Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership (eBook)

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.

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...