly Fanucci, we have gathered hundreds of people -- Protestants and Catholics -- in small groups, primarily in congregations, and asked them to reflect on a series of questions: What is my sense of God’s callings in my life? How can I learn to listen to God’s call? How do I live out multiple callings in service to others? How have challenges and struggles shaped my callings? How is my vocation changing over my lifetime?
What we heard from these participants shaped our work in profound ways. First, most people in our small groups had limited, mostly nonexistent, experiences and conceptions of God as Caller. Remember, these were people from various churches who volunteered to participate in a six-week program to think about their life as vocation. For example, Jay described his life in terms of multiple commitments and joys: marriage, children, and extended family. He described his skills as a financial analyst and his ability to help others make difficult decisions. He spoke of how he found God in others, especially as a father, husband, leader, and little league coach. Jay felt gratitude for his life, and he wanted to give back to the community. But at the end of our first discussion he concluded: “But I don’t know that I’ve ever been given a calling.”
Second, when asked about vocation most people tend to refer to the major commitments clustered in the young adult years pertaining to work and partnering, as I initially did. When we engaged college students they expressed anxiety and fear that they might miss God’s one call. They assumed that there is a single answer to the question of vocation and once they find it, discerning callings is mostly over. But framing vocation as decisions made in young adulthood left most other adults, especially as they get older, feeling that figuring out callings did not have much to do with them.
Third, those people who could recount stories of having a sense of calling as a child or a teen tended to discount their religious experiences or lacked a way to talk about or interpret the experience. Operatively, their notion of a calling that comes from God remains rather calculating, too easily imaging God as having a definite plan or will for them. Discernment constituted figuring out this deeply held secret or having direct access to God’s wishes. Experiences of hearing or seeing, having a dream, being grasped or drawn to an activity or a place, giving extensively to community or religious organizations, identifying and utilizing particular gifts, or being invited by another to share those gifts -- these common experiences were not framed as calling experiences.
If people examine their lives through the lens of calling, they do it primarily through what psychologist and contributor to this volume Matt Bloom calls “retrospective sense-making,” looking back and creating a narrative to make sense of their lives and discovering God’s hand at work in the past. Few people we talked to either looked inward or forward to consider how God might be calling them now and in the future.
Fourth, most communities are not places of calling -- that is, communities whose vocation it is to draw forth each person’s callings as well as the vocation of the whole community. We found that congregations, schools, and campus ministries generally do not engage people in the practices of vocation. For instance, many people reported that their small group was the first time they had been asked such questions. In relationship to work, for example, a majority said their pastors and congregations had rarely asked them about their job or profession, what they did, why they did it, what they loved, and what they were good at. Those who were retiring had little opportunity to explore the new horizon of callings in the next part of life. Generally, the key practices of vocation -- discernment, prayer, and storytelling -- are not fostered in congregations, the most obvious places where one might expect such activities to occur. Religious education, sermons, and sacraments or other celebrations seldom address vocation or foster vocational conversation, especially across the lifespan. We also found that most people did not pray about their callings or seek guidance and direction from the Spirit or from others, especially when they were younger and deciding what to do, where to do it, and for whom. The majority of people did not have a listening practice to hear God’s guidance, such as regular prayer with scripture or a silent meditation practice. Most significantly, they had not learned to foster a relationship with God who is understood as the “Caller.”
Finally, the language of vocation was not compelling for most people. When we began we suspected that we would find outmoded Protestant and Catholic theologies -- that vocation is equated with work (Protestants) or has to do with states of life (Catholics) or with a call to ministry (both) -- and we did to some extent. But what we mostly found is that people had no idea what the word “vocation” means. The term almost always fell flat: people did not know what it referred to in greater depth. As a central doctrine and vocabulary of the Christian faith, vocation is nearly gone.
However, when we heard people’s stories we began to see that what traditionally would be referred to as the “language of callings” was everywhere: meaningful relationships; powerful experiences of being given something to do; purposeful work, skills, and abilities experienced as gifts; confirmation about who one is; a sense of gratitude; struggles through transitions and painful loss; aspirations to serve others; and a desire to give themselves to God’s people for God’s purposes. In fact, people have a deep sense of calling in their lives but they often lack ways to make sense of it.
RECOVERING THE LANGUAGE OF VOCATION
What, then, happened to the language of vocation, a language that was once rich in the Christian vocabulary? In modernity, many Christians held narrow views of divine power and purpose that portrayed a provident all-powerful deity who makes blueprints for human lives. Such an image proved untenable, and by the twentieth century many had tossed it into the dustbin of useless religious concepts. Furthermore, vocation became a doctrine to be believed in rather than a lived practice. It functioned primarily as a noun -- what is my vocation? -- rather than as a relationship, a process, or a creative endeavor. The language of calling became static and fixed rather than dynamic and fluid, something church and academic theologians might talk about but not something everyday people needed to consider.
And yet the language of calling is everywhere. What Christians have largely lost, others have discovered. The titles of several books about “calling” demonstrate the way in which it has become the language of the secular age: Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life; Your Personal Renaissance: 12 Steps to Finding Your Life’s True Calling; The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life; Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. The New York Times featured a series entitled “Vocations” in the business section for a short time; it is now called “What I Love.” And the evangelical pastor Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life has sold millions of copies, prefers the language of “purpose” over that of “vocation” or “calling,” but he is essentially talking about the same reality.
The search engine Google Ngram Viewer tabulates the frequency of words, now covering about five million books. Terms such as “purpose” and “meaning” have grown in usage since the 1900s, rising steadily up to today; “calling” also has had steady usage. But the term “vocation,” the least used of the four terms, gained some steam around the 1920s, but dropped considerably by 2000. While not a scientific study, word usage reveals that the language of “purpose” and “meaning” has gained ground as the culture has become more secular. The term “calling” certainly leans more in a nonreligious direction despite the fact that “calling” and “vocation” are nearly synonymous terms.
What secular writers on calling have discovered is that vocation is a deeply human quest. What is the purpose of my life? To what shall I give myself? Whom shall I serve? Such questions are at the same time both frightening and exhilarating. They press for an answer. Terms like “purpose” and “meaning” also seem like they offer a greater avenue than the term “vocation” for considering change and development across the lifespan. However, these secular understandings of calling have deep roots in the Christian tradition’s claim, whether these authors recognize this heritage or not, that each person is made in the image of God, has inherent dignity and worth, and lives with a purpose shaped by divine initiative. Moreover, our culture’s “expressive individualism” prizes the notion that each person has an inner nature, truth, or self that drives toward expression. Such common or popular notions of calling in the broader culture are influenced by an unnecessarily singular focus on human well-being at the expense of community, the animal world, and the environment as well as divine life and its purposes. In large part, theological sources for vocation have been severed from its broader cultural meaning today. But as we reframe vocation in this book, we see that the Christian tradition gives us a much broader framework that honors the deeply personal and individual character of calling but claims this human quest as fundamentally communal and divine.
Excerpted from “Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation throughout Life’s Seasons,”(link is external) edited by Kathleen A. Cahalan and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, published by Eerdmans. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Faith and Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT
Christian Peele: My work as an operations leader is pastoral
Varied skills, gained in a parish and the White House, work together to inform the shape of my call's expression, writes an executive minister at The Riverside Church. A widening of the traditional understanding of the pastor's role feels necessary as the church takes on new and unusual shapes.Right after I graduated from divinity school, I spent six years in ministry in Washington, D.C. I like to think of my time inside the beltway as my theological coming-of-age, because my experiences there were so deeply formational. To this day, nearly everything about how I live into being a pastor bears the mark of what I learned and lived in that post-seminary season in the district.
The never-ending buzz of life in a 20-something group house taught me that putting the love in beloved community takes sacrifice (and is worth it). Dancing nights away in Columbia Heights dives taught me that joy is a virtue. And regular strolls along the banks of the Tidal Basin taught me that saying yes to peace takes a lot of practice.
The two most intensive places of learning for me during that time were the ministry contexts where I spent most of my waking hours. The first was the Church of the Saviour(link is external), one of the most progressive faith communities in the country. The second was the Obama White House, one of the most powerful institutions in the world.
At first glance, the two couldn’t be more different. The plots of “Touched by an Angel”(link is external)and “The West Wing”(link is external) have a lot in common -- said no one ever. And while a church makes sense as a pastor’s training ground, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building feels like more of a stretch. Yet my experience of pastoral identity suggests that the things I learned in those two spaces are more connected than not.
As an associate in ministry at the Church of the Saviour, I had responsibilities for pastoral care, worship leadership and teaching in various ministries ranging from a hospice home that serves the poor to a coffee shop church called Potter’s House(link is external).
My day-to-day work tutored me well in a host of ministry how-to’s, including a particular principle that the community holds dear and that still informs my work: journey inward, journey outward(link is external). That is to say, the journey of faith for myself and those I’m called to serve is cultivated, sustained and expressed within and outside ourselves; faith is the process of inward cultivation that leads to outward transformation, and one without the other is incomplete.
My path then took me south on 16th Street, from the Potter’s House to the White House, where I transitioned from leading worship to leading operational strategy in the areas of staff, budget and technology.
One of my most significant takeaways from there was that the quality (say, excellent or mediocre) and nature (say, intentional or ill-considered) of an organization’s operations always accurately reflects the organization’s values. The way budgets are built and talked about, the policies that shape staff culture, who sits where and in what kind of office, and how technology preserves or tears down silos all reveal organizational and even theological assumptions about power, access, hierarchy, inclusion and life together.
In my current role at The Riverside Church in the City of New York, I serve as senior clergy and also oversee four operations-related departments, including finance and human resources.
Living fully into the role requires that I do more than use my various skill sets as though they were mutually exclusive, sometimes using what I know about parish ministry and at other times using what I know about business. That kind of code switching would assume that some skills are for pastoring and some skills are for management, when in fact all the parts of my training fold into one another to create a richer pastoral palette of approaches and ideas.
Taking seriously the fullness of my leadership training in those very different contexts means understanding that my work as a leader in operations is deeply pastoral. One of the outward expressions of a dynamic spiritual life, for me, is managing with excellence the operational systems of my very large church context so that they exemplify the values of our faith.
I’ve noticed that many of my pastor peers often call me dual-vocational, as a way of pointing to the uniqueness of my professional path. But my vocation is singular: I am called to pastor. My skills are many, but they work together to inform the shape of my call’s expression. That kind of perspective honors the broadness of all that ministry can mean. Indeed, a widening of the traditional understanding of the pastor’s role and areas of focus feels necessary as the church takes on new and unusual shapes. It also makes room for reclaiming as holy any faithful approach to work that those in church circles may reflexively deride as profane, corporate or business.
There is no better classroom than the world around us, and a pastor’s ability to think creatively and critically across the lines of context only enriches the nature of call and fruit of the church.
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be unapologetically urges clergy readers to develop practices that will help them become more excellent ministers.
A long-time field educator, now serving as a denominational staff person responsible for ministerial formation, Barbara Blodgett believes excellence is a matter of doing simple things with care and consistency. Ministers who commit themselves to excellence will grow and flourish, and even become happier in ministry. Blodgett urges ministers to resist praise and instead to ask for feedback, to seek the company of mentors who are better than the reader is at what he or she does, to be vulnerable before their peers in order to learn from them, and to define themselves as a leader who does not merely take activist stances but risks entering into deep, transformative relationships. Improvement in ministry, Blodgett argues, comes about not through extraordinary leaps and bounds but rather through adopting simple habits and carrying through on small but thoughtfully made choices.
Addressed to ministers, Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be is also a valuable resource for discernment committees, Christian educators, leaders of continuing education and lay education programs, and all those who partner with theological schools to help form ministers, both lay and ordained.
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
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