Give and take: leadership as a spiritual practice

IS LEADERSHIP, specifically pastoral leadership, a spiritual practice? Dorothy Bass has defined practices as "those shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, woven together, form a way of life." Does leadership address a fundamental human need?

Effective leaders engage communities, congregations and institutions in addressing their most difficult and pressing problems, and mobilize those organizations to address their most important challenges. In these ways leadership does address a fundamental human need--our need to respond to challenges. When no person or team of persons provides leadership, communities and congregations are disabled.

Craig Dykstra adds, "Practices are those cooperative human activities through which we, as individuals and communities, grow and develop in moral character and substance." If leadership is a practice, then it forms not only those who are led, but also those who lead.

Pastoral leadership addresses fundamental human needs and shapes moral character. This kind of leadership is not easy; it's a high-risk and often dangerous endeavor. As Ron Heifetz of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government observes, "You appear dangerous to people when you question their values, beliefs and habits of a lifetime. You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Although you may see with clarity and passion a promising future of progress and gain, people will see with equal passion the losses you ask them to sustain."

As a naive young pastor, I expected people to thank me for questioning their values, beliefs and habits, and I was perplexed by just how tough and dangerous that can be. Of course, one might observe, "just what part of the cross did you not understand?" Another way to frame this would be to say that I slowly came to see leadership as a spiritual practice. Leadership has a cruciform shape. But then we've heard this story before, haven't we? Peter's "No, this shall never happen to you, Lord!" only thinly veiled another protest, "No, this shall never happen to me."

True leadership does not simply influence the community to follow the leader's vision, but also enables the community to face its most critical challenges and to be what God calls and enables it to be. There is too much stress today on the leader as the person of vision. A vision is not imported from somewhere else, and it is not the idiosyncratic vision of one charismatic woman or man. A vision arises from a careful reading of the context and the work required by God of a particular people with a particular identity.

Moses exemplifies this kind of work when he mobilizes a people to engage its most pressing and difficult challenges. He led a journey of "adaptive change," to use Heifetz's term--a journey that involves loss and risk, change of hearts and minds, loss of known worlds and ways, and an introduction to the unknown. The journey also requires trust in powers beyond one's own. The resulting transformation is intrinsically spiritual in nature: it requires spiritual leadership.

Leadership is not the same as expertise, although the two are often confused. Experts come equipped with a variety of technical fixes, new tools. These are fine as far as they go, but they don't engage people in loss, risk and trust. In fact, people may try to avoid the challenge of the more difficult work by preoccupying themselves with the latest in tools and techniques. Experts do things for us; leaders go with us.

MOSES HAD a few "technical tricks," expert moves like turning a staff into a serpent, doing that little number with his hand--kind of a "now you see it, now you don't" trick--and turning the water from the Nile into blood. So do most pastoral and community leaders, whose expert moves may include a new technique for building small groups, the latest stewardship methodology, or the ability to preach without a manuscript ("Look, Ma, no hands!"). But these tricks will not sustain leaders in the long run.

This is not only because leaders eventually run out of tricks. It's because the point of leadership is not to dazzle people but to challenge them, to assist them in growing and changing as they answer God's call. Moses leads his people in a transformation from being "no people" to being "God's people." There is no magic wand or four-step formula for that one.

Five episodes from the Moses story illustrate five different aspects of leadership as a spiritual practice. In several of these instances I draw upon Heifetz's work to deepen our understanding as well as to name particular aspects of leadership as a spiritual practice.

"Then Moses said, 'I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up" (Ex. 3:3). This, of course, is part of the story of Moses' initial encounter with God at the burning bush and God's call to him. Heifetz says that leaders need to "get to the balcony." Perhaps it seems a little pedestrian to describe the burning-bush moment as "getting to the balcony," but Heifetz means that Moses had to step away in order to get a better look at things. Moses had stepped away, far away, to Midian. In Exodus 3, he was summoned "to the balcony" for a better look at what was going on back in Egypt.