07.12.07
leadership begins with listening
While stopping in to visit Todd Hiestands‘ blog this morning, located as a result of his most excellent paper on mission in suburbia, I found a link to an article I had missed at ALLELON. The article is titled as above, and the author is Ryan Bell.
Wow.. intriguing bit of synchronicity. Those who visit regularly will know I finished a ten part article series on “leader as listener” just recently.
Ryan opens his article like this,
“Leadership begins with listening”
“This [Summer Institute] is not about experts and answers”
“This is about finding the resources amongst us.”
“These were the opening remarks made by two of the facilitators at last week’s Allelon Summer Institute, which convened at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. This is going to be difficult to pull off, I thought to myself as I settled into my chair. I had heard these affirmations before and experienced their truth in my own leadership, but when you gather at a famous Theological Seminary and bring an All-Star line up of Biblical scholars, theologians, leadership gurus and church growth experts as the speakers, you’re going to have to prove to the group that this isn’t about experts dispensing answers.
It’s odd to me that I can sometimes work with two parallel threads in my head, and the connections only become clear later on. In the case of the ten part series, which at least has proven useful to a few others, the parallel strands that later connected for me are these: entering a creative commons, and the power of shared attention. Put another way, the connection was between conversation and leadership; or framed yet another way, recovering the dynamic of a missional, egalitarian movement and the power of friendship. This transitional place we are in, this strange and often frightening liminality, has the power to open new and surprising spaces for us.. spaces where we can learn a new dependence on God and together find a new way forward – a new way that is really an old way, the Jesus way.
