I noticed a couple of years ago that all the different house groups in our church had very distinct cultures. One group played endless pranks on each other, ‘I love you lottery’ and facebook rape; one group pulled in masses of well mannered young ladies; another seemed overrun with extrovert guys. My group were thoughtful, fun, and a bit shy. Then I got it – each of these groups were just like the people leading them.
I think this is a phenomenon common to all leadership situations. Through whatever mysterious combination of means, every team/group/community/organisation ends up looking a bit like its leader.
I’ve only just realised the scary import of this idea. If every team ends up looking like its leader, King’s Care is going to end up looking like me!
A specific: I was pacing my room one morning, asking God to make instant supernatural healing happen at our Sunday drop in, and he put a pretty clear idea in my head by way of reply. I wrote this in my journal: “If the project is going to break through into doing this, you’re going to have to do it first.”Convicted.
Of course, this is exactly the picture the word ‘leadership’ conjures up: someone moving forward, someone following behind them. We instinctively despise people in positions of leadership who aren’t ‘leading by example’. Think of Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth: “remember, brave Tommy, I’m right behind you.” “About 35 miles behind you,” says Mr B.
If I have any dreams I want to see become reality, any vision for how King’s Care could be different, I need to realise it myself in my own life before it will appear anywhere else.
I’ve been reading a book on revival. Obviously I wanted to know what we need to do to get another revival on our watch. And I was surprised to read that recent and Bible history show NOT that we need to get worried about the evil in the world around us; but that we need to get tough with the evil in the church, the evil in ourselves.
A national paper once published a series of essays on theme What is wrong with the world? A man called GK Chesterton (read his stuff) sent in his in the form of a letter:
“Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, GK Chesterton.”
Ghandi apparently said, ‘be the change you wish to see in the world.’ This stuff about leadership gives us hope that we might see the rest of the world change, too.
Conscious of the need to develop myself in order to develop King’s Care, I recently picked up a copy of the classic business book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Guess what? This whole inside-out leadership thing turned up again! The guy says you can’t do anything to make your staff more committed or your kids achieve better. They will see through any leadership techniques to the essential truth that you don’t really love them, just want them to perform better for you.
What you actually have to do is change yourself to love and accept them as they are, and they will feel encouraged to contribute all they uniquely have to offer. The point is, you change the world by changing yourself. 
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One of the problems I've been struggling with recently in my own work is moral motivation. Generally as a species we're not bad at coming up with ideals. But a more profound problem is how to get close to those ideals in practice. Increasingly I'm coming to the view that good theories need to address both of these elements.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is essentially that empathy - seeing things from everyone else's point of view - is in our nature. But so is the fact that we must act from our own perspective: we have our own needs, as well as family and friends that we want to look after and be able to justify ourselves to. This is why, even though we can recognise the huge injustice inherent in easily avoidable catastrophe, we are unwilling to do even modest amounts to help avoid it. (For example, the level of resources it would take to drastically cut the threat posed by malaria is, as I understand it, relatively tiny.)
The fashionable view of this problem is that personal conversion is an ineffective way of solving it. Better to create institutions to solve injustice that impact on our "private" lives in only a modest way.
This and your last post suggest that the Christian answer is the more radical one. So that actually, the task of evangelism and the task of doing justice are, up to a point, the same. This is scary, especially for someone like me who believes that we as Christians should interact with the world as we find it, rather than as we think it should be. Is the task of doing justice doomed to fail until we can find a way of bringing others to a place where they can be changed? Or, indeed, until we can perfectly be changed ourselves?
Scary times. Although once again heartening to have it confirmed that the Bible, contrary to popular perception, prescribes a more radical program of social reform than anything we've come up with.
Andrew
(PS: props to in-depths with Chris and Lorna as a way of sorting these things out.)
Mm. I see, yeah, moral motivation is a really significant question. And it's not easy to work out the right balance between personal responsibility and global responsibility. Should I spent £10 to go and eat out with some friends, when that money could feed a large malnourished family in Uganda for a week? I've answered that question 'no', a few times, and then my friends have insisted and bought my lunch for me- which means my heroic forebearance doesn't actually help anyone except me. Because things like that are important.
ReplyDeleteThat's probably why I prefer the idea of 'doing people good' than being 'ethical'. Ethics is about harm reduction - reducing your implication in the mistreatment of child labourers by buying different products, for example. My problem is that living in the UK, you pretty much can't avoid being implicit in harming many people across the world. So 'ethics' (I guess I'm using the word in it's connotative sense) is a bit like - certainly feels a bit like - rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Whereas, taking steps to do people good; like writing to a company about how it treats its staff, or volunteering for a kid's club in your local estate (whatever floats your boat); feels much more positive. You see positive results. Often, your action actually communicates love/solidarity/empathy/support to someone, rather than simply a desire to not feel guilty. And my experience tells me that being loved, which makes you feel you have some value as a human being, is more important to the poor than anything else. Besides, I think it takes a lot more balls and genuine motivation, and people who go down this path seem to have a more joyful and loving, a less arrogant and judging, spirit - which suggests to me it's better. Though if it isn't actually more effective in helping people, you should probably disregard everything I just said.
I'm realising as I type that I'm not articulating this stuff rationally enough to prove it to a lawyer, but maybe you could ; ) Maybe we're all motivated in practice by feelings as much as rationality; and maybe that's ok.
"the task of evangelism and the task of doing justice are, up to a point, the same" I like that. I think that's how it works in practice, all jumbled up together. That's 'love your neighbour as yourself'. I also agree though, that we should interact with the world as we find it. That's the point this 'revival' book made - when the Old Testament prophets condemned the nation for its injustice and idolatry, that isn't the equivalent of us condemning the UK - it's the equivalent of us condemning the UK CHURCH. Israel was the people of God. Now we're the people of God. There are a few tirades against other states around, but very different in nature. God holds Israel accountable to his law, which was finely articulated in Genesis-Deuteronomy; which they knew full well. God holds (I think) nations like Babylon and Syria accountable to a general 'natural' moral law which he expects everyone to know about (Romans 1) - but not all the details of the Jewish law. I guess our attitude to the world should be the same. We shouldn't expect everyone to behave like Jesus... but we should do everything we can to help people do so. And we believe, based on the Bible and personal experience, that people will never start behaving like Jesus because of coercion of any kind (even by themselves); but only by knowing Jesus, and being filled with his Spirit.
ReplyDeleteSo in a way, the pursuit of justice is not going to be completely successful... yet. Because although both christians and non christians do a lot of good, they also do a lot of bad, and for some reason (Jon Foreman calls it 'the fallout') a little bad seems to do a lot more damage than a little good is able to repair. But God's plan, the whole of his work through history, is to bring absolute justice for eternity. And the only reasons I can think of why he hasn't got us there yet are a) these things take time, he's got quite a mess to work with; and b) he's holding back out of mercy for us because he wants everyone to turn around from worshipping themselves and other idols and follow him.
But I think, if we look at the pursuit of justice in terms of 'doing people good' rather than 'not hurting anyone', then this doesn't mean we don't bother with it until Jesus comes back. We get to make a difference, now. And that all adds up towards God's ever increasing kingdom, which will fill the whole earth, which will last forever. We're going to have a lot of knock backs as we seek justice, but it still all counts.
Yeah.
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear from you. If you haven't already, check out the band 'Stornoway'. I think you'll love them. : )
Tim
Just on your point about ethics.
ReplyDeleteIt's easy for someone to get an idea that it's morally right to buy faitrade bananas rather than the regular, baby-killing type, and in so doing feel slightly better about themselves. But I think there's a danger in condemning these actions as trivial and self-serving in that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that buying fairtrade bananas is still better than not, and this does make a difference. Yes, our lifestyles cause harm regardless of how hard we try and reduce it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. The point is to keep on trying to do more.
I think that people generally start doing anything that's good for someone else from a position of feeling it will benefit them. Real, sacrificial giving comes much, much later. So, where possible we need to commend people for the good choices they make, even if their motives are bad, but help them to see that there is more that can be done.
Chris