Newsletter Articles
Adaptive Leadership Part 2: Finding Home in a New Story
On Christmas Eve, 1978, my wife and I were gathered with our two small children around our Christmas tree in our home at #15 Agdasayah Street in the Niavaran section of Tehran, Iran. The annual candlelight Christmas Eve service at the little German church we attended had been cancelled. Tehran was under a mandatory curfew. Anyone caught outside after dark would be arrested and could possibly be shot. So we stayed in our house. We had no choice.
Those were turbulent days in Tehran. A revolution was under way to overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Government forces were trying to keep him in power. When nightfall came and we sat around our tree, the events and sounds to which we had become accustomed each night would begin. First, someone would cut the power, and the whole city would be blacked out. Then people would go to their rooftops and begin shouting in Farsi, “God is great!” and “Death to the Shah!” and “Death to America!”
We would hear the loud rumbling on the street outside our house as armored personnel carriers transported government troops from the army base down the road to their positions within the city. We would soon hear machine-gun fire, shouts, and deathly screams. It was just a few days after the firebombing of the house of a Mobil Oil executive down the street, and sometimes I would find a threatening note on my car. I don’t know whether it was because I was simply an American or because I had a North Carolina State University Wolfpack sticker on my car and it was some Tar Heel or Duke fan doing it.
So on this Christmas Eve night 29 years ago, we sat around our tree, held our children, and sang Christmas carols in raised voices to try to drown out the sounds of violence outside. “Hark! the heralds angels sing, glory to the new born king. Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.” “Silent Night. Holy Night. All is calm. All is bright.” In that moment, there were two stories being told, two realities competing – the story of violence in the streets and the story in the words of the carols we sang. These two stories could not be more different from each other.
The first story being told in the mayhem in the streets is as old as the story of Cain killing his brother Abel. It is a story that continues to be played out throughout every generation and in all walks of life. It is a story that seems to never end. The characters change but the story is the same. As we begin the year 2008, we must confess that we human beings still have not figured out yet how to really get along with each other. The basic elements of the story that was being played out in the streets of Tehran – the quest for power, dominance, the use of force, and the grief that it all causes – are found in all human versions of this story.
Two four-year olds fight in the sand box, and the elements are there. A war rages on in Iraq, and the elements are there. Extremists assassinate Benazir Bhutto, and that event along with the subsequent Pakistan riots hold all the elements. There is another fight with your teenager, and the elements are there. There is a power play and dissension in the office, and the elements are there. Division strikes a church council, a church staff, or the entire congregation, and, sadly, all the elements are there.
The story that belongs to the church and that is found in the words of the Christmas carols we sing is a totally different story. Instead of coming by might, God comes as a defenseless baby, declares amnesty, and through the baby-become-Messiah opens us up and invites us into a whole new way of living. Through Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and our being baptized into this crucified and risen one, God seizes us and drafts us into this sacred story. Through the Holy Spirit our minds are changed. We are given new eyes, a new and radically different way of seeing ourselves and the world, and a new home in this story of God.
As the church, we are constantly confronted by these two completely differing stories: the age-old empty story that killed Abel, declares war among nations, and crushes anyone perceived as a threat to us, and the contrasting story that belongs to the church: the story of God, hope, promise, and life revealed in Jesus. Both of these stories cannot simultaneously be true. Both cannot hold the last world. Only the one is where true hope is found can demand our allegiance. Only one can finally “save,” that is, give life, make whole, and bring wellness to all.
The Constantinian hijacking of the church took the first story and then cherry-picked and distorted this second story as reinforcement for the first story. Out of this strange relationship we get the North American church, steeped in the rhetoric of the second story but not really reflecting it in how it lives, at least not in the wholesale way to which the gospel calls us. We can excel at “church speak,” but generally function as atheists. We make church about us and not about what God is up to in the world.
When Jesus came on the scene, he called us to “repent” – make a wholesale change in our minds and in our lives. He called us to a new way of being and then said that we cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve two stories. The essential converting action of an adaptive leader is mediating movement from the world’s story to the church’s story in how the congregation lives. This is not a program-facilitated move. It is not that simple. It takes a total re-conceiving of how we are and do church together. Some handles on how the adaptive leader reshapes the staff, leaders and congregation, as well as how the leader reinvents self, will be to subject of future articles.
The place to begin, however, is with the leader. Does the leader reflect in his or her life that the leader’s home is clearly in the sacred story of the church? Does the sacred story and total devotion to and dependence upon God emanate from the leader in lifestyle choices; in radical generosity and leading in giving; in presence and courage in the midst of conflict; in informed and disciplined theological and biblical ways of thinking, analyzing, and deciding; and, in an always-hopeful, tomb-is-empty attitude? Do Jesus’ seemingly impossible words about loving enemies, unlimited forgiveness, and not losing one’s life in trying to gain the whole world seem to be less impossible in the presence of the leader? If so, then you may have a converting leader.
You have just read the second of a five part article by Rick Barger to help us better understand adaptive leadership. We encourage you to also read part one, "What It Is" and those that followed this part, "Conversion and Transformation,"
More like this one in | Newsletter Articles
Comments on this Entry:
Post a comment