Before you head off into your weekend, here are three things that I have read and been thinking about this week. Hope they are as helpful and challenging to you as they have been for me.
#1
Our public leadership, almost without exception, has no capacity to imagine outside the categories of these loyalties and commitments. The outcome is the conviction, mostly not articulated, that we are living on borrowed time. As a result, our shrill public discourse is mostly the insistence that we should continue to do what we do, only better, only more vigorously and more adamantly, assuming that if we do so, somehow it will “all work out.”
Walter Brueggemann from Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks
An organization is stuck when its leadership is unable, or refuses, to creatively imagine outside the current situation. Keeping on doing the same things, but only more of them with greater intensity may make us feel productive. It does not guarantee that we will be effective however.
We need leaders who are willing to step outside the division of right vs. left, progressive vs. conservative, and all the other binaries that we find ourselves locked into battles over. But be warned and prepared. Seeking a third way is not easy. Some circles will say it’s foolish and others will complain of heresy. But I believe it to be the courageous way forward.
#2
The focus of pastoral leadership is so consistently on the people, in fact, that the spiritual condition of the flock is the only real measure of a leader’s success.
Christopher Beeley from Leading God’s People
A great reminder that nickels and noses are important metrics for church leadership (IE. attendance and giving) but they are not the goal. The goal is spiritual maturity of the congregation. There are no tricks or shortcuts. It takes time. It takes consistency. And often you don’t see if it is happening until times are difficult.
#3
Leaders function as the immune systems of their institutions. When they are well defined, the resulting systemic effects on a society inhibit the probability that the opportunistic infections we call looters are likely to form. In other words, the crucial issue of leadership in democratic societies may not be how much power they exercise but how well their presence is able to preserve that society’s integrity.
– Edwin H. Friedman from A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
If there is one paragraph that best describes my leadership focus it is this one from Friedman. Immune systems can go unnoticed until they can’t. They don’t seem vital until they are. The work to strengthen your immune system isn’t glamorous. It is the “within” work that often goes unnoticed. But what you do when you feel well comes in very handy when you don’t. Because there is no faking it when that day comes.
todd nelson 