Faith & Everyday Leadership

A week ago I spent three days with about 35 United Methodist Ministers, including retired Bishop Joe Pennel (now Professor of the Practice of Leadership at Vanderbilt Divinity School), at the Ministry Summit 2009 at Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center outside Asheville, NC.  Despite the fact that it took me 36 hours to get home to Washington, DC (do not ask me what I think about changing planes in Atlanta!), I came away with renewed confidence and enthusiasm about mainline Protestants can accomplish when we put our minds to it!

Our time together was spent examining a simple question:   How does our religious faith impact the leadership roles each of us — and our neighbors, congregation members, and family members — play in our everyday lives? This is what we meant by “faith and everyday leadership.”

We talked about the stories that we tell about who we are, what we do, the dreams we have.  We listened to each other describe the ways our most central stories of identity and vocation can open up new opportunities for leadership, or close them off.

For example, telling or believing  stories of a God who metaphorically sits up in heaven waiting for us to make a mistake, or who loves us but with so many conditions that it makes the fine print in a credit card statement look simple, can make us cautious and risk-averse leaders.   When we take seriously that God is the sort who has Bathsheba’s in his lineage, or who goes out looking for lost sheep, or is like a gutsy father who welcomes home a child who has just returned from squandering everything, including their dignity, then it makes a difference to imagine that we are to lead like that, emulating a God who longs for our wholeness, and is willing to do whatever it takes to help us get there.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus was, foremost, a teller of stories, of parables.  And with those stories, Jesus raised up leaders from the midst of ordinary, everyday life, who became the foundation of the church, as had been the case with everyday leaders for generations before them starting with Abraham and Sarah.  These were leaders who were above all adaptive to the realities of the changing world around them, and who in discerning God’s calling to them emerged to take up the mantle of leadership for the next, and the next, generation.

And so we concluded by trying to begin to imagine how we can in our own day be more faithful in raising up this generations leaders, and those for the next, and the next generations to follow?  What do we need to do to better mentor them, sustain and equip them, not to be who we were called to be, but to be leaders called out into the future where we have not yet gone?

In the attentiveness and seriousness of conversations at Lake Junaluska I took heart for mainline churches as continuing bearers of God’s spirit in the world around us.  It’s the sort of challenge that educators today need to reclaim as fundamental to what we do, and what we still have to offer, to those seeking to be agents of grace and transformation in the communities where they live and worship.  Thanks to all of you who took part in the Ministry Summit 2009, and then went home to tell your stories.