Death by Leadership

I quote from Mintzberg's latest book "Managing"

By the excessive promotion of leadership, we demote everyone else. We create clusters of followers who have to be driven to perform, instead of leveraging the natural propensity of people to cooperate in communities. In this light, effective managing can be seen as engaging and engaged, connecting and connected, supporting and supported.

How different this is from the tired rhetoric I hear too often in church circles about 'leaders' and 'leadership'. Also, how remarkably congruent with the community life extolled in the New Testament.

But, what gives me pause for thought is that this challenge to the hollowness of 'leadership' as a notion did not come from a bible-based Christian critique of business, management, the treatment of people in organisations or the like: that is, the church being prophetically attunded to the scriptures, but from a scholar who simply seeks to go where the data and his observations lead him.

I often wonder what we pay theologians for...and suspect that we get a very poor return for our investment on some occasions!

What about evolution?

In a blog on the crusades, Peter Bolt made this statement:

Now, during my high school Scripture teaching years, I often had a formally parallel question thrown at me: “What about evolution?” After this gauntlet was thrown down with appropriately monotonous frequency, I honed an equally monotonous answer: “Well, what about evolution?”

Now, I'm glad he did scripture teaching at high school: a great mission activity, but on the surface it's a lame answer: more than monotonous Peter!

The question is one often thrown up, at least implicitly, in many conversations and writings. The not very sub-text of the question is: evolution eliminates the need for, if not the reality of supernatural explanations for the cosmos and life within it. Therefore, the questioner must believe, the Christian explanation, which is supernatural, fails and so thus fails the entire Christian program.

Beneath all this is of course the never articulated understanding that naturalism explains the basic reality of our lives: there is material; and that is all. It and natural processes are comprehensively explanatory at every level (bang goes philosophical idealism, of course, but I'd be pretty pleased about that particular side-effect).

The answer to the question is of course, not to say that the Biblical account of origins and evolutionary speculations can co-exist, because they can't and if it is suggested then it amounts to saying that the Biblical account is symbolic or metaphorical, but for the reality we go to evolution, but evolution is definitive and that eliminates the biblical explanation which only garners its force from materialist postulations and is therefore derivative and not definitive!

What is the answer then?

Well, I think it is to take naturalism to its end point: if material is all there is, and evoultion is true, then final questions can only be material and give us no answers, but leave us where we started, with only a causal chain between! That is, we've gotten nowhere. So the assertion disappears in a puff of its own logic.

But the biblical view is that final questions are personal, and are important as they tell us who we are (not material, and with real significance in real relationships) and by genesis who we are like and made by and therefore for fellowship with. Love has significance. In a material world, it is just a stochastic conjunction of particles.

Pain is a problem?

In Spectrum the other week was a fabulous article on 'Pain', by Elizabeth Farrelly. She referred to C. S. Lewis' book 'The Problem of Pain', where Lewis says a few things of interest. One is that pain is essential to justice. I disagree. Undoing the benifits of wrong is the essence of justice. I think he's referring to 'the wages of sin is death'; God's judgement on the movement of man in denial of God. That's different. Death is the antithesis of God's action in creation, and represents the outcome of the rejection of God's relation with his creation. Pain results and is the great marker of a creation in crisis. To that extent, Lewis' metaphor of pain being God's megaphone telling us that we are not a-right in a life framed by our own ends, is, I think, apt.

One 'benefit' that does come from pain is that people show thier nobility in insisting by their action that (a) pain is not to be accepted, but worked against (thus the floods of aid to Haiti, etc.), because it is not a right part of our lives, but a part of things-gone-wrong, and (b) that people in the face of personal pain will often fight against it and its effects. But in and of itself, pain has nothing to commend it. It is a marker of death, and death is the last enemy which Christ has done away with.

[I seem to recall Pannenberg writing that all fear is fear of death...how close this is to fear of pain, that which motivates us to avoid it!]

Doing things by slogan

As I was reflecting on the design and management of the 'Connect09' effort which the Diocese undertook last year, I came across this blog entry on the danger of 'management by slogan'.

I wonder to what extent C09 was the result of an analysis of the system deficiencies that lead to the need to connect, and what system changes were made to correct the deficiencies. Unfortunately,  my experience of C09 is that it amounted to substantial amounts of 'more of the same' which did nothing to either analyse or correct that which has broken the connections between the Anglican church and the community which I saw in existance in the 1960s and 1970s.

What, I wonder, happened?

Leading from the back

In a recent church news the following quote was printed:

Asked what would be his priority if he returned to leadership in a local church, New Testament scholar Gordon Fee replied: "No matter how long it might take, I would set about with a single passion to help a local body of believers recapture the New Testament church's understanding of itself as an eschatological community (The Ordinary Hero by Tim Chester, p. 165).

Now, there it is...'leadership' in a local church? I'm glad that Fee had the sense to realise that if he returned to serve a local church his job would be to HELP in some way. So often we take the notion of 'leader' from the world, maybe from the military, and think it has some application in the church.

An example of how this skews things came from a friend recently. She related how an acquaintance was over-awed by being asked to take on the leadership of a particular group. I'd be surprised if she was told what she would be expected to do, but being told it was 'leading' would be enough to give anyone the jitters if it was not stripped of worldly connotations; she would possibly have known that it is the Spirit that leads and we all follow together contributing as our gifts can provide.

It would have been more useful if she had been asked to help with the __ group. And the dimensions of that helping given to her: maybe organising the roster, helping people prepare their own contributions, finding fill-ins when someone can't do their roster, be the contact point, etc. More like convening, facilitating, organising, or just plain helping (Gordon Fee's word). My earlier post on Mintzberg on 'leading' is apposite here.

When we start to think 'ministry' and not 'leader' we'll all be better off, and as Christians we might all be encouraged that we have a part to play in the life of the church and not just sit and watch, which is what 'leaders' so often engender and the concept in its worldly configuration suggests.

BTW, I was very encouraged to hear a person who was going to serve at a remote area church talk about the 'contribution' he hoped to make: a much more Christian conceptualisation of joining the life of a church than any worldly hubristic notions of 'leading' (and, please don't start me on the oxymoronic idea of 'servant-leader')

Bible refs on gun sights

In response to the news of Bible references being inscribed on pieces of military weaponry, a minister at my church penned the following (in part) in our weekly bulletin:

The message is so wrong on so many levels. When will we learn that this sort of misguided tokenism only increases our fascination with the notion that God is somehow on our side. And this is wrong. It is never a matter of whose side God is on; what a bizarre thought if we really stop and think about it. Oh that we would remember that God is sovereign over the whole earth and that he is working out his plans and purposes. The real question for us is whose side are we on; God’s or our own?...

Because Jesus came to turn our world upside down and inside out; he knew that what is displayed on the outside of our lives has its genesis in what is going on inside. Is Jesus glorified by what is etched on a gun or by a changed life? Think on these verses:

Our thoughts. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. Phil 4:8

Our attitudes. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.   Phil 2:5-8

Our lives: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.  John 13:34-35

Our speech: et no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear… but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence; Eph 4:29, 1 Petr 3:15.

The external will always reflect what is going on inside. If our thoughts and attitudes are not being shaped by God then why would we ever think that our lives and speech will be? There is an order here. Let’s not be fascinated with guns and etched verses—the real question is how is God shaping our thoughts and attitudes so that we love one another and are always ready to tell others of the wonderful hope we have in Jesus. For in this way only will our world see that Jesus is indeed the light of the world (John 8:12).