2005 Book List

These are the books I finished reading since Christmas 2004:

• Velvet Elvis:  Repainting the Christian Faith
  Rob Bell
• Looking for God in Harry Potter
  John Granger
• Light from Heaven
  Jan Karon
• the out of bounds church?  Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change
  Steve Taylor
• a New Kind of Christian
  Brian D. McLaren
• The Last Word, and the Word After That
  Brian D. McLaren
• Breaking Barriers:  The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World
  Lyle D. Vander Broeck
• Mere Discipleship:  Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World
  Lee C. Camp
• In the Name of Jesus:  Reflections on Christian Leadership
  Henri J.M. Nouwen
• tuesdays with Morrie:  an old man, a young man, and life's greatest lesson
  Mitch Albom
• Walk On:  The Spiritual Journey of U2
  Steve Stockman
• Shake Hands with the Devil:  The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
  L.Gen Roméo Dallaire
• Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross:  Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition
  Hans Boersma
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
  J.K Rowling
• Divorcing Marriage:  Unveiling the Dangers in Canada's New Social Experiment
  Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow, editors
• Colossians Remixed:  Subverting the Empire
  Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
• The Age of Innocence
  Edith Wharton
• Pocket Full of Rye
  Agatha Christie
• The Road to Daybreak:  a spiritual journey
  Henri J.M. Nouwen
• Mudhouse Sabbath
  Lauren F. Winner
• The Slippery Slope:  A Series of Unfortunate Events
  Lemony Snicket
• The Illumined Heart:  The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation
  Frederica Mathewes-Green
• A Sacred Sorrow:  Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament
  Michael Card
• The Meaning of the City
  Jacques Ellul
• Evangelical Christian Women:  War Stories in the Gender Battles
  Julie Ingersoll
• The Resurrection of the Son of God
  N.T. Wright
• a Generous Orthodoxy
  Brian D. McLaren
• Blue Like Jazz:  Nonregilious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
  donald miller
• the Search to Belong:  Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups
  Joseph R. Myers
• ReImagining Spiritual Formation:  A Week in the Life of an Experimental Church
  Doug Pagitt

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Compassion in a Broken World

At Christmas it is almost impossible not to be confronted by the stark difference between the haves — who are busy supporting the North American economy in their purchasing of all many of goods, for themselves and for others — and the have nots — most notably those suffering from natural disasters, but also those in chronic poverty or societal dysfunction.

Compassion fatigue is, of course, also a very real phenomenon. We seem to be bombarded by stories of brokenness and need so often and so extensively that, in order to maintain our own sanity, we develop a short of blindness to all that pain and misery. It struck me that this is not unlike the way we deal with signs and advertisements, as I spoke of in my last post.

Curiously, however, I find that while stories of desperate need often pass over me without impact, I never fail to be moved by stories of compassion — stories of people reaching out and responding to the needs they see in the world.

Regrettably, I find that I am surrounded not by people telling and enacting stories of compassion so much as I am surrounded by people telling stories of need and competing with each other to tell their stories in the most graphic way, to seek the most attention. As I result, I find I am growing into a less compassionate person, rather than a more compassionate person. Just like with the signs, by trying to motivate or ask directly, instead of getting greater response, ultimately this approach gets less.

Sounds sort of like he who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, will save it", doesn't it?

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Signs: Asking or Giving?

Everywhere you look you see signs asking you to do something: vote for me in the upcoming election, buy this product, use this service, attend this concert, support this cause, give money, give time, give blood — each competing with the others for your attention. Eventually, these signs become invisible — or perhaps more accurately, we get so that we simply don't see them any more.

Church signs, for the most part, look just the same as every other sign — they advertise times and events, and given the genre, seem to be asking for your attendance, just as the other signs do. The information is useful to those who want it, but largely invisible to everyone else.

For the past several years, my son and I have been involved in changing a church sign every week. What has made this sign different is that we have tried to avoid as much as possible asking anyone for anything. Instead we have tried simply to give thoughts, insights, encouragements, reflections to whomever is passing by, whether or not they would ever come into our building, or identify themselves with us in anyway. To be sure, there have been times when the sign has advertised an event or service — along the same lines as other signs — but up until recently, we have been able to resist those influences that would tend to turn the sign into just another asking sign.

That time may be coming to an end — we've been getting repeated, and more pointed, requests to have service times up on one side more or less permanently. To me, this is a sad development — it seems in some way to be breaking faith with the community and selling out to the ask mentality. And so I don't know how long our involvement with that sign will continue.

From time to time over the years, we would get encouraging responses back, directly or indirectly, that these messages have been greatly appreciated in the community. We have learned of people who make a point of reading that sign whenever they pass, others who copy the messages down and disseminate them in other forums, and others who have been moved or encouraged at a particularly sensitive point in their lives. And, of course, a few who find something a bit too close to home, perhaps, and become irritated or offended.

Our intention, of course, is neither to offend nor to never offend, but simply to give something of value to the community — to give freely and indiscriminately, without regard to return. Much the way I think the gospel is intended to be given out. Hearing stories of how people have been affected is encouraging, but that is just pure gift, not something that drives the giving.

Many times, however, I feel that I am totally alone in this sort of thinking — our culture is so obsessed with seeing, indeed measuring, results. And our churches are no different. Consequently, to come upon something that another has written that sounds similar is so very encouraging. In this particular case, it is Rob Bell who writes in Velvet Elvis the following:

I am learning that the church is at its best when it gives itself away. ... God has no boundaries. God blesses everybody. People who don't believe in God. People who are opposed to God. People who do violent, evil things. God's intentions are to bless everybody. Jesus continues this idea in many of his teachings. In the book of Luke he says, "I am among you as one who serves." He not only refers to himself as a servant, sent to serve others, but he teaches his disciples that the greatest in his kingdom are the ones who serve. For Jesus, everything is upside down. The best and the greatest and most important are thones who humble themselves, set theirs needs and desires aside, and selflessly serve others.

So what is a group of people living this way called? That's the church. The church doesn't exist for itself; it exists to serve the world. It is not ultimately about the church; it's about all the people God wants to bless through the church. When the church loses sight of this, it loses its heart. This is especially true today in the world we live in where so many people are hostile to the church, many for good reason. We reclaim the church as a blessing machine not only because that is what Jesus intended from the beginning but also because serving people is the only way their perceptions of church are ever going to change. ... (T)he most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display.

Oftentimes the Christian community has sent the message that we love people and build relationships in order to convert them to the Christian faith. So there is an agenda. And when there is an agenda, it isn't really love, is it? It's something else. We have to rediscover love, period. Love that loves because it is what Jesus teaches us to do. We have to surrender our agendas.

I am learning that the church is at its best when it is underground, subversive, and countercultural. It is the quiet, humble, stealth acts that change things.

I wonder why it is so hard for us to see this.

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Alone

This morning I've had episodes of feeling profoundly alone. They are quite debilitating, making it impossible to work or focus on much of anything. I'd thought these had been left behind, but I guess not.

I wonder if that's how some people feel about Christmas — profoundly alone in the midst of all the "family togetherness time" language that surrounds the season.

For me today, recovery was generated by someone walking into my office to talk about distinguishing current versus long-term assets and liabilities with respect to the already convuluted pension accounting rules — totally unrelated to anything connected to the feelings of aloneness. Which, of course, makes me wonder if assisting the painfully alone might actually require less attention to the reason for the feeling rather than more — if perhaps those best situated to help are not those who identify with the pain, but those who simply engage the individual with the ordinary things of living.

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Suffer the Little Children

Today we witnessed our children's dramatic Christmas presentation at church — apparently the first such in this church's six year history (but don't quote me on that). Afterward we had another practice for our upcoming Christmas Eve drama.

As I was leaving following the practice, something reminded me of the first "adult" drama I participated in. My father had a role in a Christmas drama, and for some reason brought me along to one of the rehearsals. One of the men was absent — again! — and to help them out with the practice I was asked to read the part. By the end of the rehearsal, the part was mine. I was nine, I think, or ten at the very outside.

From those recollections, I was reminded of many other ways that I had participated in the worship life of that particular church community. I remember singing solos as special music on more than one occasion in the main morning worship service. I remember being appointed the official teller of children's stories in the evening service — the sort of stories that the adults are just as interested in as the children.

In a very real sense then, when I was baptized at age eleven and officially became a "member" of that church, it really was just ratification of what had been true for some time already — as a child I really was an active participating member of that faith community; a part of the body of Christ that really was being built up through my gifts as well as those of others.

I realized just how much so many of our churches have lost since then, in not making the spaces available for the gifts of all her members to be utilized in the life of the community, but rather relegating the gifts of so many to little ghettos rather than the service of the community as a whole.

Maybe that's the real tragedy in our ongoing arguments over style and technique and vision and the best way to enculturate the gospel — we are so focused on getting the stuff right that we overlook the gifts that the Spirit has given our churches in the persons of the "least" — in our eyes, if not in God's — of these members; whether children or other groups that are reduced to mere spectators.

Maybe too, it was the way that church we attended from the time I was five until just after my twelfth birthday included me as a fully participating member even as a child is what has kept me committed to this messed up way of being that we call church through all the struggles that came later.

Thank you God, for this reminder of how you have brought me to yourself through so many little, yet wondrous, ways. Teach us also how to recognize and value the gifts you give us in those little packages we rarely pause to consider.

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Conflict is not Wrong

"Conflict in itself is neither right nor wrong. Conflict is merely the lived experience of attempting to inter-relate with others whose experiences, assumptions, and usages of language are different from our own. It is what we do with conflict that is right or wrong."

This was a loose quote from Cherith Nordling in this morning's walking lecture; or more precisely a loose quote of her loose quote from a professor of hers some time in the past. It came up in the context of a discussion of theologies from the margins, and the recognition that the existence of the margins is prima facie evidence of a process or experience of marginalization, which means that there has been some profound wrong that has occurred in the lives of the marginalized.

For much of the past five years, I have lived in the context of a church community whose primary means of dealing with conflict was to suppress it, ignore it, or trivialize it. Only when the conflict became so extensive that these approaches could no longer contain it, was the existence of the conflict acknowledged &mdash and then, the most common approach taken was to demonize those with whom one was in conflict. Open and honest dialogue in an attempt to either find common ground or to understand the differing lived experience that gave rise to differences in assumptions, emphasis or expression simply did not occur &mdash perhaps in part because there was so little time available for such activity, time which was needed to be expended in "more important" matters such as the pursuit of vision.

The fruit of this pattern of dealing — or perhaps better stated, not dealing — with conflict was marginalization. And as people came to feel more and more marginalized, they tended to withdraw in various ways from participation in the community life. And the more they withdrew, the greater the tendency for others to discount their differing opinions, expressions, or experience as invalid, thus increasing the marginalization. And people left — not just people who had always been, as it were, on the fringe, but people who had once &mdash and often very recently &mdash been in the very thick of the community life.

The church community we are now part of wants to see itself as accepting of all sorts of people, and in particularly people from the margins — for did not Jesus go out to the margins of his society to proclaim his Good News? Ironically, a too common response of the formerly marginalized is a tendency to attempt to marginalize those they see as belonging to the "privileged" class. A prime example of this occurred last Sunday morning when the speaker, talking about the experience of marginalization felt by many women in our society, particularly around areas of crisis pregnancy — miscarriage, abortion, adoption, and the like — by her manner or speech, acted to marginalize the men in the audience. One man in particular, who spoke with me quite passionately following the service, was feeling overwhelmingly marginalized by a society in which male bashing by women in response to their experience of pain seemed to be constant and unrelenting; and most poignantly, often in the very area where empathy ought most naturally to be have been available. Of course, he spoke in language of retaliation; of "not taking it anymore" — a response that would inevitably marginalize women who had not themselves acted directly to oppress him. And so the cycle continues.

The questions this raises for me are these: If in the process of taking what I think is the Good News to the marginalized of our world, my manner or message results in the marginalization of others — particularly if consciously — is it really Jesus' message I am carrying? How do I deal with my own sense of marginalization, in a marginalizing community or society, in a way that brings the hope of God's salvation to other marginalized people without in turn attempting to marginalize those whose speech, behaviours, actions and inactions have marginalized me?

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My, what one less computer can do

Our household has been experiencing a bit of computer generated discomfort these past two weeks, with one less functioning computer. Two computers just don't seem to be enough to service five people, even with all our comings and goings and passing as ships in the night.

For me, it's been experienced in very limited blogging &mdash honest posting doesn't seem possible if you have to start with some unpleasantness in either kicking someone off a computer, or in asking the individual across the room to tone down the music, or whatever, so you can concentrate on thinking deeply out loud. I guess there is a certain element of privacy that is needed when opening up oneself, even to the public.

So, I certainly hope we'll hear back soon about Yvonne's notebook, in again for the third time since the summer.

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Pure and Transparent Relationships

In my early morning walks, I've begun listening to a summer school course on contemporary theologies by Dr. Cherith Nordling. Before getting into the genesis and specifics of various contemporary theologies, she reviewed the nature of trinity as eternal loving community.

The comment that particularly grabbed my attention and my heart was related to our eternal destiny — rather than being a "boring" existence sitting around, we are invited into the eternal loving community of Father, Son & Spirit. This means not only do we have perfected relationship with God, but our relationships with other people will be free of all the things that mess them up now. Indeed we will relate to each other in a pure and fully transparent manner, and be loved and accepted as we are.

To be fully known, to stand before God and others fully transparent, as my naked self, and feel no shame. Now that is an exciting prospect! And one that makes my heart sing!

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Of Language and History

This morning, on my usual early morning walk in the cold, I listened to a fascinating lecture by Dr. Sarah Williams, entitled Recovering Belief in History. Her doctoral and post-doctoral work has been in the area of Modern Religious History, a field dominated, she says, by a presumption of the secularization theory. As as result, the tendency has been to explain all religious change in the modern period by analysis of change in economic, class and other external social phenomena, and to disregard, almost by design, the language of self-reporting of individuals about their own religious experience and motivation. Dr. Williams expects that the rise of postmodernity will actual force a change in that situation, allowing (or requiring) serious historians to develop methods of investigation that bring the language and practice of belief back into the discussion of history.

Part of my own fascination with her talk was the connections I saw between her own scholastic world and the world of the churches of my experience, and my own frustration with the fact that "faith" was not something that could be discussed as it had actually developed in my own life and story, but something that had to fit into a pre-determined form that looked nothing like my experience.

But beyond that, there was much of her reports of the odd juxtapositions of folk and church belief in the lives of those she interviewed that made me think about how the language of church shapes, and mis-shapes, the life and faith of those exposed to it. As a result, my belief that we need to pay much closer attention to the effects of our language patterns in the church was re-inforced. How do we guard against the tendency for our language to promote a kind of "magical" understanding of the rituals of our faith, on the one hand, and also against the tendency of our language to promote a kind of "moralism" on the other?

Perhaps here too the rise of postmodernity, with its emphases on diverse forms of expression, will force us to multiply the metaphors and the media we use to express matters of faith — will force us out of our lazy habits of focussing too much on the one right form of expression, a habit that certainly plays into the hands of misunderstandings.

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Are We Too Sophisticated to Serve?

Blogger desertpastor invites dialog on the question Are We Too Sophisticated to Serve? His question raises one of my own: could it be, perhaps, that our language of Servant Leadership operates in some way for us as a rationalization for our own preference to pursue the advantages of leadership over the more radical, but far less glamorous, call to servanthood? I wouldn't want to suggest that this is necessarily the case for all, but might it not be something we need be aware of in our own lives?

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Every Man's Battle: A Metaphor

The sermon this morning was entitled Christmas Through a Man's Eyes, and was an articulation of the nature of a Godly man by means of a character study of Joseph, the husband of Mary. During the part about true sexual integrity, the statement was made that a truly Godly man is one who will change channels on the TV, will turn off the computer, will leave the theatre when necessary — when the content is problematic to his sexual integrity. It was at this juncture that I recalled an incident from the past and began to make connections between the struggle commonly attributed to "every" man, and those I have been encountering regarding the cultural language and mythology of Leadership.

Some years ago, we used to receive mailings from a Christian organization based in western Canada that went by the name of International Centre for Leadership Development, or something like that. It was sort of a mail-order bookstore specializing in all the popular Church Growth and Christian Leadership material — books, audio material, study guides, programs, spiritual gift inventories, and the like. The mailers were all high quality, glossy catalogs of material available. The thing about these catalogs, however, was the descriptions of the material. Never have I seen such over the top marketing hype anywhere — the superlatives were lavish and the promises beyond belief. The descriptions of the material were so overblown as to become obscene — no secular source would have made such blatantly incredible claims. I remember coming to feel dirty just from looking at these mailouts. Time and time again, I would promise myself that the next time one came in the mail it would go straight in the garbage without even a glance. But too often I would get sucked into opening it up and flipping through it, only to gag at the marketing hype.

In time, this reaction grew to extend to almost all Leadership type material. And eventually I responded the way Christian men are taught to respond to any sort of pornographic material; I banned anything remotely "erotic" from my reading list, my home, my vocabulary — in this case "erotic" referring to just about anything that touched on Leadership in any way, whether over-hyped or not.

A little over a year ago my colleagues and I took some clients out to the Cirque du Soleil when it was in town. I remember reflecting upon the performance of one particular pair of performers — one man and one woman — whom I sort of tagged in my mind as Adam and Eve, due in part to their costumes and in part to the way their performance began. There was, I was reminded, an incredible beauty to the unadorned human form, distinctly male and female, that God had created and originally declared very good. It struck me that this beauty was a thing to be appreciated and delighted in, as a good gift of God. And I was reminded of Peter's vision of the animals on the sheet, when God instructed him not to call anything unclean which God had made clean.

I know that some Christians would take serious exception to what I have just said. To them, the power of fallen human sexuality is so powerful that only by avoiding anything and everything that might be capable of arousing an inappropriate sexual interest — in effect everything sensual related to human form — can one be truly "pure" — something which is, admittedly, an incredibly difficult thing to do in such a sexually charged culture such as ours. This advice is, no doubt, appropriate advice for those who have fallen hard into addictive sexual behaviours — just as total abstinence is appropriate advice for dry alcoholics. Yet I have often wondered if perhaps the extreme nature of this advice is not in itself what has made sex into the battleground of supposedly every man, by unnecessarily transforming what otherwise would have been appropriate delight in God's good gift of the beauty of human form into something unclean — by making the simple recognition of value the sin, rather than the desire to possess what is not one's to own. Can one not fully delight in the beauty of the mountains, without being overtaken by the lust to possess them for oneself? Similarly, can one not fully delight in the beauty of a woman without being overtaken by the lust to possess her for oneself? Indeed, can the delight in the beauty of a woman not remind one of the delight one has in one's own wife — a delight that can only be appropriately enjoyed in the context of one's own marriage — in a way that is pleasing to the God who made them male and female? For myself, I have long found the answers to these questions to be Yes!, and have always endeavoured to make them so practically in my own life.

In reflecting on this whole matter, I can see how much I have been influenced by the thinking of those who demand strict avoidance of anything sensual in my own response to the challenge of the heavily charged Leadership language of our culture. But, as I concluded in my last post, this is not a viable solution for the long run. The encouragement I find in this current reflection is this: just as I have been able to find ways to live comfortably in a culture charged with the language and images of the Sex god without falling into sexual addiction on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to the beauty of the human form on the other, so too there must be a way of living comfortably in a culture charged with the language of the Leadership god without falling into idolatry on the one hand and without withdrawing from all exposure to leadership language on the other.

No doubt it will be harder to find my way on the Leadership side of this parallel than it was on the Sexual side, because I have had so much longer exposure to the dark side of Leadership. But today I am more hopeful that that way can and will be found.

Soli Deo gloria!

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On Leadership and Servanthood

This is a post I have been putting off writing, partly because it will be long, and partly because in many ways I am tired of the subject — it seems to be getting in the way of so much I want in my life and relationships. But at the moment, it doesn't seem like I am able to avoid the subject.

The Language of Leadership

In our culture, the word "leadership" is utilized in a number of related, and yet very distinct ways. At one level, leadership is simply a task performed by one or more individuals that assists a group in self-organizing and accomplishing something. In this sense, leadership is a needed component of any group endeavour. How it happens or how it is exercised depends on the context of the situation, and therefore can take a multiplicity of forms. Some individuals have skills that permit them to perform this task in a variety of contexts, while others have skills that rarely lend themselves to fulfilling this role except in unusual circumstances. For the time, and in the context, that an individual performs the task of leadership, we call him or her a "leader". I have no quarrel at all with this conception of leadership.

However that is not the only meaning of the word leadership in our culture — indeed, I find that it actually rare in our culture to encounter this meaning alone, without overtones of other meanings. It is with these other meanings of "Leadership" that this post attempts to engage.

Just last night I heard a woman who was about to lead our group in a short devotional period express her discomfort with what she was about to do by explaining, "I am not a Leader." In saying this, she was expressing a conception of Leadership that was much more than simply the task of assisting the group toward an end — for she was certainly capable of doing that, and indeed proceeded to do that in a number of ways throughout the evening. Her statement had to do with a complex of concepts that our culture has subsumed under the idea of Leadership.

One of those aspects of this complex of concepts that make up the idea of Leadership is that Leadership is some "thing" that resides in or on those persons who are "Leaders" — it is an essential aspect of those individuals' character, makeup, or person. This produces the kind of divisional marker that makes sense of my friend's statement — some people possess this something we call Leadership and other people do not. It also makes sense of the kinds of discussions that go on concerning whether Leadership is something is primarily inate or primarily learned, and the degree to which Leadership can be developed in an individual; discussions that would make no sense whatsoever if leadership were understood solely as a task in a context.

Now it is possible that one could speak of the loose collection of qualities, skills, character traits, etc. that tend to be commonly possessed by those individuals who find themselves taking on the task of leadership (in my first sense) in a wider range of contexts than others (and hence, more frequently than others), and refer to that by the shorthand label of "leadership". We use this type of shorthand language all the time, and if that were simply what we meant by "leadership" in this personal characteristic sense, I would again have no particular quarrel. However, even if that was how the language usage began, it clearly has passed beyond that. Consider my friend's statement, "I am not a Leader", and how it would be understood if this were simply shorthand: "I do not possess enough of the particular skills, qualities, character traits, etc. commonly associated with leading to be one of those persons who takes on the task of leadership in a wider range of contexts than others." Would that have made sense of what she meant in the context in which she said it? I think not. It would have been akin to someone who had been asked to lead a group of preschoolers to the playground saying, "I am uncomfortable doing that, because I don't have the skills to lead an orchestra (or circumpolar expedition, or whatever)."

Like it or not, and whether we accept the truth of the language or not, the language of Leadership in our culture is inextricably bound up with the idea that it is a particular, even if difficult to precisely define, collection of personal characteristics that Leaders possess and that non-Leaders do not. And by extension we assume that only Leaders can / should take of the task of leadership (in the primitive sense) — a non-Leader may do so in a pinch, but things would go much better if a Leader did it.

This leads us to yet another aspect of the way Leadership is used in the language of our culture. That is the idea that Leadership is what is needed to solve the problems that we are in, whether those be problems in the workplace, problems in the family, problems in the schools, problems in government, problems in socio-political realities of all kinds, problems in ecological systems, economic systems, legal systems, whatever. Leadership is the thing that will bring peace, prosperity and salvation to our world. It is this belief that drives us to study Leadership (in the sense of personal qualities) so as to find a way to bring more of it to bear on our problems. It is this belief that drives us to try and develop more and better Leaders — because our problems are so extensive we cannot see how we can be saved without it. It is this belief that drives us to bestow upon Leadership language of trust, commitment, honor, praise, worth &mdash in a word, worship.

Following the god of Leadership

Leadership makes quite an enticing god, when you think about it. Leadership promises to solve all our problems — not just secular problems but also ecclesiastical problems. Even more important, Leadership offers us personal significance in holding out that "You, too, can be a Leader"; vaguely reminiscent of the serpent's promise, "Ye shall be as gods!" Even better, we can justify our devotion to Leadership on the premise that Leadership is a gift given by God. What could be wrong with that?

Of course, the sun is also a gift from God, as is the moon, the rain, the harvest, sexuality, etc., etc. Yet we know that worshipping these things is precisely anathema to the true worship of God — you would find no debate about that anywhere within christian circles.

Committing oneself to trust in and serve the god of Leadership is not something one does deliberately as a concious act of rejection of God. Rather this devotion is something that develops subtly and slowly, often under the guise of trying to do the work of building God's kingdom. In a way, you can see the same thing happening in the lives of Annanias and Sapphira — their devotion to money grew alongside the activity of using money to promote God's kingdom.

In my own case, I have spent almost my entire adult life in some form of formal church leadership. Had you asked me, I would have been sure that this work of leadership was entirely about following God. It was only when I experienced a major leadership clash in the context of a group of men who were equally convinced that their pursuit and exercise of Leadership was entirely about following God, and saw the effect that that interaction was having on my own soul, that I realized just how soul-destructive a god Leadership really was. How devoted I had become to the Leadership god became evident in the extreme difficulty I had in giving it up.

Prior to this experience, I had gone through a major surgery removing a cancerous tumour from my right kidney, and found it easy to trust God through it all. A few days into the recovery phase, the tube delivering the analgesic to the epidural tap on my back became dislocated. The result was not simply a loss of the pain control, but also the generation of something like fire running up and down my entire spine. There was some confusion in getting in touch with the pain control doctor, and so I lay in bed for what seemed like an eternity with this fire, not knowing what was really going on. One thought was that an infection had taken hold in the spine, which could do who knows what sort of permanent damage. I distinctly remember considering the possibility that one outcome could be paralysis, and I distinctly remember knowing deep within my soul that even if that were to happen, God would be there with me and that it was far far better to be paralysed with God than fully healthy without Him.

The reality of peacefully trusting God in that circumstance, in the circumstances of my parents' deaths, and in the circumstances of other health or life and death situations stood as a marked contrast to my inability to trust God with the leadership of the church. That is to say, I could trust God intellectually with the church, but that did not translate into the deep gut level trust I experienced with life and death issues.

What about servant Leadership?

It is a commonplace in church circles to say that "out in the world" Leadership may well be this dangerous and unGodly thing, but that's because the world doesn't pursue the right sort of Leadership. We, on the other hand, know that the right sort of Leadership is "servant Leadership" — a softer, gentler form of Leadership that is concerned with the well being of people rather than the aggrandizement of self that comes from position. We even quote Jesus in support of this idea:

You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:42-45 (ESV)

Unfortunately, I don't think the idea of servant Leadership works, at least not the way I hear it used in actual practice. Every christian Leader I have ever met has considered himself or herself to be pursuing servant Leadership. I know I did. But is the fruit of this Leadership really all that different in the church than in the world?

The language of servant Leadership is not unique to the christian community — it has its proponents in the secular business world as well. In that usage, it means adopting the guise of a servant, doing things for those whom you wish to lead, in order that they will in turn be more amenable to following you. It is not much different from the idea that if you treat your employees with dignity and respect, and give them freedom to work somewhat in their own way, they will work harder for you and therefore by more productive and more valuable assets. (This is sometimes called management theory Y in opposition to management theory X which postulates that people are basically all lazy and self-interested and must be constantly supervised, prodded and whipped — figuratively, or in some cultures literally — into action, or they'll do nothing.)

The problem with the idea of servant Leadership in this form is that it is still first and foremost about Leadership — it's about what sort of Leadership is more effective. Serving the people you lead is first and foremost about getting the desired response from them; along the lines of the adage "you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar". Of course we all know that it's not the flies' best interest which is in focus here.

The problem we have in using the Bible in this way is that we are asking the wrong question of the text. We persist in coming to the Bible already to committed to the idea that in Leadership we will find our salvation, and ask of the Bible only how best to engage in Leadership. What we ought to ask is instead something like "If we were to spend three years hanging around with Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels, what would we conclude ought to be our posture toward the people around us who are experiencing these problems?”

Jesus' upside-down Kingdom

I am convinced that if we let the Bible speak on its own terms, rather than coming to it to see what it might say on a particular subject we've already predetermined, we would come to the conclusion that Leadership is not what offers salvation, nor is Leadership something we ought to particularly aspire to. I am convinced that if we came to the Bible on its own terms, we would see that what Jesus says in passages such as the Mark 10 passage quoted above is not that we need to pursue a different sort of Leadership than do the Gentiles, but rather that we need to abandon the pursuit of Leadership entirely. Instead of aspiring to be Leaders, we become servants. Instead of serving others in order to get them to sign on to our agenda, follow us, and help us accomplish that for which we are Leaders, we simply serve them because they are in need.

Following Jesus in this way is not just about taking on the guise of a servant as a means to becoming a better Leader — it is about becoming a servant, period — just as Jesus does not come down from God in the guise of humanity but rather becomes truly human.

I am convinced that if we are serious about following Jesus, we will not engage in developing character or skills so that we can be better Leaders, but so that we can be better servants.

Can't we have both?

Do we really need to abandon all aspects of Leadership in order to truly follow Jesus? Is servanthood truly incompatible with Leadership? Or might we not be able to do both, be both servants and Leaders.

First of all, I will agree that being a servant does not prevent one from taking on the task of leadership in a particular context. Nor does it even prevent one from taking on the task of leadership frequently, regularly, in a host of varying contexts, if that is what is called at the time in order to serve to the best of one's ability. Indeed, to refuse to utilize the particular skills, traits, knowledge and character that one possesses when those are called upon in the task of leadership because leadership is involved is actually to refuse to be a true servant.

What I will insist upon is that it is not possible to truly be a servant if we self-identify ourselves primarily in terms of our Leadership qualities, or lack thereof. A servant must be prepared to serve where he or she is placed, whether that task is one of leadership or not.

The problem with allowing ourselves to continue to use the language of Leadership, as if it were something that distinguished Leaders from non-Leaders, and as if it were something that ought to be developed because of its capacity to solve our problems and bring salvation, is that we are inevitably formed by the language we use. I am convinced that we can no more habitually talk the talk of Leadership and remain unaffected by it than we can freely participate in the ritual worship meals in the idol's temple and not be drawn into fellowship with the demon that stands behind the idol (1 Corinthians 10:21). This is ultimately the view of my earlier post, Cleanse out the old leaven.

Following Jesus, then, must eventually transform our language, as well as our lives, so that not only do we no longer worship Leadership as a god, we now longer encourage others to do so by the language we use.

What then is my role?

So how do I then live in light of what I have just said? I cannot change the language of the culture around me, even that small bit of culture close at hand, simply by fiat. For one thing, it doesn't work, and for another, my attempts to do so simply pull me deeper into the whole Leadership mythology. Or else they tend to isolate me from that bit of community around me.

Nor can I avoid this whole language issue by withdrawing from it, for that would mean I would have to withdraw from the world. How then could I serve those around me? And yet simply ignoring the issue also pulls me in the direction I am convinced is destructive to fall into. At times I feel like exclaiming, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” Isaiah 6:5, NIV

Oddly enough the following passage came to me as I stopped to take a break from writing this post:

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to your countrymen and say to them: ‘When I bring the sword against a land, and the people of the land choose one of their men and make him their watchman, and he sees the sword coming against the land and blows the trumpet to warn the people, then if anyone hears the trumpet but does not take warning and the sword comes and takes his life, his blood will be on his own head. Since he heard the sound of the trumpet but did not take warning, his blood will be on his own head. If he had taken warning, he would have saved himself. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.’

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.

Ezekiel 33:1-9, NIV

It seems clear that God is telling Ezekiel that the prophet is not responsible for how the people respond to his prophecy. The prophet is only responsible for declaring the message God has given him. Perhaps, then, it is not my responsibility to transform the language around me, but only to give warning of the dangers it holds. That is indeed comforting — even a reprieve from the demands of the Leadership god which does measure its servants by results.

Yet there still remains the guarding of my own soul. I know far too well how easy it is for me to fall back into the trap of doing obeisance to the Leadership god, of taking the responsibility for providing solutions to the problems of the world around me onto myself as its servant. Is there anyone who will walk beside me in this struggle, and not invite me to join again the party in the idol's temple? Is there anyone who will speak the warning to me when I wander back in there, who will take my hand and lead me out? Or is it God alone who will watch over me?

Lord, it was you yourself who said, in the context of a world not yet fallen, that it was not good for man to dwell alone. How much I feel that at times like these. I know that you have been faithful in bringing the voices of faithful men into my life when most I needed them, even when that voice is my own from an earlier time, and I know that you will not fail in that regard. But it is such a tiring task to have those flesh and blood, here and now, fellow travellers the closest at hand not seem to understand the words I speak. How long must I bear the curse of Babel? Are not two better than one? For if one falls the other can lift him up. But how will one be lifted up if he is alone?

Lord, have mercy upon me, I pray.

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