On Leadership

Over the last year I’ve been working for the United Church of Canada on a project titled, “Re-Imagining Theological Education.” At mid-year the project got re-directed by an announcement from the Lilly Endowment for Religion of a new “Large Grant” program. The grants, of up to $10 million, are for collaborative efforts by theological schools focused on “preparing pastoral leaders for Christian congregations.” In the world of theological education, $10 million is a lot of money.

So, using my initial research on possibilities for fruitful collaboration among the eight schools affiliated with the United Church of Canada, I wrote a grant proposal that passed initial muster and is now in final stages of preparation. Last week I was in Indianapolis, where the Lilly Endowment is located, for a conference on preparing our final grant proposal which is due in mid-August.

Lilly is laser-focused on pastoral leadership as the key to the health and vitality of congregations. That puts a heavy load of expectations on ministers, a.k.a. “pastoral leaders.” But it isn’t misplaced. I’ve not sure I ever seen a thriving congregation that didn’t have good to great pastoral leadership. Likewise, I’ve seen plenty of declining, “wandering-in-the-wilderness,” congregations that suffered from diffident, ineffective or clueless pastoral leaders.

At one point in last week’s Lilly-sponsored conference we were urged, as part of our work of preparing the final grant, to consider what would be the “obstacles” or “barriers” that might stand in the way of success for the projects for which we sought such generous funding.

It occurred to me that the seminaries themselves are, ironically, sometimes an obstacle. A seminary education can help a person become a good to great pastoral leader. Ideally, you’d think this would be the point. But sometimes seminaries have a different effect. They instill in their graduates a certain condescension toward the church and churches.

One of John Updike’s novels is a thinly veiled depiction of Harvard Divinity School, where I studied for a while on a post-graduate fellowship. In Updike’s novel, a seminary professor described what they did as taking ripe, fragrant heads of cabbage (incoming students) and turning them into sliced, diced, and dried-out slaw. That is, students came to seminary with a radiant and hopeful, if naive, faith. By the time they left they were so steeped in the academy’s prevailing “hermeneutics of suspicion” they weren’t much good to actual congregations.

While that probably overstates matters, it’s not completely off base. You can emerge from seminary with a kind of missionary mindset — that is you come out thinking your job is get people in your congregation to think like your seminary professors. The same is often true of the national offices of denominations and their various priorities. Too often for seminaries and the denomination’s national staff the church is a problem, even the problem.

But maybe there’s help to be found in what is one of the current buzz words in the academic world, “contextual.” Nowadays, it’s all about understanding cultural “context,” and becoming adept at working in multi or cross-cultural contexts. Good enough. My hunch is that successful pastoral leaders will approach a congregation they are called to serve as a particular culture which needs to be understood and appreciated on its own terms before undertaking big change. Apply a contextual approach not only to the  larger community/world, but to the congregation itself.

I pondered this while reading Ross Douthat’s book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. It’s a daring book, as the subtitle suggests. One chapter I found particularly intriguing is, “The Myth of Disenchantment,” in which Douthat notes that ordinary believers report that they do not share their experiences of God or the supernatural with seminary-trained clergy because they are afraid they won’t be taken seriously or, worse, will be referred for psychiatric help. I’m pretty sure I would have been guilty of something like that myself as a young minister.

“When intellectuals stopped taking mystical experiences seriously,” writes Douthat, “actual human beings kept on having the experiences. While Official Knowledge ruled out the supernatural, in ordinary life it kept on breaking in. Science supplanted prayer, for good reason, as the primary means of seeking healing, but people kept on reporting that they had been healed by intercessory prayer. The afterlife ceased to be a respectable subject for theory and argument, but people kept on having visions, seeing ghosts, and reporting strange experiences at the threshold of death at a pace not obviously different — or in the case of near-death experiences, at higher rates — than in the more religious past.”

Part of our grant proposal is aimed at helping future pastors make the transition from seminary to church. Seminaries can help not only by insisting on academic rigor but by encouraging their students to approach actual churches and those who make them up with humility, curiosity, even love. I wrote in our grant proposal that we seek as students those who “love God and love the church.”

“Those whom we would change,” said Martin Luther King Jr., “we must first love.” A tall order, but a truthful one.