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.