Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership (eBook)
240 Seiten
IVP Formatio (Verlag)
978-0-8308-7417-0 (ISBN)
Ruth Haley Barton is a teacher, spiritual director, retreat leader and author. She is cofounder and president of The Transforming Center (www.thetransformingcenter.org), a ministry dedicated to caring for the souls of pastors. Ruth has ministered in several congregations, including Willow Creek Community Church. Her other books include Sacred Rhythms and Invitation to Solitude and Silence (both InterVarsity Press). This book was previously published by Waterbrook under the title The Truths That Free Us.
Ruth Haley Barton (Doctor of Divinity, Northern Seminary) is founding president/CEO of the Transforming Center, a ministry dedicated to strengthening the souls of pastors and Christian leaders, and the congregations and organizations they serve. For over twenty years, she has ministered to the soul care needs of pastors and leaders based upon her conviction that the best thing we bring to to leadership is our own transforming selves. Trained at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation and the Institute for Pastoral Studies Loyola University Chicago, Ruth is a seasoned retreat leader and spiritual director. A sought-after speaker and preacher, she has served on the pastoral staff of several churches and teaches frequently at seminaries and graduate schools. Ruth is the author of numerous books and resources on the spiritual life, including Invitation to Solitude and Silence, Sacred Rhythms, Longing for More, Pursuing God's Will Together, and Life Together in Christ. She continues to share her thoughts and perspectives on soulful leadership through an online resource called eReflections as well as a podcast entitled Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership. Leighton Ford is president of Leighton Ford Ministries, which seeks to help young leaders worldwide to lead more like Jesus and more to Jesus. For many years, Ford communicated Christ around the globe through speaking, writing and media outreach, addressing millions of people in thirty-seven countries on every continent. He served from 1955 until 1985 as Associate Evangelist and later Vice President of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and was featured as the alternate speaker to Billy Graham on the Hour of Decision broadcast. He served for nearly twenty years as chairman of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, an international body of Christian leaders. The author or co-author of numerous books, includingTransforming Leadership and The Attentive Life, Ford lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife Jean.
This is a book about the soul—your soul, my soul and the soul of our leadership.
When I refer to the soul1, I am not talking about some ill-defined, amorphous, soft-around-the-edges sort of thing. I am talking about the part of you that is most real—the very essence of you that God knew before he brought you forth in physical form, the part that will exist after your body goes into the ground. This is the “you” that exists beyond any role you play, any job you perform, any relationship that seems to define you, or any notoriety or success you may have achieved. It is the part of you that longs for more of God than you have right now, the part that may, even now, be aware of “missing” God amid the challenges of life in ministry.
Jesus indicates that it is possible to gain the whole world but lose your own soul. If he were talking to us as Christian leaders today, he might point out that it is possible to gain the world of ministry success and lose your own soul in the midst of it all. He might remind us that it is possible to find your soul, after so much seeking, only to lose it again.
If Jesus were speaking to us today, he might also point out that when leaders lose their souls, so do the churches and organizations they lead. “Soul slips away easily2 from a church or an institution,” Gordon Cosby, founding pastor of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., points out. “You may go to any of these places and find that the Spirit has departed and the Shekinah is gone. . . . When a local church loses its soul it begins to slip into mediocrity and is unable to give life. The average person doesn’t even know when a church begins to lose its soul. It takes unusual deeper wisdom to see it, and then when we see it, it is costly beyond words to retrieve it.”
Losing your soul is sort of like losing a credit card. You think it’s in your wallet so you don’t give it much thought until one day you reach for it and can’t find it. The minute you realize it’s gone, you start scrambling to find it, trying to remember when you last used it or at least had it in your possession. No matter what is going on in your life, you stop and look for it, because otherwise major damage could be done. Oh, that we would feel the same sense of urgency when we become aware that we have lost our souls!
THE BEST THING WE BRING TO LEADERSHIP
I have been in leadership roles all of my life—everything from serving in lay leadership positions in small churches to being on the pastoral staff of larger churches to my current responsibilities as cofounder and president of a not-for-profit ministry organization. I know what it is to serve under someone else’s leadership and I know what it is to be the-buck-stops-here person and bear the weight of responsibility for carrying out a vision that has been given by God. Beyond my own experiences, I have spent years providing spiritual direction to individuals and groups of leaders on retreat and in their own settings, listening to their soul cries which are so similar to my own. These cries are gut-wrenching and consistent: there has to be more to life in leadership than many of us are experiencing.
In all this listening to my own life and to the lives of others, I have become convinced that the More that we are looking for is the transformation of our souls in the presence of God. It is what we want for ourselves and it is what we want for those we are leading. And that is exactly what this book is about. It is about the presence of God in the middle of a person’s leadership. It is an exploration of the relationship between a person’s private encounters with God in solitude and the call to leadership in the public arena. What difference does solitude and spiritual seeking make in the life of a leader—really? Is it a self-indulgent luxury that only those who are not very busy or not very much in demand can afford? Is the practice of solitude only relevant to a mystical few? Or is it more fundamental to spiritual leadership than that, type-A personalities and all?
That being said, this is not an answer book about leadership, because, quite frankly, I have more questions than answers these days. It’s like the man who said, “I used to have no children and six theories [about parenting]. Now I have six children and no theories!” Somehow, when I was working in someone else’s field (so to speak), I had lots of theories and, to be completely honest, lots of critiques. Now that I have borne the full weight of responsibility for an organization for a number of years, I have fewer theories, more questions and greater respect for others who have set out to lead toward a vision. I have discovered that it is so much harder than you think to create something out of nothing. Things happen that you never imagined would happen to you. The lines are much finer, the issues a lot grayer, the people so much harder to figure out, your own foibles so much more real, more deeply ingrained and more obvious to others than you ever knew.
However, I do know what some of the most fruitful questions are for leaders who want to continue to stay on the spiritual path amid the challenges of leadership. I know what it is like to walk into God’s presence with those questions day after day, waiting on God to move or to shift something inside me while at the same time still needing to lead in the public arena. I know how important it is to have a spiritual guide or companion during those times when everything in us wants to get up and do something—anything!—rather than stay in that Presence. And I have walked the path of taking that tender, transforming soul back into the leadership arena and seeking to lead from that place, with all the risk that that involves.
A LEADER’S INVITATION TO SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
Strengthening the soul of your leadership is an invitation to enter more deeply into the process of spiritual transformation and to choose to lead from that place. It is an opportunity to forge a connection between our souls and our leadership rather than experiencing them as separate arenas of our lives.
Spiritual transformation is the process by which Christ is formed in us for the glory of God, for the abundance of our own lives and for the sake of others. The biblical metaphors that are used in reference to the transformation process (the formation of the embryo in its mother’s womb referred to in Galatians 4:19 and the metamorphosis [transformation] of the caterpillar into a butterfly alluded to in Romans 12:2) indicate that it is an organic process that goes far beyond mere behavioral tweaks to work deep, fundamental changes at the very core of our being. In the process of transformation the Spirit of God moves us from behaviors motivated by fear and self-protection to trust and abandonment to God; from selfishness and self-absorption to freely offering the gifts of the authentic self; from the ego’s desperate attempts to control the outcomes of our lives to an ability to give ourselves over to the will of God which is often the foolishness of this world. This kind of change is not something we can produce or manufacture for ourselves but it is what we most need. It is what those around us most need.
Crucible3: A place or set of circumstances
where people or things are subjected to forces
that test them and often make them change.
Lest we are tempted to view this as a glorified self-help project or an occasion for more activism, it is important for us to embrace spiritual transformation as a process that is full of mystery. It is a phenomenon that is outside the range of what human beings can accomplish on their own. It can only be grasped and experienced through divine intervention. God is the one who initiates and guides the process and brings it to fruition. The soul-full leader is appropriately humbled by this realization and also relieved to not have to bear the heavy weight of responsibility for changing herself or others. The soul-full leader is faithful to the one thing he can do—create the conditions that set us up for an encounter with God in the places where we need it most. To continually seek God in the crucible of ministry no matter how hard it gets.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL
As a spiritual director, my primary intent in this book is to guide you into encounters with God in the places where you need it most in the context of your leadership. Thus, you will find practice sections at the end of each chapter that are intended to guide you into an experience with God in much the same way I would guide you if we were together in spiritual direction or on retreat.
These practices will help you move into solitude and communion with God by encouraging you first of all to become quiet—which is no small thing!—and to pay attention to your breathing. This is a very simple way of calming the chaos in our souls and listening to the Spirit of God whom the Scriptures describe as the wind, the pneuma, the very breath of God. This Spirit is closer to us than our own breath.
As you become quieter in God’s presence, the opportunity for prayer and honest communication with God opens up through the use of guided meditations and prayers that are written in poetic form. This is the language of the soul meant to draw out your soul and help you say what you need to say to God and hold you in a place of listening to what God wants to say to your soul.
Many of us...
Erscheint lt. Verlag | 3.4.2018 |
---|---|
Reihe/Serie | Transforming Resources | Transforming Resources |
Nachwort | Leighton Ford |
Vorwort | Gary A. Haugen |
Verlagsort | Lisle |
Sprache | englisch |
Themenwelt | Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte |
Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik | |
Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Pastoraltheologie | |
Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management | |
Schlagworte | authentic • Burn out • Burnout • Business and Professional Growth • calling • Christian • Christian leader • Chruch Leadership • Church • church leader • Community • Discern • Discernment • Discipleship • drained • God • God's will • guidance • Guide • Influence • isolated • Isolation • journey • lead • Leader • Leadership • leadership burn out • leadership development • leadership resources • loneliness • lonely • Minister • ministry • ministry leader • Moses • Pastor • Pastoral Resources • pay attention • promised land • Running On Empty • Sacred Rhythms • serve • soul care • soul check • Spiritual Care • Spiritual Formation • spiritual journey • spiritual leader • spiritual practices • strengthen • Stress • strong |
ISBN-10 | 0-8308-7417-8 / 0830874178 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-8308-7417-0 / 9780830874170 |
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