Governance is often a dirty
word. It is either something explicitly
disdained, or it is seen as an unfortunate necessity that anyone in his or her
right mind would avoid and evade. All
too often, governance becomes equated with bureaucracy. Yet we also know that wise governance is
crucial, and that preserving the health of institutions is crucial for our well
being as persons and communities.
Hence, this evening I want to
reflect on governance as it relates to the preservation of institutions and as
an important practice that requires key virtues for its wise exercise. I begin with three vignettes designed to
help stir our imaginations about why the practice of Christian governance is so
important.
I.
The first vignette is drawn from
the interview I had with a search committee from Duke University about becoming
Dean of the Divinity School. I knew most of the people on the search committee,
and several of them had been my teachers, so I had some sense of what they were
going to ask. I thought I was fairly
well prepared for the questions that might be asked of me, for example, about
what it would mean to be dean of a university-related divinity school formally
connected to the United Methodist Church.
After all, my father had been a theological administrator and had been
one of the deans at Duke Divinity School for a time.
But I was taken aback when about
half-way through the conversation one of the faculty members turned to me and
said, “Greg, you wrote a book called Embodying
Forgiveness; how would your work on forgiveness affect the way you would
serve as dean?” The question called me
up short because it didn’t have to do with competence at administering budgets,
or relating to the church, or building a faculty, at least that I was aware
of. It was one of those questions that
made me stop, take a deep breath, and think for a moment. The first thought that came to my mind, at
least slightly humorously, was to note that I had written a chapter in Embodying Forgiveness entitled “Loving
Enemies.” I thought that might help at least in conducting faculty
meetings. After the period of laughter,
I began to reflect on the deeper connections.
I related to the committee how my
work in Embodying Forgiveness -
trying to reclaim forgiveness as a craft of practice and a way of life - had
a great deal to do with the ways in which institutions
needed to be preserved, and dealing with various forms of brokenness and trying
to address these issues. Furthermore, I noted that the ways in which I tried to
reflect on forgiveness was related also to questions of reconciliation, to
healing, and to finding ways to come to terms with the brokenness of the past
that would offer new life into the future.
The more I started talking myself into a response to the question, the
more I was able to see a continuity between the work I had been doing as a
scholar and as a teacher, and the work that I thought I might be called to as
an administrator and as a dean.
That question has continued to
linger with me over the course of time that I have served as dean because I’ve
begun to discover that there is a profoundly theological understanding of what
is involved in the practice of governance, and in many ways forgiveness is at the
heart of it. I didn’t realize quite as poignantly as I might have at the time
that my work on forgiveness would also have something to do with what I think a
good leader is obliged to do in recognizing failure and being able to ask
forgiveness of others. Such practices
are difficult because they challenge the myth of the expert that has become
enshrined in far too many presumptions in American culture - about clergy as
well as about leaders of other organizations and institutions. But that question, “How would your work on
forgiveness affect the way you would serve as dean?” challenges the presumption
that governance is simply about a set of neutral skills that are somehow
separate from the larger theological horizons, convictions, and commitments of
our lives.
The second vignette comes from a
United Methodist Annual Conference that I visited several years ago. It was a conference that was bitterly
divided by old, familiar arguments between, for example, urban and rural areas,
clergy and laity, evangelicals and progressives, rich and poor, black and
white, men and women. You could
identify the splits in many different ways.
These divisions had become so sharp that the conference was having a
difficult time focusing on a coherent sense of mission. In light of the tense situation, the
presiding bishop decided to do something radical for a United Methodist Annual
Conference. Instead of focusing people’s time and energy on the business of the
conference, he decided to focus almost the entire time around the theme of
building common ground through worship, education, and mission. My wife, a United Methodist pastor, and I
were invited to come to the conference to lead educational sessions built
around Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life
Together. We were excited to be
there because we thought this was somebody else’s conference - we could sit
back as voyeuristic outsiders enjoying the fact that it wasn’t our struggles
being engaged.
On
the first evening of the conference there was a worship service that was designed
to be a context for confessing brokenness.
As soon as the service began we discovered that we were not going to be
simply voyeurs; everybody was going to be implicated. During the prelude, off
on the left side of the altar, a potter was crafting a pot. It was a beautiful
pot. As the recipient of a “C” in
fourth grade art, I’ve always admired people who are very gifted artists, so I
was transfixed watching this potter craft the pot. As the prelude came to an end, everything went dark. A spotlight shone over in the right corner
where a teenager, dressed as a hoodlum, took a brick and threw it through a
piece of stained glass that had been erected for the occasion. You heard the shattering of the glass, and
then the spotlight turned over to the potter who took the almost finished pot
and smashed it back into a lump of clay.
Then we began with a litany confessing our brokenness. We were all given a piece of broken glass to
carry around with us in a purse, pocketbook, or pants pocket for the next twenty-four
hours to reflect on our complicity in the brokenness. The invitation to reflect on our brokenness was comprehensive in
our own lives, our families, our friendships, our local churches, our annual
conference, our denomination, the world - so much for being a voyeur.
The sharpest edges of the broken glass had been taken off to keep us
out of the hospital, but nonetheless, when I was standing there talking to
people, I would put my hands in my pockets and keep feeling this piece of
broken glass. Throughout the rest of
the service, the potter worked on re-crafting the smashed pot. After an hour and a half service, he was
still in the very beginning stages of trying to reshape what was once so near
completion.
We gathered again for worship the
next night and the service began with another litany confessing our
brokenness. Several youth came around
with baskets into which everyone put their piece of glass and you could hear
the shattering of glass over and over again.
After collecting all of the pieces of glass, the students then walked
down the center aisle up to the altar area and dropped basket after basket of
broken glass into one large washtub.
The shattering and re-shattering of glass from the base of the altar
sounded through the room. As the last
bucket was dropped into the washtub, a black cloth was removed from above the
altar revealing a cross made out of broken glass. We were asked then to sing together, “Now Thank We All Our God.” The next night was a service of
commissioning in mission. James Forbes
from Riverside Church came to preach and whenever James Forbes preaches you
know there’s going to be a sense of the Spirit at work. But particularly in light of the previous
two nights, we were prepared to refocus ourselves on a common mission.
The most memorable part of the
conference for me was watching the potter on that first night. What struck me
was how much easier it was to destroy the pot than it was to re-craft it. That pot was destroyed in a moment, but it
was taking hours to begin the slow laborious process of re-shaping, of
re-crafting.
A third vignette: When my wife,
Susan, and I moved to Baltimore, where I had taken a teaching position, she
transferred conferences and was appointed to a two-point charge in the city of
Baltimore that the District Superintendent said would be “an opportunity,”
which is superintendent-speak for a “fixer-upper house.” Upon arrival at the church, we started
unloading and unpacking boxes and people began to stop by to tell us about the
events that had taken place in the congregation earlier that year. Of course,
it was each person’s version of the events.
Over time, Susan began to put together a few pieces of the puzzle and
deduced at least some of the facts about the long-standing bitterness in the
congregation that had erupted in February of that year.
The administrative board of the
church had splintered into two groups.
One of the groups kept meeting in the same room where they had always
met, and the other group went down the hall.
For forty-five minutes there were two groups simultaneously meeting,
both claiming to be the administrative board, discussing the same issue as if
the other group didn’t exist. When the
group that had split off down the hall came back into the main room to announce
what they had decided, you can imagine how warmly that was received. They ended up in a shouting match. We don’t know who shouted at whom first, or
who said what to whom first. We don’t
even know exactly who threw the first chair; but they ended up literally
throwing chairs across the room at each other.
Ironically, at the first meeting
of the administrative board after my wife became pastor there, the topic of
discussion was why the church wasn’t growing.
She tried to suggest to them that this wasn’t rocket science, that if a
congregation is literally throwing chairs at each other it may not be a place
that people are going to be drawn to as a sign of the coming kingdom. We spent three years at that congregation
and at the end of three years, through Susan’s very hard work and patient,
careful leadership, we had begun to glimpse the possibility of healing what had
happened on that February night. It is
a lot easier to smash something into a lump of clay than it is to try to
re-craft it.
I’ve told that story before, and
I used to say that the literal throwing of chairs doesn’t happen in
congregations very often, but that it is an apt metaphor for the problems that
emerge in failures of leadership and allowing situations to fester and worsen
over time. However, I have had too many
people come up after I’ve told that story to tell me about their own episodes
in a local church where they literally had a chair-throwing incident, that I no
longer think it is just a metaphor.
Rather, I think it aptly addresses the challenge that we face when
talking about the leadership of congregations – what it means to strengthen the
church and to be in mission and in service bearing witness to God’s in-breaking
kingdom. The challenge for us in the
practice of governance is how we understand institutions and their fragility,
and what is involved in preserving and shepherding them in thoughtful and
faithful ways so that we are not always trying to do damage control. Those three vignettes shape what I want to
talk about tonight in terms of Christian reflections on the practice of
governance.
II.
I turn to some reflections on why
institutions matter and how institutions think. Now in some sense I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, yet
I think it’s important for all of us to reflect on the implicit assumptions
that we tend to have across the denominations, and alas, all too often across
the Christian church. Somehow we tend
to have this mystical and misguided ideal that the Christian church is really
not institutional - that it is a non-institutional, charismatic community that
sometimes over time, by necessity, has to take on some of those dreaded
institutional forms. The ideal is some
nostalgic romanticized vision of people just gathering together and loving one
another without any of the trappings of institutions. The myth has been particularly pernicious in the 20th
century, in the wake of Max Weber and the various forms of sociological
analysis that bear a link to him. We
have been mired in the unhelpful assumptions about bureaucracy and a kind of
anti-institutionalism that surfaced and gained great strength in the
1960s.
But the problem runs much deeper
than that, because it goes back to a particular way in which many mistakenly
read the New Testament. People imagine Jesus and this rag-tag bunch of
disciples getting together in a “60’s style commune” to love one another and
pretend that there are no burdens, institutions, or struggles to deal with –
until the utopia ends with the arrival of the dreaded early Catholicism and all
of its institutional trappings.
Curiously, the only way in which you can read scripture that way is if
you are a Marcionite who has lost sight of the fact that Jesus was a Jew, born
in the context of Jewish traditions, and indeed Jewish institutions, and that
the people of Israel had already wrestled with a lot of the issues of what it
means to live institutionally over time.
We like to recreate this myth
that institutions are somehow the necessary, if rather despicable, chaff that
we must discard in order to find the pure wheat of the gospel. It’s a mistaken conception. It’s not faithful to scripture, and it’s not
faithful to the empirical realities of our life together. We need to reclaim an understanding of what
is involved in the sustenance and preservation of institutions that do indeed
need criticism from time to time for the ways in which they can become
bureaucratic, stifling, and hierarchical.
But the romantic notion that we are somehow going to find a purer
community apart from the reality of institution is fallacious.
In recent years some of the
debates about institutions have emerged around Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology.
More specifically, the debates have focused on his conception of practices and
their relation to institutions. MacIntyre develops an account of the vitality
of practices not only as what isolated individuals do, but also as something
that becomes part of the ongoing work of a community - the practices and the
relationships and how those communities are nurtured over time. MacIntyre argues that practices need
institutions and institutions can either be contexts that nurture or corrupt
those practices. And yet I want to
suggest that even though MacIntyre, at his best, criticizes certain strands of
20th century sociological analysis with a deepened understanding of
the importance and necessity of institutions, he nonetheless carries a
lingering bias that somehow institutions are a necessary by-product
accompanying practices that are pure.
Since MacIntyre’s writing, a number of sociologists, philosophers,
political theorists, theologians, and ethicists have begun to work in an even
more refined fashion to try to grapple with the ways in which institutions
themselves may be contexts that ought to be understood in terms of practices -
that they’re not simply the places that house practices – but places where
practices of Christian governance are integral to a vibrant and faithful way of
life.
In 1986 the anthropologist Mary
Douglas wrote a book with the very intriguing title, How Institutions Think. The
title in some ways is better than the analysis, but it’s a book well worth
reading. She touches on the very notion
that institutions think and that institutions carry an identity. In the chapter, “How Institutions Remember
and Forget,” an agency is attributed to institutions that suggests they can
embody a way of life, that when people become a part of an institution it
embeds them in a distinctive way of thinking and living in relation to one
another. Her proposals suggest a much
richer context for how we might think about our lives and how we might learn to
structure our lives: which practices we take as given, which ones we shield
from view, where our blindnesses are, and how institutions carry distinctive
identities. Douglas’s analysis suggests to us that institutions are not simply
the necessary by-products or structures to make practices possible, but that
institutions themselves create a way of life that both provide opportunities
for thinking and constrain thinking.
They provide opportunities for practices and also constrain those
practices.
Each institution has its own
distinctive ethos. By visiting an institution you can begin to get a feel for
its character and the kind of contextual influence it exerts on the people that
inhabit it. I’m a cradle Methodist.
I’ve been a Methodist for all my life, and I have five generations of
Methodist preachers in my family. So
when people ask me why I became a Methodist preacher, I say I didn’t know I had
a choice - it’s a family business. I
live and breathe and think as a United Methodist. Yet after finishing my Ph.D., I was invited to teach at Loyola
College in Baltimore, MD, a Jesuit institution, and I discovered that there was
a distinctive ethos to a Jesuit institution that you can feel when you walk on
campus. It has its own distinctive way
of being. There are code words that say
a lot more than just the words themselves.
The words “cura personalis” (the care of the person) on a Jesuit campus
get chanted sometimes like a mantra.
And until you really begin to feel how such things gets embedded not
only explicitly but also implicitly in the way of life of an institution, you can’t
understand what makes it tick.
We talk a lot about diversity
within institutions, but we rarely appreciate the diversity of
institutions. Diversity of institutions
and diversity in how institutions think can offer a richness to us that
bureaucracies fail to produce.
Denominational bureaucracies, and various other kinds of bureaucracies,
even sometimes accrediting bodies, try to compel homogenization. It seems to me that a rich understanding of
institutions and the Christian practice of governance of those institutions
does well to preserve a real distinctiveness.
I think theological accrediting does a lot better than the accrediting
of many other professional institutions precisely because we know about things
like the diversity of gifts that Paul writes about, and the diversity of denominational
traditions. But unless we begin to
think of theological educational institutions in a richer framework than just
as the necessary work (e.g., paying the bills, being sure the salaries are
covered, and tending to those details nobody likes), unless we begin to think
about how institutions think, how they shape an ethos, and how they shape their
faculty, staff and students, then a theological school will never really be
able to understand the genuine significance of the practice of governance.
I have my own ways in which I
have tried to cope with the awkwardness of former faculty colleagues talking
about my fall from grace going from teaching into administration. My standard
line is that doing administration is penance for the sins of my youth. And on those bad days, after a really
horrible faculty meeting, I say I just didn’t remember I had done that much as
a youth. But those are the kinds of
interactions that all too often carry with them a bias against institutions and
against administration as being somehow less pure than the real life of the
gospel (or of teaching in service to the gospel). A conversation with a woman about her ministry not too long ago
was quite revealing. She said that what
she really was frustrated by was doing all this administration that kept her
from doing the work of ministry. Just
think about all the assumptions that are embedded in what counts as ministry
and what counts as administration.
Although the title of this
lecture is “The Practice of Christian Governance,” the title that I perhaps
should have given it is “The Right Use of Governance with a View to the Love of
God (with apologies to Simone Weil).”
Some of you may know the essay by Simone Weil in her book Waiting for God entitled “The Right Use
of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” It’s a beautiful essay in which she really presses questions
between prayer and study at a very deep and nurturing level. I use it with first year students in a fall
semester class, because I want them to begin their theological education
thinking about the connections between prayer and study. Weil makes the connections in a really
challenging way. She wants her readers to think about the gospel, to think
about prayer, and to think about God in a non-utilitarian way; not to think
about what’s in it for me, not to think about the salary that I might be able
to make or the ordination that I might be able to have and the power and
authority that comes with it. She wants
us to think about God for God’s own sake.
In a theological school that’s hard to do, because it is after all our
business, our profession.
In her essay, Weil suggests that
learning a foreign language is actually essential to learning what it means to
pray. What she means is that there are
no short cuts to learning the grammar.
Whether it’s Greek, French, German, Spanish, or English as a second
language, you have to go through the hard work of mastering the declensions and
the verb tenses. You have to keep
working at it. Furthermore, there is nothing like a language class to make it
very clear when you’ve gotten it wrong, and Weil says we need to learn what it
means to be ignorant. We can’t learn
what it means to love God unless we’ve learned what it means to be
ignorant. She says it’s actually easier
to accept that we are a sinner than that we are ignorant. There are challenging points all through the
essay.
Drawing some analogies from
Simone Weil’s “The Right Use of School Studies” I want to suggest eight
different activities that I think are central to the right use of governance,
as well as a Christian virtue that is associated with each of them. These
reflections in many ways stem from what I have learned over the past several
years as I have continued to try to come to terms with the ways in which my
work on forgiveness has affected the way in which I serve as a dean.
III.
The first of these activities is
to cultivate disinterested governance. What I mean by this, and I’m going to
overstate it, is the principle that you ought never place someone in a position
of governance who covets the job because in all likelihood that coveting will
be for the wrong reasons. People will
covet a position for the trappings that it offers, the salary, or power, or recognition,
or just for being the next step on the rung of the ladder of success. I think that in Christian terms what we
should be cultivating is a discernment that taps people on the shoulder and
calls them into positions of leadership because the gifts are discerned rather
than because the power is coveted.
Granted, there are all sorts of ways that people can develop false
humility and play games with that sort of activity. As Pope John Paul II advances in age, you can see versions of
this game among the “papabilia” that are being mentioned as possible
successors. It’s well known that if you
are seen as wanting the job then you will almost certainly not be elected
pope. And so they go through these
elaborate means of trying to figure out how to show enough interest and yet how
to not say too much. I recently read a
story about one person who stepped over the line and is now being widely
discredited as a candidate. There are
various games that can be played that could suggest a false humility.
The
virtue that goes along with the activity of cultivating disinterested
governance is humility. That is,
recognizing that perhaps you are called to exercise a distinctive form of
leadership for a season, but it is not to exercise power tyrannically over people,
rather it is to exercise power on behalf of the whole.
A friend of mine was visiting a
monastery, and as he was going through the food line for breakfast a
particularly crusty monk looked at him and said roughly, “You want eggs, or
eggs?!!” My friend said that eggs would
be fine. The monk plopped the eggs on
his plate and growled, “You want a roll?!!”
My friend was a little taken aback by the monk’s manner and he asked his
host, “Who is that?” The host replied,
“That’s the former abbot.” Upon
reflection on the event, my friend thought what a wonderful sign of a
well-ordered community where the former abbot finds himself serving eggs in the
morning.
You may exercise leadership for a
time, but particularly in a stable community you better exercise it carefully
because you may return to a role where others are going to be in the position
of leadership instead of you. It is one
of those realizations that has called me up short on more than one occasion
because when I finish being dean I intend to return to the faculty, and then I
will be their colleague, and I ought to behave in a way that will make it at
least reasonably possible to do so without too much difficulty. I had a provost once who exercised
leadership in such a self-interested way that he made it impossible ever to be
seen as a colleague again.
A second activity that I think is
extremely important, and one that we have lost sight of in our culture of the
expert, is to learn from failure. This
is difficult because somehow we think we will be perceived as weak in our
governance, in our leadership, if we acknowledge failure. And so there’s a temptation to try to cover
it over, to gloss it, to turn it into the passive voice. Have you ever noticed in Exodus 32 and 33,
the story of the golden calf, that you have the first public relations person
for a government leader? When Aaron is
confronted by Moses he says, we just put the gold in there and then out came a
golden calf. Magical - no one did it,
it just happened. The temptation of any
leader is to turn the active voice into the passive voice - mistakes were made
but nobody made them. And yet, I have
discovered that when we can genuinely acknowledge failure, and the
vulnerability that goes with that, we then have the capacity to learn from that
failure in a way that becomes far more powerful for the wise governance of the
institution. It depends, to be sure, on
a high level of trust, and yet it’s essential to the well-ordered
institution.
The
virtue that goes along with learning from failure is forgiveness. Forgiveness is something that we as
Christians at least claim to have as a central part of our lives. Yet this may be difficult to believe from
watching how we relate with – or throw chairs at – one another. I witnessed a bishop of a denomination
confess administrative failure in front of the diocese and saw the transforming
difference it made. It actually enabled
more effective and faithful leadership because he was no longer seen as someone
exercising some kind of externalized power over them, but was seen as someone who
was part of the body of Christ.
We have
to exercise judgment; there is no way we can get around it in our lives. There’s no way we can order or govern a
community apart from judgment. Yet
somehow in that same kind of sentimentalized notion of community, we’ve taken
Matthew 7:1, “Judge not lest you be judged,” ripped it out of the context of
7:2-5, and created a community where we just say, “Don’t worry, be happy. Let’s not evaluate one another. Let’s not grade one another. Let’s not have judgment. Let’s just be happy together.”
Yet the
truth of the matter is that we judge all of the time. There is no way we can avoid it.
As we walked into this room we started looking around at people and
making evaluations and judgments of all sorts.
Some of you probably looked at me when I got up here and thought, he’s
too young to be a dean. We make
judgments all the time. The issue here
lies in verses 2-5 of Matthew 7. After
“Judge not lest you be judged” comes “for with the judgment you give will be
the judgment you receive. You hypocrites! Why do you notice the speck in your
brother or sister’s eye and not the log in your own eye?” Faithful Christian understanding of
governance will always recognize the log in its own eye. Administratively, morally, theologically,
it’s related to that first virtue that I mentioned, humility. Even the most gifted administrators
nonetheless see through a glass darkly.
Crucial to cultivating a virtue of forgiveness is learning what it means
to be forgiven. Only in this way can we
understand the richness of what it means to forgive.
The third activity is the wise
use of authority and discovering the convergence between being in authority and being an authority. There is credibility, power, and influence that come from office
- from being in authority. One of the
hardest things to teach about leadership is a proper understanding of the
authority of office. When you become
the pastor of a congregation they don’t hear you as Joe or Sarah anymore - you
are the pastor. It took me several
months to realize that as dean I could no longer just throw out wacky ideas as
if I was around the coffee table with several faculty colleagues. Now when I throw out a wacky idea people go
away saying, “Well, the dean said…” There is power to the office. It can be abused. It can also be used wisely.
Power used wisely is about the
convergence of being in authority and
being an authority, so that it is
legitimated, recognized, and sanctioned.
The office has the power to put people in authority, but sometimes people who are in authority are themselves of corrupt character. This calls into question the legitimacy of
what they are doing, for even though they have that power of office, because
they are not an authority, they are
not seen as credible. They are not seen
as having the kind of wisdom and gifts necessary for the wise ordering of the
institution. Sometimes the gap is found
because there are people who are in the “an” authority category who don’t have
any official power. For many years that
was the role of women in congregations that precluded the capacity of
ordination, and yet they would have the wisdom and gifts that were seen as
being an authority. Is it any wonder that the first moves in
women’s ordination came in those traditions like Pentecostalism that tended to
have a more fluid movement between office and character?
Perhaps the most powerful example
of the convergence between being in
and an authority that I know of in
the last twenty-five years is Desmond Tutu in South Africa. He had the virtue of office by being
Archbishop of Cape Town, but that office converged with a powerful moral and
theological vision that eventually outstripped his office. And so he retains his authority in South
Africa and around the world even though he is now retired from his office.
The virtue that is associated
with the wise use of authority is fidelity - faithfulness. It is an important virtue, yet somehow we
all too frequently have turned faith, even as Paul talks about it in I
Corinthians 13, into solely the deposit of convictions rather than being also a
commitment to relationships and what is involved and entailed therein. Faithfulness involves our attitudes and
habits as well as our convictions.
The fourth activity is nurturing
continuity with tradition. One of the
great temptations of
leaders is to become disciples of Melchizedek. In the book of Hebrews, Melchizedek, the
high priest, is described by the writer to the Hebrews as being without father,
without mother, without genealogy. This
is a temptation that pastors have - a temptation anybody has - in becoming a
leader of an institution, to assume you come in with a blank slate, to start
with your own vision, to neglect the past.
Now to be sure, all of us have days when we wish we could be
Melchizedek, because the past can burden and haunt as well as give life. In nurturing continuity with tradition,
tradition must be thought of in the sense that you find from Jaroslav Pelikan
in his book The Vindication of Tradition. Pelikan makes an important distinction. He
says, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” There is always a danger in governing in a
traditionalist way. The importance of
the continuity of tradition is to recognize that the particular shape and the
way that each institution thinks and lives is shaped by generations who have
gone before. This happens sometimes in
explicit ways, sometimes in implicit ways, sometimes in life-giving ways, and
sometimes in really corrupt and distorted ideological ways. Churches, seminaries, and universities like
to tell the story of their past in very romanticized ways. But to nurture continuity with tradition is
to recognize that who we are now is shaped for both good and ill by where we
have been. I think one of the most
important ways in which we can exercise leadership is to read histories. I like to read local church histories - they
are fascinating.
There’s a church in Illinois
where Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr’s father pastored for many years. A woman
who was quite devoted to Pastor Niebuhr wrote all about his exploits in the
church and what he had done in the community and all the ways in which he had
ministered to people. Then at the very end there was one last sentence, “Pastor
Niebuhr and his wife had two sons and so far as we can tell they both went into
the ministry.” Two of the great giants
of 20th century theology and church life get hardly a footnote in a
local church’s history, because what was really significant is what had
happened there. To nurture continuity
does not mean we are replicating the past, but it is about remembering it.
The virtue that is associated
with nurturing that continuity is remembrance, which is very different from
either amnesia or nostalgia.
Remembrance involves a truthful accounting of the past in both praise
and penitence. It overcomes amnesia by
genuinely remembering what happened, and it overcomes nostalgia by remembering
truthfully. Forgiveness is crucial to
our ability to remember the past without being haunted by it.
A fifth and closely related
activity is developing creativity in moving into the future. New days provide new tasks. Faithful leadership is always about
nurturing change and thinking creatively in appreciation for where we have
been. We can’t just replicate the past and stay where we are; we’ve got to move
into the future in faithful ways. It’s
about creativity. Theologically, it’s
about trusting that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world. One of the great biblical texts
demonstrating the sinful side of this is the story in Numbers 13 and 14 where
twelve spies are sent out to look at the Promised Land. They come back with a majority and a
minority report. The majority of ten says, “We can’t go forward. It’s a land
flowing with milk and honey, but there are giants up ahead. There are too many obstacles, we can’t go
forward.” Only two of the twelve spies
say, “We have to go forward. God is calling us there and if God is calling us
to a land flowing with milk and honey, we can trust God for the future.” Well, the crowd sides with the ten and say,
“Let’s go back to Egypt.” Now remember
what Egypt was - slavery, oppression, and suffering - but it was familiar. It was a desire to become a traditionalist
and a refusal to think about the future.
My father used to say every local
church he’d ever known had a back to Egypt committee in it. Even more, every person I’ve ever known,
myself included, has a back to Egypt part of our soul. The right use of governance is about looking
creatively toward the future and trusting that the God we worship is the God
not only of yesterday, but also of tomorrow.
The virtue that is associated
with moving creatively toward the future is hope. Hope is very different from optimism. Optimism is having confidence because of who we are - we are
getting better and better each and every day - and that can all too easily
degenerate into cynicism. Winston
Churchill said, “If a person is not an optimist at age sixteen he doesn’t have
a heart. If he’s not a cynic by the age
of forty, he doesn’t have a head.”
Optimism and cynicism go together as two sides of a coin, but I am
suggesting that remembrance and hope also go together. Hope is a confidence not because of who we
are, but because of who God is, and that is at the heart of it.
The sixth activity is what I call
taking the long view. I think this is
particularly important in the context of governance around the theme of silence
and speech, but also in terms of action.
How often we are tempted to lash back, to just say what is going to make
us feel good, even though it may compromise the institution over the long
term. We often act for the short term,
failing to recognize how much easier it is to smash the pot into a lump of clay
than it is to re-craft it. Taking the
long view is recognizing that good things get nurtured over time and that
sometimes only the seed of an idea is going to be planted by you while the
nurturing and reaping will be done by your successors.
Furthermore, I think there is
something integral to the wise use of governance about a redemptive silence as
well as a redemptive speech, about not acting too hastily and waiting until it
seems good to the Spirit and to us (Acts15).
Notice there is no “me” in that description. It’s not about my ego, but what is good for the whole. Taking the long view is about waiting until
it seems right. It doesn’t mean waiting
forever. It doesn’t mean that you
shouldn’t sometimes take decisive action and let the chips fall where they
may. But it needs to be done
recognizing the costs that are incurred and what is involved in the long
view. The virtue associated with taking
the long view is patience. It’s not
passivity, but patience, an active and crucial virtue that Simone Weil has much
to teach us about. Weil points to the
quality of waiting, of attending, as an activity crucial to life with God. We need to cultivate the virtue of patience
as an active commitment to the long view rather than the quick fix.
The seventh activity I take from
the writings of Simone Weil and Seamus Haney, the Irish poet. Seamus Heaney
calls it redress. Simone Weil writes
about it in the context both of redress and of a kind of tilting. I don’t really know how to describe the
activity except as tilting. Seamus
Heaney describes it as the idea of counter weighting, of balancing out forces
of redress, tilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent
equilibrium. I describe it as tilting,
of trying to avoid there being a sense of any permanent losers. In any institution, in any gathered
community over time, different interest groups and divisions are going to
develop. Hopefully they become
cross-cutting rather than entrenched, but part of the wise use of leadership is
using tilting to keep a sense of balance.
This does not mean become lukewarm like the church of Laodicea in
Revelation 3 to whom the Lord says, “I spew you out of my mouth, because you
are neither hot nor cold.” It’s not
that sense of moderation that has nothing to offer, but perhaps what the London
Economist magazine calls the “extreme center,” or “dynamic center,” that tilts
like a ship back and forth to try to maintain its balance over time.
Peter Hebblethwaite’s book on
Pope Paul VI is an extraordinary testimony to his leadership and why he was
eventually selected as pope. During the
Second Vatican Council he worked extraordinarily hard behind the scenes while
various decisions were being made to try to minimize the sense in which anybody
felt like a loser. Too often we look in
the short term, try to get a majority vote, and even if it’s eight to seven, we
claim a victory without any recognition of how the other seven may be
permanently identified as the losers.
And the seeds of bitterness begin to grow. It is that sense of tilting, of seeing what is necessary to keep
a sense of balance over the long term that holds people together. And the virtue that goes along with this is
discernment.
The eighth and final activity is
what I call prophetic leadership and power.
I use this phrase in two senses.
There’s the most obvious sense that we could think of that any wise
governance of an institution calls for the importance of prophetic critique
against the injustices, the loveless indifference, the bureaucratic structures
that sap the energy out of the system and call for the kind of confident
leadership that says, “This ought not to be so.” And yet prophetic leadership is not only about cursing, but also
about blessing.
I learned about this lesson from
one of my colleagues who preached a sermon on Balaam’s donkey. This is not a text that is often preached in
churches. It’s not in any of the
lectionaries so far as I can tell. And
yet, it’s an important story for us because it turns out that Balaam can only
exercise prophecy when he discovers that he’s no smarter than a donkey, or put
in the vernacular, no smarter than an ass.
But you notice the prophecy that God then puts into his mouth, “How fair
are your tents, O Jacob, your encampments, O Israel.” It’s easier to be a
prophet who just baldly speaks the truth.
I have faculty who enjoy that role – treasure it – would like to be
quoted in newspapers for it, and I get to generate my fair share of
correspondence explaining it to the people who are outraged, sometime in ways I
agree with, sometimes in ways I shudder from.
The wise use of governance calls both for times of prophetic critique
and prophetic blessing.
Can we exercise leadership and
power in ways that generate and reflect authentic affection for the people we
serve? I think this is one of the real
struggles that happens in the transition from seminary into the first five
years of ordained ministry. You come
out on fire and then you realize that you can’t change everything in the first
six months of your ministry. And you
begin to wonder why God sent you to these folks with very ordinary struggles,
fears, and sometimes much worse than that, divisions. And you have to learn to bless as often as you curse. And here, the virtue is the greatest of all virtues,
from I Corinthians 13 - the one that abides, namely love.
I have suggested eight activities
and eight virtues that are involved in the right use of governance. In conclusion, I want to suggest briefly
four corollary commitments that are crucial to wise governance – and remind us
that we are called to conform all of our governance to God.
The first commitment is spending
enough time with the people involved with the institution to cultivate
collegiality and meaningful disagreements.
Wise governance is not only about talking to those people you agree
with, or just looking over your shoulder at the people you have to keep at bay,
but cultivating meaningful disagreements.
MacIntyre’s account of tradition suggests that it is born out of the
continuing arguments over time among people.
And I think these sustained arguments are essential for us. One of the most disturbing signs of poor
governance, particularly in seminaries, but also all too often in churches, is
when people gather together more often when a vote is at stake than for
sustained conversation and argument. We
all know that the day of the vote is the last time when you really want to
start a conversation about an issue, because as soon as people know a vote is
on the line, positions tend to rigidify.
And then once people vote one way or the other, they spend the rest of
their time defending why they voted that way.
There need to be occasions for sustaining conversation and disagreement
when a vote is not at stake.
The second commitment is
prayer. It is, after all, at the heart
of Simone Weil’s essay “On the Right
Use of School Studies.” It is about
having an openness and a receptivity where we recognize the need to be
re-centered in God. It is about
engaging in prayer where we are silent and listen, not simply where we offer up
our agenda, but where we find renewal over time. The right use of governance requires what Timothy calls praying
without ceasing.
The third commitment is to
reevaluate our priorities in relation to checkbooks and calendars. The heart of our priorities and convictions
are found in what we do with our checkbooks and our calendars. And I’ll tell you the honest to goodness
truth; I don’t really want to show people either of them. But even worse, in the context of
governance, I’d much rather show you my checkbook than my calendar. We are far less intentional than we ought to
be about either of them. We allow other
things to shape them rather than for us to be intentional about how we ought to
shape the use of our checkbook and the use of our calendar.
The fourth commitment is observing the Sabbath. The
tendency for people in governance and in positions of leadership is to let the
reservoir of our souls run dry – to get depleted to the point where there is no
more water there and no rain on the horizon.
For most people in leadership it’s not a question of whether you go to
the meeting, but which of the two or three competing meetings you are going to
get to. And it’s easy to get caught up
in what is euphemistically called 24/7.
Particularly in the United States, but in most of the industrialized
world, we have many people who are over-worked, creating a permanent underclass
of under-worked people. As my wife
reminds me with far too much regularity – the injunction to observe the Sabbath
is a commandment, not a suggestion, and is one of the definitive ten!
Desmond Tutu, even during the
greatest of the struggles against apartheid and some of the most intense
difficulties, never failed to take his monthly retreat. My colleague and good friend, Peter Storey,
who was President of the South African Council of Churches when Tutu was
Executive Secretary, said he used to get irritated that Tutu would leave when
the media was hounding and decisions had to be made. And yet, he found consistently that Tutu would return with
greater steel in his spine, with greater center in God, and a deeper sense of
purpose. He came back renewed -
essential to what is involved in wise governance.
Conforming our governance to God
involves abandoning at least two temptations: namely, the temptation of Aaron
in Exodus 32 and 33 who wanted to indulge the people’s fantasies and give them
what they wanted rather than what they needed, as well as the temptation of
Jonah who gets God right and resents it.
Notice in the fourth chapter of Jonah how he beautifully
describes God, “I knew you were a God slow to anger, abounding in steadfast
love, ready to relent from punishing.”
It doesn’t do any good, however,
if we train our people in the deepest and wisest, most truthful understanding
of God, and disconnect it from what that means for how we order our lives
together. It doesn’t do any good to
indulge the fantasies. It doesn’t do
any good to teach the truth unless teaching and living the truth come together.
You may say he talked an awfully long time to come back around to something so
simple. But I want to suggest that the
heart of what I’ve been trying to reflect on are some words from I Peter 5:1-4
on the significance of governance, “Now as an elder myself, and a witness of
the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory to be
revealed. I exhort the elders among you
to tend the flock of God that is in your charge, exercising the oversight, not
under compulsion but willingly, as God would have you do it, not for sordid
gain but eagerly. Do not lord it over
those who are in your charge, but be examples to the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears you will
win the crown of glory that never fades away.”
There is, I believe, a
distinctively Christian perspective on the right practice of governance that we
are all called to cultivate so that perhaps we can do a better job of
sustaining and preserving those institutions which God has given us. And in a time of fragmentation, and in a
culture tempted to despair, we need to be a hopeful people who believe – and
practice – the wise Christian governance of institutions.