09.17.08

leadership and spirituality

Posted in life happens at 9:55 am by len

I need to make a confession..

I’m not a great leader..

I’m not very spiritual..

I am completing a doctorate on leadership and spirituality because I’d like to be more spiritual, and I’m still trying to figure out leadership. I try to pray regularly..  not because I am great at prayer, but because I really need practice.

I am with Brian McLaren, who writes in Finding Our Way Again not that practice makes perfect, but that it makes possible what we could not do otherwise.

I think that I would be both a better leader (what does that mean) and more spiritual (ok I have some idea on this one) if I learned to follow Jesus more closely. That is my deeper goal. It takes practice. I think I am slowly learning. If it is hard for me, I can barely imagine how difficult it must be for those who have formal leadership roles and a thousand people around them looking for concrete answers.

God help us.

* * *

A package arrived this morning with four books (five actually, but one is for a friend). They are ..

Practicing Our Faith by Dorothy R Bass
New Monasticism by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Models of the Church by Avery Dulles (Expanded)
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Kline

Unrelated, Jesus Radicals links a paper by William Cavanaugh: “The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization.” Shades of Vinoth Ramachandra, only in sacramental color with Anabaptist foundations. This to me represents a very hopeful convergence..

The paper (Modern Theology, 1999) HERE.

4 Comments

  1. robin dugall said,

    September 17, 2008 at 11:05 am

    I echo your confession…thanks for being humble and vulnerable.

    Robin

  2. Michael Creel said,

    September 17, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    A friend of mine says that one definition of being a disciple of Jesus means to be willing to spend the rest of one’s life being wrong/getting it wrong.
    Which made me sort of cringe when I first hear that. After all, I thought I was a fairly decent leader & spiritual kind of guy.
    But i’m probably wrong (sigh).

    Thank God for Amazing Grace . . .

  3. Brian Niece said,

    September 17, 2008 at 6:39 pm

    This resonates with me. I AM in leadership and I DO have people looking to me. Sometimes they are looking to the wrong person for the answers they can find in conversation with Jesus, and in community with each other.

    Nevertheless, I have just been realizing my failures in recent months. Practice certainly does not perfect … it only makes us vulnerable, and supple, and available.

    Shalom.

  4. jonathan said,

    September 18, 2008 at 5:24 am

    to quote shaq “Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”

    but on a serious note, i heard a man say we always talk of following Christ but He wants us to be Christ. 1john, abide in Me and I in you. there is the time He calls us to follow, “come and see, if any man doesn’t pick up his cross and follow me”, but then came the moment He sent them out alone. And that was better for them He said. maybe leadership is learned when you are no longer learning…when there are no answers and you have to fall on the strength of Christ. when words fail and problems rise and we look to the mountains for our help to come.

    but i don’t know. i’m just thinking.