Humble and Strong: Mutually Accountable Leadership in the Church
126
Humble and Strong: Mutually Accountable Leadership in the Church
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819224088 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 126 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
HUMBLE AND STRONG
MUTUALLY ACCOUNTABLE LEADERSHIP IN THE CHURCHBy Gerald W. Keucher
Morehouse Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Gerald W. KeucherAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2408-8
Chapter One
THE CONTEXT OF LEADERSHIPOnly that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.—William Butler Yeats
WHEN A CONGREGATION stumbles, there may be various external reasons that include changing demographics, financial setbacks or large-scale recession, and shifts in private and public funding for programs. Congregations generally stumble, however, because of internal factors such as conflict, depleted endowments, or serious deferred maintenance. Leadership, however, is always critical. A congregation can fail to thrive even with good leadership if the members are in constant conflict, the building problems are overwhelming, or if there are insurmountable external factors. No matter how favorably a congregation is situated, however, I have never seen one thrive without leadership that is humble and strong.
Yet does humble and strong leadership really matter that much? Despite Jesus' example, throughout history there have certainly been Christian leaders who were arrogant, ambitious, narcissistic, and careless. Individuals may not have liked them personally, but the institution of the church continued to do well. I think that humble and strong leadership especially matters today, however, because of two related factors.
First, belonging to a church is now truly voluntary. For the first time people are in church only because they want to be. Christendom, a society in which Christianity is favored by social and legal pressures, is no more. Long gone are any norms or social expectations encouraging church attendance in most parts of this country; if anything, social pressure now goes the other way and it is not unusual for churchgoers to feel a bit apologetic about being observant when they are with their non-churchgoing friends.
Since people now go to church only because they are searching for something, some religious leaders complain about a consumer mentality that has taken over. The church must now offer the "product" the consumer wants, so the grumbling goes. I think this charge is largely unfair: people come to church because they are looking for things like meaning, connection, community, an authentic experience of God, opportunities to serve others and to confront injustice, the healing of past hurts, and the beauty of holiness. They do not come to see and be seen or to satisfy superficial lifestyle choices. This means that when they come, they need to find signs that the life-transforming experiences we advertise are authentically on offer.
If this is a bad thing, we really have only ourselves to blame. We relied so much and for so long on the threat of hell that it lost its force. We tried to control people's actions and to limit the scope of their inquiry, but the fear of punishment and the threat of social ostracism no longer works except in highly controlled and sectarian communities. Personally I think it is appropriate to rejoice that we are done with the distractions and distortions that come with conformity to social and cultural orthodoxy. To be sure, our current position requires some significant adjustments. If we were living in a church-going culture, we wouldn't have to spend time talking about why people do, or might want to, go to church; it would be one of the givens of the culture. In that situation we can rely on cultural norms and social pressure to get the people inside the door.
In a post-Christian and secular culture, however, we can assume nothing. There will be no familiarity with bible stories or church ways. A young woman told me once that she had been "raised lapsed Catholic," meaning that she had been baptized but had never been to church. Her children may well not be baptized. If this woman and her children are going to be evangelized, it won't be on the basis of threats of punishments or promises of rewards, both of which create the same unhelpful psychological dynamic. Hectoring, didactic, doctrinaire approaches are not going to work.
Instead, such people will seek out the church either because they have perceived some kind of longing or desire, or they have felt something is missing. A colleague who has taught comparative religion in private schools observes that when someone wants to be a Buddhist, she learns spiritual disciplines and practices. In Christian inquirers' classes, however, the emphasis is mostly on history, doctrine, and what makes our particular tradition superior. I think that those who come to us are looking for connection rather than correctness. The idea that in each of us there is a "God-shaped hole" is a useful way of describing how many experience their spiritual seeking. The church's history and creeds are important, but they are secondary. First comes some kind of sense that here you can find what your soul longs for—seekers need to apprehend that God can be met and experienced here. Good leadership is vital in making the community open enough and patient enough to let seekers move at their own speed.
Another way of describing this search is to say that people are responding to the pull of what Yeats calls "the irresistible," something that does not teach, cry out, persuade, condescend or explain. What would a presentation of the gospel look like that did not depend first on catechesis, oratory, systematic argument, authoritative teaching, or explanation? There will be plenty of time for all these necessary activities once someone has responded to the pull of the irresistible. Our normal ways of trying to teach, persuade, or threaten seekers into relationship with God have proved quite easy to resist.
In the Acts of the Apostles, it is Christians' lives that are the irresistible attraction. When the jailer in Philippi sees that Paul and Silas have not escaped from prison despite being freed by the earthquake, he asks, "What must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30), which I think can be interpreted as, "How can I become like you?" Those who have found the God-shaped hole in themselves and those who are responding to the gentle tug of the irresistible need to apprehend somehow that the connection they seek can be found in our communities.
This may be a way of bridging the gap that has developed in recent years between "spirituality" and "religion," whereby people increasingly define themselves as "spiritual but not religious." The definitions of spirituality vary, but it seems fair to say that people use "spirituality" to speak of what feels like an authentic interior experience, while "religion" is taken to mean the organized beliefs and ritualized observances of a group of people. A common perception on the part of those who don't attend church seems to be that "religion" is all rules and outward practices that tend toward the exclusion of other paths to God. This perception is often warranted because churches frequently present the beliefs and the rules first, and are not shy about making exclusivist claims.
It might be that if, in our dealings with seekers, we pastors were attentive to the inner experience that has brought the person to us, we might not have to persuade and convince. We don't have to waterboard people with doctrine. When people can speak of their longing and their experience, catechetical formation won't need to be imposed; they will ask for it because they'll want to satisfy their thirst for the living water.
The Problem of Authority
The fact that the church is now truly a voluntary association where seekers expect to find authentic Christianity means there also has to be a change in how the church is led. The kind of top-down leadership no longer works that worked when the church was assumed to be part of the general culture and institutional affiliation was much more important than it is now. People are suspicious of traditional authorities, so to speak about how leadership in the church has to change we need to look briefly at changing concepts of power and authority.
Power is the ability to do something, including making someone else do something. Power at its most basic resides in the brute strength necessary to accomplish certain outcomes; a mob has the power to kill a perceived criminal, for example. Authority is different. It is power that is conferred within a community of people in a way the community views as legitimate. In our community courts, not mobs, have the legitimate power to punish wrongdoers. If people are in any kind of community, they must share to some extent a common source of authority; if people look to the same source of authority, they are by definition part of a community.
The conferral of authority in a community may be informal, so that the group recognizes someone as wise or experienced enough to be tacitly given certain powers. Extended families and groups of friends often confer authority in this way. Informal authority can be found in the workplace alongside of, or even in opposition to, the organizational chart. Parishes, especially family-sized ones, frequently operate through informal authority: no matter who's on the vestry, Betty still calls the shots. Many contemporary megachurches in effect confer authority informally by recognizing the founding pastor who originally gathered the congregation as the legitimate leader.
Some informal conferral of authority is almost universal in human groups. In a group of three or four friends, one will likely be acknowledged informally as the sparkplug that gets things going, the one whose opinion the others seek out. Because these situations are unstructured, there can be trouble if the group grows beyond a certain size. Then people begin to question how eligibility for leadership is determined, how leaders are selected, how long they serve, and what happens when the leader needs to be replaced. There can be, and frequently are, troubles when the informal ascription of authority proves inadequate to the size or complexity of the organization, or when it is necessary to provide for a successor to the leader. When those founding pastors try to make their position hereditary, rough sailing is often the result.
Communities usually have a formal structure that confers certain powers on a person by virtue of the position she holds in the community. For example, the powers of the presidency are conferred by the constitution and by statute on the president. On taking office the president is authorized to exercise those powers. The larger the community and the longer it has existed, the more likely it is to have a formal structure of authority with rules that provide who can choose the leaders and what powers they are authorized to exercise and for how long. As the community becomes an institution, the more likely it is that its members will come to believe that simply by achieving a certain position one can exercise effectively the powers that come with the office.
It was probably never really sufficient for a leader to say, "Because I'm in charge and I said so," and certainly not today. Authority, remember, is a combination of power and legitimacy. When institutional loyalties are weaker, you don't get the legitimacy you need just from being chosen in accordance with the rules. The ability to exercise effectively, the power of an office, no longer comes automatically with the office; it must be earned. Certainly a new rector or a new bishop will begin with a reservoir of goodwill and will usually be cut some slack as he or she settles in. However, that reservoir will be quickly drained by a few high-handed or careless actions. If those continue, the leader will find herself still able to exercise the powers of her office, but she will not have the kind of influence that inspires and moves hearts. She will not get the cooperation necessary to move the organization forward because her leadership lacks the kind of legitimacy necessary to elicit it.
Most church leaders, like the leaders of many membership organizations, do not have a lot of executive authority. They can't move the organization they lead through their efforts alone. The members are volunteers, not staff that can be fired. Leaders must work with semi-autonomous auxiliaries, committees, boards, and related agencies, all of which have their own constituencies and interests. Leaders must inspire and gain the trust of these bodies in order to accomplish anything. That is what I mean by saying that influential authority is now absolutely necessary to effective leadership. The former National Executive Director of the Girl Scouts, Frances Hesselbein, when asked in an interview how she accomplished so much without concentrated executive power, replied, "Oh, you always have power, if you just know where to find it. There is the power of inclusion, and the power of language, and the power of shared interests, and the power of coalition. Power is all around you to draw upon, but it is rarely raw, rarely visible."
What Hesselbein is saying is that for leadership to be effective, the authority that comes with the office must be accompanied by the informal recognition among the people that this person authentically embodies the community's values and aspirations. In other words institutional legitimacy is not enough for effective leadership; the leader must also be regarded as a worthy occupant of the office.
When Leadership Fails
In fiercely contested presidential campaigns people sometimes say, "If X is elected, I'm moving to Canada!" The moves rarely take place, however, for two reasons. In general we trust our constitutional structures sufficiently that we will put up with an administration we can't abide, both because we'll get another chance in four years and because we have term limits. Besides, although the president is an important figure, our everyday lives take up more mental space than our preoccupation with the national government.
In many churches, however, there are no terms limits for the ordained leadership; rectors can stay indefinitely, and bishops have life tenure. We have no built-in safety valve. People don't know when the leader will leave, and it's usually pretty messy to try to get rid of a settled minister. Churches are different in another way as well—few organizations hold a membership meeting every week. Inadequate leadership can't be ignored when it's in front of you every Sunday. I imagine we have all had the experience of attending services led by someone whose leadership we simply cannot respect. It is not pleasant, and we will generally try not to undergo the experience very often. We may not move to Canada because X is elected president, but we are likely to vote with our feet and leave when church leadership disappoints or disillusions us.
This sense of disillusionment is not wholly new. Christians have always struggled with the discrepancy between our talk and our actions. They aspire to show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith, and want no less from their leaders. At certain points in their history Christians' dissatisfaction with poor leadership has threatened schism, as when the Donatists of the fourth century decided that the ministries of bishops and priests who had renounced their faith under persecution were invalid, and barred them from repenting and returning to their leadership positions. The anti-clerical Lollard movement of fourteenth-century England focused on the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, its leaders and its ties to government. Both these movements were related to the perceived "unworthiness" of the ministers and the church of their day.
The church's response to complaints about the unworthiness of the minister is both theologically correct—that the validity of the sacraments does not depend on the worthiness of the minister—and exactly what one would expect an institution to say. A priest in a state of mortal sin can still administer a valid baptism or eucharist because the sacraments depend on God's action, not on individual merit. Indeed, who is worthy to lead the Lord's people? Yet the institutional convenience of the position is also obvious.
Most people, I think, could be brought to understand and agree conceptually with this position. It would be an administrative nightmare, and impossibly subjective, to try to monitor the "worthiness" of all the clergy. Nevertheless, on the ground such monitoring occurs regularly among the faithful, while people seem less and less willing to accept the ministry of one who comes across as inauthentic, high-handed, or hypocritical. They'll go to another parish or simply stop attending church. If they stay because of their love for the parish, they may reduce their giving or attend less frequently, and certainly won't respond with enthusiasm to anything the leader proposes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HUMBLE AND STRONG by Gerald W. Keucher Copyright © 2010 by Gerald W. Keucher. Excerpted by permission of Morehouse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixIntroduction: Leadership as Craft....................xi
Chapter One: The Context of Leadership....................1
Chapter Two: Humility and Strength....................15
Chapter Three: Things That Twist Our Vocations....................37
Chapter Four: Ways to Stay on Track: Eleven Suggestions....................67
Chapter Five: Leadership in Action....................93
Suggested Reading....................125
What People are Saying About This
“Practical and wise. Reading this book is like sitting down with a seasoned mentor and talking about what the church is really like and what it could become. Father Keucher reminds us that there are dragons that must be slain on the way to becoming effective leaders.”
—The Rev.
Kenneth H. Brannon, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Sun Valley, Idaho
“Humble and Strong is the kind of book that I would have found so vital at the beginning of my ordained ministry forty years ago. It is rich with sound, practical advice that has too often been left unsaid.
This is a must read for all who are beginning their ordained ministry and for those who mentor them.”
—The Rt. Rev. Rodney R. Michel,
Assisting Bishop, Diocese of Pennsylvania
“A practical, topic-by-topic study of both the spirit and work of church leadership. What makes this book different is its straightforward,
unsentimental, and carefully reasoned approach to ministry. Keucher manages to approach deeply spiritual issues in a thoroughly practical way, and explores practical matters without failing to note their spiritual dimension. Overall, this book instructs and gently disciplines the leader in the best tradition of church service while remaining strikingly contemporary in attitude and style.”
—The Rt. Rev. Paul V.
Marshall, Bishop of Bethlehem
“Plain speaking about important truths. Powerfully authentic."
—The Rev.
Canon William F. Geisler, co-editor, The Annual Tax Guide for Episcopal
Ministers