leadership style and the future

In difficult financial times, organizations tend to fall back on default leadership styles, drawing on old, autocratic and authoritarian methods to make hard decisions. We may wonder "what's wrong with that?"

My colleague Scott Williamson has discovered a fine new book by a couple of educators that helps make sense of this dilemma.

Stephen Preskill and Stephen Brookfield in Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009) have gathered stories from leaders of social justice movements and teased out the kinds of leadership that have been effective.

I found most helpful their image of conventional leadership from the work of Joseph Raelin ("Leaderful Organizations"). The value of directive, commanding styles of leadership assumes leadership to be "serial (exercised by one person at a time...), individual (only ever exercised by a single individual), controlling (fiercely pursuing the leader's vision of how others should live and how a community or organization should function), and dispassionate (viewing as necessary 'collateral damage,' the wrecked lives of those individuals, cultures or communities that are uprooted, excluded, or disenfranchised in the pursuit of desired goals)." [Preskill and Brookfield, p.3.]

It's so evident to me that this kind of leadership is well designed to defend and protect the status-quo. It works in a stable environment with a homogeneous constituency. The problem with this style is that we no longer have either a stable environment nor a homogeneous constituency! Change is rapid and comprehensive. Diversity is becoming the norm rather than the ideal. Organizations, and this includes churches and theological seminaries, that hope to survive the first quarter of the 21st century need to take change and diversity into account, and ignore the emerging of the future to their immediate peril.

Preskill and Brookfield suggest that learners make the best leaders when the future is at stake. Learning is about changing the learner as well as the context of learning. Learning is an investment in the future, not the past. Learning is translating the faith and traditions of the past into the parlance of the presence so we can move together into the future.

Comment on Comment

Dave's comments posted here in response to my "heaven can wait" posting serve to show the vast gulf between world views here. In their presentations here at Louisville Seminary, McLaren and Borg both made strong Biblical cases for a service-oriented "God's will be done on earth" perspective, based on a faith-relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Dave makes his case from a propositional-doctrinal position, quite possibly based on the modernist apology for faith found in a set of doctrines known as fundamentalism. I appreciate Dave's comment because it makes me work hard, and not yet very satisfactorily, to find common ground between our divergent perspectives. I assume Dave is a faithful person with a different take on Christian life than mine. I hope Dave would be able to grant that my take is also worthy of respect.

Making Heaven Wait

This year's Festival of Theology at Louisville Seminary, featuring Diana Butler Bass, Brian McLaren and Marcus Borg, stirred up lots of good thoughts and feelings, and prompted many fine reflections.

One reflection came in the intersection of one of Brian McClaren's concepts and a newspaper article printed in the New York Times last week.

Brian was critiquing the American cultural religious notion that the main point of Christian faith is to get each person to heaven. In two power point slides, he made his point graphically (see www.slideshare.net/brianmclaren/christian-faith-as-a-way-of-life). In the first, slide # 13, faith is imagined as "self enhancement in this life and the next" with a tiny circle representing the world, a middle side circle representing the church, and a huge circle representing the self on its way to heaven. His preferred image is showed in slide 14, with concentric circles. An arrow from heaven shows God's investment in the self and the church, with the smallest circle being the self, the next size the church, both of which moving into and serving and transforming the world, making God's "kingdom come, on earth as in heaven."

The article in the Times (I've lost the date and citation) reported a study that showed that the "very religious" are the most likely to request extraordinary procedures in hospitals and emergency rooms, postponing death even at the cost of comfort and dignity. When I saw the headline, I said to myself, "That's just crazy!" After I thought about it awhile, I realized the connection. The devoted Christians come from that "self oriented" perspective which wants what "I" want, not what heaven wants, so I can selfishly hold on to life, even with the promise of "heaven" waiting for me.

The contrast between the self-oriented faith and the service-to-the-world oriented faith could not be more stark. I'd rather be putting God's will to work here and now, not making heaven wait for justice and equity and peace, than making heaven wait while I get everything that's coming to me!

Cones of Hope

Watching the weather news about a recent hurricane, I heard the term "the cone of uncertainty" to describe the possible but unpredictable trajectory of a storm. I was reminded of it with a quote in my prayer book on the hope that all things will be brought to God in the end. That is an older world-view that projects a "cone of certainty" in which everything will work out according to God's "goal"--a teleology of seeing how everything comes together in the end.

A perspective more understandable to the contemporary mind might be to refer to the "cone of indeterminacy" -- it may sound better than "uncertainty" and it rings true with quantum physics. Rather than seeing all things coming to a pre-determined end, even God's end, we see trajectories of freedom and choice with lives evolving and changing as they go along. The picture of fractals, lovely and complex patterns of developing reality, but not predictable in their outcomes. This is a "process theology" approach, it seems to me.

We can found our hope, as Christians, not in certainty but in the sense that God is luring us all, including the whole cosmos, into newer and more whole ways of being.

I Love it when I was right!

Two items in the news in the last couple of days confirm my earlier opinions expressed in this blog.
1. The new book about Warren Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett on the Business of Life, is being advertised with the heading "What would Warren Buffet do?" That reminded me of my blog of November 16, 2007, when I recommended a dream ticket for president (sadly my recommendation has been ignored until now) of two Buffetts--Warren for president and Jimmy for vice president. Think of the Alan Jackson country song "It's Five O'clock Somewhere" which includes the line, "What would Jimmy Buffett do?" The song is about skipping responsibility, but I maintain that even Jimmy Buffett would do a better job at governing than the yahoos who've been in power the past eight years. But we really should have been listening to Warren.
2. Watching the presidential debate and realizing that both candidates have gone back on their vows to avoid mudslinging in this campaign, I thought about my blog post from March 11, 2008, on the concept of "teleopathy"--which means "goal sickness." Obviously the goal of winning has overcome the deeper values of integrity and honesty in the presidential campaign, and the American people are the worse for it because it diminishes our respect and trust in whoever wins the election!

Follow up on Harvey Cox

The man hasn't lost a step, theologically or intellectually. As he walked into the room he was wearing his Red Sox cap, very appropriate. About 45 people gathered, about half the seminary faculty, a few folks from the Presbyterian headquarters, a number of retired pastors from the area, and a few students (most of the other students had no idea who Harvey Cox is!) He talked about his Harvard undergrad class on Jesus and moral ethics, noting that most students, including the most secular and including those of other faith traditions, have no problem talking about Jesus.

He also talked about how there is a resurgence of religion in our time, often in the form of "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." I was fascinated by the ensuing conversation about what Jim Lewis labeled the intersection of the appeal of high liturgical worship, such as Eastern Orthodox, the endurance of Pentecostalism, and the "spiritual but not religious."

It put me in mind of David Roozen's sociological study of denominations (Church, Identity, And Change: Theology And Denominational Structures In Unsettled Times, Eerdmans, 2005) in which he notes that those American denominations based on "affective" religion--such as the Episcopalians and the Pentecostals--are having a better time at adapting to the 21st century than are those denominations based on "the word" or what Cox called the "assentive" faiths based on propositional adherence. Of course its clear that the Presbyterians are in that latter group and are not faring well in adapting to the 21st century.

That may be partly why I'm attracted to teaching "emotional intelligence" to old-line protestant ministers, and also why Diana Butler Bass is able to promote re-traditioning--since she's episcopalian.

When Harvey Cox Came to Louisville

An Evening of Conversation
With HARVEY COX
“A Theologian Reflects on
Religion, Morality and Politics
in the 21st Century”

For Students, Faculty, Staff, Friends of the Seminary
Free, no registration required!
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6
7-9 P.M.
HUNDLEY HALL—GARDEN COURT
Moderated by Dr. Christopher Elwood

Cornell West has called Harvey Cox “one of the most significant religious thinkers of the late twentieth Century.” Cox is Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he has been teaching since 1965. An American Baptist minister, his research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, and interfaith relations. He is a prolific author, including:
· When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today, describing his immensely popular undergraduate course, “Jesus and the Moral Life,” which attracted hundreds of students each year.
· The Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller and was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
· Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year, based on his experience with his wife, Professor Tina Tumarkin, of raising their son in her Jewish faith.
· The Feast of Fools;
· The Seduction of the Spirit;
· The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: Liberation Theology and the Future of World Christianity;
· Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality.

Participants in this evening of conversation will be inspired by the range of Dr. Cox’s spiritual history as we engage him with our questions and comments.