Let's define some terms. Leadership is setting a direction. It is compass work. It is air traffic control. It is flying on this latitude rather than that one. Many people think in the airplane metaphor that the leader is the pilot; often the leader is the knowledge on the ground, which the pilot wisely accepts. Leadership is the conversation between air and ground - between a pilot who has been magnificently trained to follow certain directions and to know what to do if directions fail. Leadership is a direction-setting interaction between leader and followers.
So if leadership is setting an interactive direction, what is shine? Shine is what happens when you get rubbed too often like that famous bunny in the famous book. In the Velveteen Rabbit, we are told that "By the time you get real, most of your hair has been loved off, your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shiney." Leadership soars when it has something to do with love; it crashes and burns when it serves other Gods. Leadership wears you out. It rubs you raw. It makes you shiney with love.
The New Testament has yet another definition of leadership, much more interesting than mine. Mine is a little raw and a little realistic. Most pilots really don't feel that good about air traffic controllers, even though they are absolutely dependent on them. In the New Testament, leadership is releasing the treasure born by earthen vessels. Leadership is cracking the pot open.
Without the New Testament understanding of leadership, I would probably be growing tomatoes - really good tomatoes - in Western Massachusetts. Because of the New Testament understanding - that leadership is a treasure in an earthen vessel - and that leaders are often crack pots or cracked pots - I wake up in the morning and try to be your leader, with joy and gratitude, seasoned with raw realism. Explicitly, I set direction. You control the air traffic. You tell me how to get there. I have promised to join my life's mission to yours. Mine is spiritual nurture for public capacity. I know you are tired of hearing that. Spiritual nurture yoked to public capacity. I fail if you are only nurtured and I fail if you just act. I succeed if my product in you and in this congregation is a spiritually full, public action on behalf of the world. Yours is to maintain your legacy of an edgy exciting social justice and artistic ministry, to be one of the hearts of this great urban village, to be a place where the village can meet, at a profound level. Our leadership sets out in these directions, what I call legacy maintenance and legacy deepening. I want our best days to be today and tomorrow - on the same path but with deeper spiritual wells. Again, you are probably sick of hearing that. Another thing I know about leadership is that certain things you can't say too much. You simply cannot interrupt peoples' sleep on the airplane enough with a pilot's announcement…"if you are not going to San Francisco with us today, please leave the plane." This plane is going to San Francisco. By the way, this plane is going to San Francisco.
Anyway, leadership with love is about cracking pots. It is about getting shiney. The best definition of love I ever heard was that it is the consent to be mutually changed. You will change me. You will alter my path. I will change you. I will alter your path. Because we are in each other's lives, we will be changed. Ministry is for and by crackpots. Here the text again. "For we have this treasure in earthen vessels…"
This is yet another example of the theology of the incarnation. Again, I know I am repeating myself. But we just can't get too much learning about what the incarnation means. The incarnation means that ordinary things carry holy value. That ordinary people are trusted with the ministry of almighty God. Jesus and Christmas are all about the incarnation. Pretty soon people will start on the dualism that Christmas is too commercial. That is a slippery slope to the thought that heaven is pure and earth is dirty. Wrong. Christmas means that heaven and earth are both divine - or at least have the capacity to be divine.
Incarnationally, we are always linking heaven and earth, eternity and time, body and soul, spirit to matter, clean and dirty, commerce and Christ, ordinary and holy. That's why congregations like ours are not allergic to politics. We imagine a holy politics and a holy commerce. We resacralize the desacralized. We reenchant the disenchanted. We believe that both mystery and evolution are friends, one to the other.
So here is where it gets interesting. Leaders are not always holy. Nor are they always unholy. Leaders are cracked pots. They break open to spill. They crack open to set direction. They are the lead voice in the choir. Not the authoritarian or titled or robed or set apart so much as part of the choir, leading it. I have been amazed that the Roman Catholic Church has not hauled out its best heresy during the recent bout of unholiness in holy men. That heresy was resolved in this magnificent statement in the 12th century. They took two years to come up with it. It says, "The Bread is good even if the giver isn't." So, if you come here looking for a place to talk about how much you have been wounded by leaders and how you can no longer trust, watch out. The Bread is good, even if the giver is not. Leaders are not the only ones who need to mature; followers, if they want to get to San Francisco, are going to have to get over whatever keeps them from being led.
We all woke up last Monday to these words, "New York's most powerful tug joined a full moon high tide to pull the Intrepid out of a dock in Manhattan Harbor so that the boat could be fixed in Bayonne." 24 years at the same pier. Silt and mud were victors over tide and tug. Not an uncommon experience, is it. By the way, incarnationalists honor silt and mud the way we honor commerce and politics.
Ministry often becomes the victim of silt and mud. I know one church in Philadelphia where the famous Tinley organ is housed. It has chosen silt over San Francisco, mud over destination. In the pastor's study there, the former pastor's glasses sit on the desk and the bible is open to his last page. Why? The church loved those 24 years so much they were not able to move on.
Larger versions of silt and mud exist. Many myths hound leaders who are ministers. That ministry is management and therapy is common knowledge today. Ministry involves some management and some therapy but mostly it is slogging through the mud to get the ship moving. If there is a time conflict between ministry as movement and ministry as management or therapy, good leaders choose to move and let chaos in the office reign. Really good leaders avoid those conflicts in the first place by getting ahead of them - but as I have already stated, ministry is by and for crack pots. Ministry is for people who are usually a little more earthen than they are vessels. We break. Listen to Barbara Brown Taylor describe her exit from ministry in her new book, Leaving Church:
Behind my heroic image of myself, I saw a tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval. Above all, I saw that my desire to draw near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for hurt things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue. Drawn to a life of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider. Drawn to marry the divine presence, I had ended up estranged. I wondered if I had devoted myself to an illusion.
Rabbi Edwin Friedman argues that the typical Protestant congregation consists of an over functioning pastor surrounded by infantilized or under functioning laity. We at Judson are better than that - but we are also part of a culture that tells us otherwise.
Leadership engages systems to demythologize and to remythologize. I think that is what we are up to right now at Judson and it is cracking me up. In good ways. It is changing me. In good ways. Not always pleasant ways, but good ways. We are here to crack each other open.
By the way, clergy leaders are just one kind of leader. You are each leaders in your own ways, in your own worlds, in families, as parents, as workers, as treasures in earthen vessels. The goal of leadership is to crack up and to crack open, in good ways. We are to understand how divine the clay of which we are made is.
Standing at an airlines desk, fighting for a seat on a plane last Tuesday, when NYC was inundated with rain, I overheard this conversation. Big man, big suit, says to small woman in uniform behind desk: "What do you mean my ticket is for tomorrow not today? How could sheee [his assistant] have done that to me?" Small woman says to large man, with smile on face, "Because she is human, that's why." Nice way to think about leadership, isn't it, reminding one ever so much of the bread being good even if the giver is not. You are not a perfect congregation; I am surely not a perfect pastor. Come let us rub each other raw.
A clergy friend of mine just left one of our wonderful churches in Chicago. She put her departure this way: "I was invited to do church their way but not my way. I was there only to do legacy protection. I wanted to do that and something more. Was I wrong to do want that?" Wrong if you wanted the job, not wrong if you wanted the work. My friend Tony Robinson begins his new book on the ministry this way: "I loved the work and hated the job." I daresay his statement also applies to medicine and law, parenting and air traffic control. We love the work and hate the job.
Hal Taussig says that churches like ours have five things in common. "We love the questions more than we love the answers, we believe social action is the point of cracking pots, we love the arts in and outside of worship, we think we are remarkably unique, and we indulge in heroic self marginalization." Yes, you have heard that before too. Repetition and redundancy are the ritual acts of leadership. You don't just set out for San Francisco; you keep heading there. Because this church thought it was unique, it got no consultant, got no help, and now has lost a minister after less than a year. When you are unique, no one can help you. You risk heroic self-marginalization. Sometimes really magnificent churches like ours leave our eyeglasses on the last risk we took. We keep the page open to whatever greatness we used to have. Such immobility's keep us from moving. We have to be watched by leaders and congregants who want to maintain a legacy of motion and change. New York's most powerful tug lines up with a high tide full moon to move the Intrepid out to sea so that it can get the repairs it needs to float again. Silt and mud stop it. Everything about the metaphor breaks down, when compared with us, except for one thing: There is a high tide full moon. There are people who are desperate for an open shiny religion. There are systems that must be touched by the cracking open love of God. There is treasure in every earthen vessel in this room. There is a great legacy of risk and motion here. We are together to move out into the sea.
