By Elizabeth Clement-
Some of the best conversations I have ever had happen on this hall, in the spaces between our offices and our work. The FTE staff is an amazingly rich assortment of gifts and personalities, all of them devoted to the church and the next generation of its leaders. We talk about all things “broadly construed”, but the issue we talk about most is church leadership. For Matthew Williams, Stephen Lewis and me, the issue more specifically is leadership in the black church. Those two always have a live question going and I learn more in an afternoon with them than in two weeks of class. This is learning dialogue at its best.
Matthew frequently makes reference to his “ancestral muse,” Ella Baker, a community organizer whose role in most efforts for equal rights as far back as the 1930s is under appreciated. Miss Baker had the notion that people and relationships are at the heart of leading. She had a deep respect for persons—a reverence—and a commitment to develop their many gifts to advance the community cause. It follows that she would find group-centered leadership is more appropriate than leader-centered groups for people with an ambitious social agenda. The message for Christians, the church and its leaders in our world-changing project seems to be: first honor people and their gifts.
Miss Baker didn’t intend to construct a theology of pastoral leadership but the implications for us are there, like it or not, and not hard to find. This kind of reverence for every life created in the image of God, for example, is at the heart of the claim we often make that every Christian—not just clergy—has a vocation, that we are all called to follow and serve Christ.
The group-centered leadership model would seem also to suggest an inter-dependent relationship between the vocation of pastors and the vocation of the church and its members. It’s as if the call to serve the church is a call to serve the people in it—these people, right here, not an idea of the pure church somewhere else; it is a call to lead worked out in the midst, along the way, as life happens, between sacraments. But service is not to do everything the people want done; respect at this level requires that every person do what they are gifted and called to do. In this view, to take another’s proper assignment is disrespectful of that person and of God. To stand between God and another’s faithful response would be a mistake.
I can’t help but wonder what the young, African-American and Hispanic pastors in the first cohort of Project Rising Sun would make of all this. Last month, they began a two-year exploration of pastoral leadership together. They come with a wealth of gifts and experience with congregations this early in their ministries. This should seem odd, not reality as we know it. Going forward, however, they will be challenged to consider many new ways to see themselves as leaders in the future church. What can they do with Miss Baker’s models? What would this way of leading cost them? Cost us?
Elizabeth Clement is a regional director for Calling Congregations, an initiative of the Fund for Theological Education, in Atlanta, GA.
By Bill Lamar-
We exist in a culture that hawks self-improvement incessantly. There is never a dearth of folks promising to make you better. He promises a smaller waist and firmer pectorals in 90 days. She promises that implementing the strategies in her book will improve your credit score by 100 points. They promise that in 90 days you’ll become closer to God and your purpose in life will emerge from the foggy recesses of your soul.
Don’t get me wrong, self-improvement is not bad. I am skeptical, however, of those in the self-improvement business who promise too much and play upon our fears and inadequacies. I am skeptical of those who offer linear, scripted
solutions to messy, entrenched personal and communal challenges. And purveyors of self-improvement don’t just exist on infomercials and in book stores and on talk shows. The church is bombarded by those who would sell her the tools she needs to reach her maximum potential.
During my nine years of pastoral ministry, I received as many invitations to ministry and pastoral improvement
seminars as I did credit card offers. The slick advertisements featured smiling preachers with gleaming white teeth promising me that that they had found the secret to growing their churches, raising more money and perfecting youth ministry. I was promised that the marketing propaganda I had received was the key that would unlock my inner mega-church pastor. I was seduced. I fell for it. I signed up for a few seminars.
After attending a couple, the desire to attend more vanished. There was some good technical knowledge. There were some inspiring stories. I even sensed that God had done great things in the ministers and ministries that led the meetings. I would go back to the church I served all fired up to implement what I had learned. And every time I went to a new seminar, I abandoned the ideas from the old seminar for some shinier, newer ideas. The outcome was herky-jerky, two steps forward and one step back.
I realize what was missing. I was. The ideas of others are valuable. But ministry is profoundly local and deeply contextual. What worked for the ministry I served had to grow from the soil of that ministry. This is the genius of Project Rising Sun. PRS takes seriously who participants are and where they serve. PRS does not promise amazing results if a set formula is followed. PRS promises that if participants fully engage, their roots will sink more deeply into the soil of the ministries where they find themselves. PRS embodies this quote from Warren G. Bennis, “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that difficult.”
SMITH Magazine has published beautiful six word memoirs from many interesting authors (www.sixwordmemoir.com). I attempted to create my own six word pastoral memoir: Became better pastor by becoming me. Think about it.
Bill Lamar is a managing director at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School, in Durham, NC.
