01.05.10

Hauerwas on leadership

Posted in community, leadership at 5:00 am by len

I was delighted to see Paul Fromont’s link to this interview. Hauerwas is not only an incisive thinker, he refuses to embrace a cultural reading of ecclesia or leadership. This interview has some important nuggets and I’ll comment on a few items.

“Leadership can’t be abstracted from the communities that make it possible, says Stanley Hauerwas, a Duke Divinity School professor considered to be one of the [United States of America's] most influential theologians.”

To me that is nearly a stunning statement. A couple of things seem quite obvious.

1. this is counter to the assumptions of most of the leadership literature. But our rediscovery of a theology of place and the importance of context is pushing us in this direction.

2. it has always been true — but we “forgot” it through the univeralizing force of modernity.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“…Power is rightly one of the gifts God has given us for the formation of good communities and good people. The way you put the question presupposes that you might have an alternative. You don’t. You have to discuss questions of how you discover those among you with gifts necessary for the whole community…”

Is this even a consideration when it comes to senior leadership positions in most communities? Having abstracted the congregation from its context, we abstract leadership from the community. It then becomes possible to import a leader from afar, hoping that our structures and ethos are universal enough that any “universal” leader can simply plug in. And then we wonder why we can’t seem to become a “real” (rooted?) community.

Neil Cole comments on this dynamic in his excellent bit of work titled “Organic leadership.” He writes that there is only one clear case of recruitment into an established ministry in the New Testament. There are plenty of good reasons for this. Paul leaves behind leaders (Timothy, Silas and Luke) on his second missionary journey and then arrives alone in Athens (133). This doesn’t go well and he never does it again. Instead, leaders are grown naturally in the fields where they work. This ensures there is never a shortage of leaders. Neil comments that in fact recruitment is a practice of subtraction — taking people from one ministry to work in another. Reproducing leaders from the harvest and for the harvest is a practice of multiplication. “We all want fruit, but Jesus wants us to BEAR fruit, not to BUY it.” (135 – yes, leadership too is a fruit – the fruit of healthy, Spirit empowered community).

“The recognition of limit is a good discipline for discovering what kind of institution you actually should be…”

“The church’s liturgy has been a history of constant innovation. Innovation should occur in a way that we recognize continuities through time. It was a bad innovation when the revivalistic structure overtook the church’s primary liturgical form in a way that charismatic preachers replaced the centrality of Eucharist…”

Whoa. That is a loaded statement. When we made the ministry of the Word central but then later connected that ministry to the sola pastora model, and then to the cult of personality, we failed to recognize how far we had drifted from a biblical understanding of ecclesia. We were intensely shaped by the cultural forces of modernity. (David Fitch The Great Giveaway addresses some of these issues very well). It’s interesting to see the growing interest in liturgy, and in particular in the Eucharist — in stops and starts we are exploring a recovery of biblical ecclesiology at the same time as we are recovering the missio Dei.

“People called to administrative positions have to undergo a deep ascetical discipline. You’re dealing with people who have possibilities and limits, the limits sometimes will drive you crazy, and you cannot take it personally…”

This reminds me of Jean Vanier: “The more we become people of action and responsibility in our community, the more we must become people of contemplation. If we do not nurture our deep emotional life in prayer hidden in God, if we do not spend time in silence and if we do not know how to take time from the presence of our brothers and sisters, we risk becoming embittered. It is only to the extent that we nurture our own hearts that we can keep interior freedom. People who are hyperactive, fleeing from their deep selves and their wound, become tyrannical and their exercise of responsibility only creates conflict. ” Hauerwas continues,
“You do this to provide space for the different gifts of the community. I’m very Pauline in this. Communities have diversities of gifts. Part of your responsibility as an administrator and leader is to help members of the community own them as contributing to the overall good of the community. To be in a position of power means that you recognize how fragile the power is. You wouldn’t have it otherwise. And you have enough confidence that you don’t have to win all the time. That’s a real ascetic discipline, a discipline of the ego, which is absolutely crucial for being an administrator and to allow the institution to go on once you’re no longer there…”

I was reminded here of Gary Collins, Good to Great. Gary makes the point of describing two types of leaders. One type, usually charismatic, creates a dependent organization, and when they leave it falls apart. The other type is serving the organization. In an old article he writes,

“Almost by definition, an enduring great company has to be built not to depend on an individual leader, because individuals die or retire or move on. What’s more, when a company’s identity can’t be separated from the identity of its leader, it can;t be known for what it stand for. Which means it sacrifices the potency of being guided by its core purpose.

“So the charismatic-leader model has to die. What do you replace it with? The task that the CEO is uniquely positioned to do: designing the mechanisms that reinforce and give life to the company’s core purpose and stimulate the company to change.

“Building mechanisms is one of the CEO’s most powerful but least understood and most rarely employed tools. Along with figuring out what the company stands for and pushing it to understand what it’s really good at, building mechanisms is the CEO’s role: the leader as architect. “

Q: What do you tell seminary students who have designs on leadership?

“Don’t lie. It’s just very simple. Don’t lie to me. You may oftentimes not know what the truth is. Tell me that. Just don’t lie to me. It kills you, it kills me and it kills the community.

“The bottom line: politics is people. For any person that wants to be in leadership, if they try to lead in a way that means they don’t have to deal with people, they automatically defeat community. It is everyday interactions that make it possible for there to be people who tell the truth to us one at a time in the hopes that in that process we will be a truthful community…”

A Closing Note

Neil Cole reminds us that Luke 10:2 commands us to pray for workers for the harvest. He sets his phone alarm to go off every day at 10:02 so he will remember to pray. It’s a viral practice – let’s join him in it.

Related: the end of strategic planning?

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