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In the past twenty years leadership has been one of the prime discussion topics in the western church. I came into the discussion myself in the late 80's, initially with only a passing curiosity. Around 1998 I dove in with interest, primarily because I was disenchanted with the models and discussion I was seeing and hearing, but also in part because I was discovering that I was a person who influenced others.
To date my greatest inspiration has been those who have written about "moral leadership," people like Robert Greenleaf and Richard Quebedeaux. And with the generation younger than myself, I have been inspired by heroes like Flavius Maximus in "Gladiator," William Wallace in "Braveheart," and even Frodo in "The Fellowship of the Ring."
Increasingly I have found myself less enchanted with the direction set by John Maxwell and company. I can't fault his work per se, and a few of his tapes I have found almost profound.. but the analytical approach no longer grabs me. I am no longer content to discuss leadership in isolation from the context of healthy, working communities.
In part this comes from a conviction that the New Testament does not make any such separation. Paul's discussion in Ephesians 4, for example, places leadership in the larger context of the body and the purpose of the Head of the Church in giving gifts... "that all may reach the fulness of Christ." Increasingly I feel that there is a wholeness in God's creation and call, and that we lose its essence when we overly rationalize and separate one element out as more important than another.
Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey, pp. 1-1
I've said all this by way of introduction. Now I need to be more self-disclosing in order to frame some questions and make sense of a new direction.
Around 1997 I was attending a Vineyard conference in a small town when the teacher began speaking from the gift of knowledge. He pointed out a number of individuals and "read their mail." I knew two of the individuals he pointed two, and his insight was accurate and his manner loving and affirming. I knew his gift was real and that his heart was aligned with the heart of the Lord.
My wife was the third person he pointed out, and I was the fourth. He spoke to me about a ministry to prodigals, and then he said that the Lord had anointed me as a leader. While I was an elder in a small church, I had never thought of myself as a leader. It's true that I had always been a seeker, often dissatisfied with the status quo or the prepared answer. I had never been in a official position of authority, and I didn't see myself as a leader.
But as I looked back at my life I saw influence, and I began to see something new about the nature of leadership.
New Directions for Leadership
The mirrors of popular culture cry for our attention. In modern culture the heroes were the Clint Eastwoods, Arnold Schwarzneggers and Sylvester Stallones. Suddenly instead of the confident hero and powerful hero we have Frodo. In place of the intimidating Schwarzneggers and Stallones we have Neo. Both Frodo and Neo are self-doubting types who rely heavily on the community around them for a sense of identity and purpose. Indeed, while they have a sense of the need, and willingness to carry heavy burdens of responsibility, they may not even know the first step on the journey.
"I will carry the Ring to Mordor.. though I do not know the way."
One of the blocks to my own ability to see myself as a leader was a cultural understanding that leaders are people with knowledge, power and authority. It's true that I had some knowledge... I had an earned MDiv from a well established seminary. But since 1995, I seemed to have more questions than answers.
What if leadership has more to do with finding meaning than in setting direction? Then the lack of a map may not be a big problem. In fact, in a time of transition, when the old maps have become useless, the confident leader who knows the way forward could be a handicap.
In transitional times, when the old structures are falling and we must move forward "to a city we have not seen," we need listeners and tinkerers. We need listeners because no one will find the way forward alone; there is too much data, and too much that is apparently contradictory. The way forward is a communal way because we each have part of the answer; leaders who are listeners will discern the voice of the Lord through many parts of the body, and "in a multitude of counsellors there is safety."
"The conductor conducts by being conducted. He first hears, feels, loses himself in the silent music; then when he knows what it is he finds a way to help others hear it too. He knows that music is not made by people playing instruments, but rather by music playing people." (Isaac Stern in China)
We need tinkerers, because the pace of change has moved us far beyond the old frameworks and methods. Leaders in the modern world were focused on efficiency, and that focus was based on elements that could be quantified and controlled. We now know that we know far less than we thought we knew. When we assume we have all the information we need and can control even the human variables, we are like the captain of an ocean liner who carefully steers around an iceberg.. forgetting that what we don't know and can't control makes up the greater part of the unseen reality. Working with the unseen elements of growth requires intimate connection and comfort with process and paradox. As a result we need those who can are not afraid to fail, and can playfully experiment along with others on the way forward.
This means we must resist establishing a direction too early. We need leaders who are comfortable with chaos. "Strange attractors," in the world of physics cause order to emerge from apparent chaos. In building empowered communities "strange attractors" are like guiding principles or values and have more impact on individual behavior than good management. Leadership is de-centralized, less visible, but more potent than ever.
Postmodern leaders resist taking control because they know that focus is more important than individual behaviors. Taking control would mean replacing individual initiative, and re-centralizing authority, thus impeding the natural development of community. If our goal is to be in control, we needn't worry about the growth of community; a hierarchy will do. If our goal is to grow communities and to empower ministry and life, we dare not build a hierarchy. We dare not be the savior or the one with all the answers, or the only one who is indispensable.
One reason that leaders are quick to organize is that we lack confidence in the spontaneous ability of life to organize itself. Margaret Wheatley remarks,
"This world of a simpler way has a natural and spontaneous tendency toward organization. It seeks order. Whatever chaos is present at the start, when elements combine, systems of organization appear. Life is attracted to order -- order gained through wandering explorations into new relationships and new possibilities." (A Simpler Way)
Comfort with chaos also means comfort with fluid structures; inevitably there will be failure as we experiment and learn and fail. Failure isn't as important as we once thought, and we needn't fear redundancy. We need to become more interested in finding meaning than in building structures or establishing order. Wheatley comments that, "We instinctively reach out to leaders who work with us in creating meaning" (Leadership and the New Science, p.135).
Leadership as Meaning-Making
Wilfred Drath and Charles Paulus pursued this direction in a book titled "Making Common Sense: Leadership As Meaning-Making in a Community of Practice." (Publisher: The Center for Creative Leadership).
Drath and Paulus argue that the old understanding of leadership rested on a set of assumptions about human nature and motivation. The dominance-cum-social-influence view assumes that humans are naturally at rest and that they need a motivational force to get them going. The meaning-making view assumes that people are naturally in motion, always doing something, and that they need, rather than motivation to act, frameworks within which their actions make sense.
We constuct knowledge from our experience, and this constitutes our understanding. Understanding consists of "a process of using meaning-making to construct knowledge about experience so that one is able to interpret, anticipate, and plan. Meaning-making makes sense of an action by placing it within a larger frame, and this farme is seen by the person who makes sense as the way the world is and thus guides [them] in their way of being in the world." (page 3)
From this theory comes an important difference and a powerful advantage. When we no longer see dominance and social influence as the basic activities of leadership, we no longer think of people in terms of leaders and followers. Instead, we can think of leadership as a process in which an entire community is engaged. "This enables us to disentangle power and authority from leadership. Authority is a tool for making sense of things, but so are other human tools such as values, work systems, and goal-path structures. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process through which people put these tools to work to create meaning." (p.6)
Drath and Paulus have helped me make sense of my own world; I have never been a "dominance" style or directive leader, yet I find that people listen to me and come to me with questions. As a result I have influence, and have become a mentor for a few. Rather than offering answers I have found that my role is to engage in honest dialogue and reflection with them and help them learn new questions and discover new perspective. This ability to name and interpret life is an essential quality of discovery and growth, which is in turn at the heart of making meaning.
Too often our leadership models, so heavily tied up with views of authority toward efficiency and productivity, perhaps from our own need for control, or fear of chaos, result in our missing the context and essence of leadership. While attempting to build secure and lasting structures, we destroy the ethos of community. Employing faulty models of leadership while trying to build living communities is like spraying a healthy grape vine with herbicide instead of fertilizer. Margaret Wheatley comments on self-organizing systems:
What leaders don't know, others know. The knowledge is out there in the community. The question then becomes how best to foster the rich connectedness and participation that will result in the growth of all. If this sounds very much like Ephesians 4, it should! Here I'm going to make an aside with a long quote from an article I wrote two years ago.
Leadership, Fathering and the Giver of Gifts
Teachers have generally focussed on the fivefold gifts of Ephesians 4 and neglected the flow and completeness of the passage. Naturally, teachers tend to focus on leadership issues because they are leaders, and the lens they use to view the world is a leadership lens. We live among a leader fixated people, in a power fixated age! We need to recapture a servant mind. Let's look more closely at Ephesians 4 and then at the parallels in Hebrews 8.
(Now this, "He ascended" - what does it mean but that He also first descended into
the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is also the One who ascended far
above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and
some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry,
for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of
the knowledge of the son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of
the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and
carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning
craftiness of deceitful plotting, but speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all
things into Him who is the head - Christ - from whom the whole body, joined and
knit together by that which every joint supplies, according to the effective working
by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of
itself in love. 4:8-16
The passage opens with relational or experiential unity in verse 2 and 3 ("unity of the Spirit," and "bearing with one another in love") and then moves immediately to a sweeping panorama of unity ("one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.") Next Paul focuses on the victorious Giver, who "ascended on high," and moves through the listing of gifts ("he gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists and pastors and teachers.") Paul then mentions the direction of these gifts ("equipping the saints"), and ends on two notes: the functioning of the healthy community ("joined and knit together by what every joint supplies,") and the means of growth, love! The body "upbuilds itself through love," the primary task is relational and on that note Paul closes one of the most often quoted passages in the New Testament.
Our focus has typically been the governmental function, and not the community function. In our desire to establish proper order, and in our over concern with authority, we have missed the flow of the passage, with Christ the Giver at the center and the outward flow of love in gifting to the body.
Perhaps we as leaders have been too focussed on our own significance in the community. Perhaps we have been pushed in that direction both by our teachers and our followers. Our culture has itself been management rather than relationship focussed. Our task orientation (we leaders are mostly male) has itself pushed us away from the dimension of mystery and toward management and control.
Larry Crabb, in "The Safest Place on Earth," comments that we have a choice: we can be either managers or mystics. Most of us feel somewhat out of place in community: we don't always feel safe and community itself is a mystery. We prefer structures we can understand and control. The problem is, God is less interested in predictability and control than we are! Or, from another perspective, He wants to be the one in control, and He doesn't always tell us in advance what He is up to!
Traditionally we think of fathers as the ones in charge. We picture a pyramid, with fathers on top, then mothers and children below. This is a classic image of patriarchy and it fits well with the old paradigms of management and control. In Part II of theological reflections we'll look more closely at the New Testament teaching on fathers and authority. For the moment let's focus on the One who is at the center.
"He Ascended on High"
In Ephesians 4: 8-10 Paul writes that Jesus ascended on high "that he might fill all things." From that place of kingly authority he gave gifts to men. As part of His victory and His rule from on high Christ distributes "as he wills."
Now consider Hebrews 2:3,4, where God's great salvation is attested "by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will." It is part of Jesus' work of salvation to give gifts to ALL His people (given "to each" for the "common good" 1 Cor.12:7). It is His fullness in us that together we are His body (Ephesians 1:23).
The implication is that we His body physically manifest His glory, or fail to do so. We manifest His glory and say YES to His will when we honor the work He has done. Part of "the great salvation" which we may be guilty of neglecting is not discerning the body. Have we failed to honor His will as He distributes gifts to His people? The gifts that God places in the body are a witness to His great salvation.
The "fullness of Christ" in Eph.4:13, or the "whole body working properly" of 4:16 is precisely the correct interrelation of the ministries of 4:11,12 - in line with the divine unity of 4:3-6. We have tended to individualize this, in step with our self-focussed culture, by focussing on the gifts of a few or on the maturity of individual believers. We have tended to make ministry into something done by the few to the many, and then read this approach into Scripture.
But it is completely out of line with the flow of the chapter to center all this on the maturity of the individual believer. The phrases "unity of the faith," "mature humanity," and "measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" refer to the divinely coordinated ministries of the body.
Incredibly, it seems that it is precisely the diversity of giftings and multiplicity of ministries of the body that will bring harmony. It's a measure of our failure to attain significant relationships that we haven't come anywhere near this, and have even feared it and restrained it. Our failure to be true communities has left us with the only reasonable alternative: we have become managers rather than mystics. We live with only a shadow of true community.
If this is not true, then why do we value the working of a few gifts so much more than others? Why do we fail to create a place where all these gifts can function together, and in fact imply by our order of meeting that only a few gifts (and a few people) are really important? Jean Vanier comments,
Two years ago my wife traveled to a conference in the north to assist in the ministry there. Called on spontaneously to do workshops on spiritual and emotional healing, she proceeded to lead two sessions. In spite of the good things that happened, the high point was at the end of her second workshop.
As she was finishing and women around the circle were sharing, the turn came for a young lady seated beside her. This woman was mentally challenged.
She said, "I just came because my spiritual mother came. And I just love the Lord. And I know he is healing me because I can walk better today, and my arthritis isn't hurting me so much. And I just love Jesus and all he has done for me."
When she shared this the Spirit suddenly came in power, and my wife found herself weeping and rejoicing in the goodness of God. God didn't need her to elaborate, and the simple words of this woman of faith said it all.
We have much to answer for, and it's frightening! Do we think ourselves greater than God that we can neglect his sovereign will? If we haven't really seen his glory in his church, it is partly because we have not released the fullness of the Spirit's ministry. (For more on this discussion see Elijah is Coming and Tabernacle and Temple and the Church in Transition).
* * * * *
That was then, and this is now.. back to "leadership as meaning making."
One of the lovely metaphors from quantum physics comes from the discovery that while we know some things about particles and their connections, we haven't discovered where the power in the particles comes from. We know that it is not in the particles themselves. Some imaginative theorists speculate that that the power is in the blank spaces. Others theorize that the power is in the connections themselves. The meaning-making view of leadership sees it as a process in which everyone in a community is engaged.
The traditional view of leadership not only unrealistically isolates certain behaviors from their context, but confuses authority and leadership, a confusion of means and ends. Understanding leadership as a communal process can help us work at empowering the entire community to participate in leadership, as well as sort out the differences between certain individual traits (dominance, intelligence, risk-taking etc.) Those we term "inspired" leaders are often the people who are able to express formulations of meaning on behalf of a community -- they name what people have in their minds and hearts -- a gift that can seem supernatural.
Leaders who are anxious or over-responsible work too hard and don't allow blank spaces, self-organizing dynamics or spontaneous connections. And leaders who are indispensable can actually disempower individuals and create apathy or dependence. Everyone wants to contribute when they know their contribution is uniquely theirs. When leaders are overconcerned with their own visibility or centrality they become like the cork in the bottle, the narrow place that actually restricts creativity and growth. Working with the unseen elements of growth requires intimate connection (community) and comfort with process and paradox. Not every leader is comfortable with relational dynamics and the mysterious elements of community.
Meaning-making involves both naming and interpreting, as well as values and commitments. We commit ourselves to what we value and what we understand as worthwhile. We make commitments to the meaning we see, to ways of naming and ways of being in the world. The process of leadership also involves these commitments.
When cultures collide, as modernity and postmodernity are currently doing, those who find themselves caught in the explosion can feel that their world no longer makes sense. Old paradigms collapse, and the frame of meaning is lost. Those who are meaning makers tend to be listeners and observers, and they join the process of communal searching and learn to ride the shock waves.. they contextualize meaning and discover a new way of making sense of the new world. They arrive at a liminal place.. a place between the two cultures where new conversations are possible, and new possibilities arise.
Mort Meyerson, chairman of Perot Systems, says that the primary task of being a leader is to make sure that the organization knows itself. Margaret Wheatley comments that "we must realize that our task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about who we are, who we've just become, who we still want to be. This includes the interpretations available from our customers, our markets, our history, our mistakes. If the organization can stay in a continuous conversation about who it is and who it is becoming, then leaders don't have to undertake the impossible task of trying to hold it all together. Organizations that are clear at their core hold themselves together because of their deep congruence. People are then free to explore new avenues of activity, new ventures and customers, in ways that make sense for the organization." (Goodbye Command and Control, in "Leader to Leader," 1997).
Liminal places are typical of all transitional spaces; they breed anxiety. They cause us to question our old identity, while failing to provide solid new anchors. But they are powerfully creative places, places where the Spirit of God loves to rest and to speak.
These liminal places force us to let go of formal security, based on outward things like title or position, and search for inward security, based on less definable things like our sense of being loved by God.. our identity hidden in Christ. Simultaneously, when we let go of familiar anchors, we go deeper on the journey that takes us closer to Christ. That in turn impacts all our other relationships. The leader who has no inner journey is merely a manager, a spiritual technician, not an explorer and fellow pilgim walking forward in faith. Margaret Wheatley again,
"All this seems true to me, but I think the story is more complex. Leaders managing difficult personal transitions are usually simultaneously opening new avenues for people in the organization. They are moving toward true team structures, opening to more and more participative processes, introducing new ways of thinking. They are setting a great many things in motion inside the organization. These ripple through the system; some work, some don't, but the climate for experimentation is evident. A change here elicits a response there, which calls for a new idea, which elicits yet another response. It's an intricate exchange and co-evolution, and it's nearly impossible to look back and name any one change as the cause of all the others. Organizational change is a dance, not a forced march." (Goodbye Command and Control, 1997)
New leaders that are rising in the postmodern milieu are those unafraid to walk forward into the unknown. Like Abraham, they are rootless in this world and so willing to let go of the old security, seeking a city that is to come.
Walter Brueggemann's recent work "Cadences of Home" works toward a framework for survival for exiles. He concludes that the church model that dominated the modern experience was one that arose in the stable period of the Israelite monarchy, a relatively short period in Israel's history. The conditions that produced that model and made it workable were swept away in a cultural geo-political upheaval.
That upheaval is not unlike that which we are experiencing in our own time. The model that has worked while Christian culture was dominant is now being swept away. There are signs of collapse everywhere. Even those who are not theologically reflective feel the tension and the "cognitive dissonance...." The western church is losing its connection with the culture, and where it most accommodated itself to the old culture it is most
irrelevant.
Thankfully, the monarchical model is not the only model for the church in culture. Brueggemann finds other models in the Old Testament, rooted in times of exile and transition. "How will we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Even our familiar lands are rapidly becoming foreign to us; this is a time to rediscover that "we are strangers and aliens here..." Brueggemann notes that the response of exiles is shaped by Isaiah 40-55.
Get you up to a high mountain,
"How beautiful on the mountains
As we deconstruct, and as we tentatively look for the presence of God in the desert regions, let's find a way to utter those fresh, subversive, and liberating words. Because whatever we make of the current situation, we can't despair..
Because OUR GOD REIGNS.
Whatever has been lost, much more will be gained, because these three abide..
FAITH, HOPE, LOVE.
God's sovereign newness is wild and free, amazing and spontaneous, unpredictable and fresh.
But it will come.. OH YES.. it will surely appear. Brueggemann closes his work..
"We can only stand in readiness for what God may do.. that standing requires the use of intentional disciplines that in every case are marked by danger:
But in this place of intense insecurity, the Lord tells us that we belong and are intensely cared for:
But now thus says the Lord;
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• © 1999-2003 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on June 1, 2003
