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[Church of the Brethren News Services]

Date:      June 29, 1999
Contact:  Nevin Dulabaum
V:  847/742-5100   F:  847/742-6103
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"Who, me?" by Moderator Lowell Flory, McPherson, Kan.

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I've always liked that old story of the young fellow who had just
completed skiing lessons and was on the slopes testing his new
found skill.  About halfway down a hill he misjudged a curve, took
it too wide, and presently found himself hurtling over an incline,
the height and steepness of which he couldn’t assess.  As he almost
rolled out of control, he managed to reach out and grasp a small
sapling growing from between the rocks.  So there he hung, arm
extended, skis dangling from his feet, unable to see much in any
direction.  

"Hello, is there anybody up there?"  No response.  

"Hello, I say, is there anybody up there?"  Silence.

Finally on his third appeal, a low, resonant voice broke the
silence: "I am here."  

"Oh, I am so glad, I am so happy you just happened to come by here
right now.  What a coincidence.  You see I have this . . ."

"I have always been here."

"Oh . . .   OK.  Whatever.  So let me tell you about this little
problem I've gotten into.  I am hanging here from a . . . "  

"I can see you."

"Oh. . . . OK.  Well, uhh, so will you help me?" 

"I will help you."
 
"OK!!  Very good.  OK . . . I’m ready when you are.  Just tell me
what you want me to do first."

"Let go . . ."  

" . . . Hello, hello!  Is there anybody else up there?"  

Sometimes it is hard to hear what God is saying to us, isn’t it?  
 
At an earlier time in my life I was a professional student of
history.  One of the ways I could easily get into daydreaming was
to start imagining what it must have been like to be present at
various times in history that I was reading about.  What was the
response of the crowd when Lincoln spoke the Gettysburg address? 
What was daily life really like in Colonial Williamsburg in July or
among the native Americans of the plains in January?   What was it
like with Caesar at the Rubicon?  What would it have been like, of
all silly ideas, to watch Moses standing there in the desert
carrying on this conversation with a bush!?  Must have been rather
novel looking at the very least!

Yet I wonder whether it is possible that we are facing that burning
bush in our day.  Are we standing on Holy Ground?  Is the bush
speaking to US: "Servant church, arise!  Servants of the church,
where are you? Arise!  The harvest is plentiful but the workers are
few."  Is the Lord of the harvest asking us to go out into the
field, and we are standing here arguing "Who, me?  NOT me!" - just
like Moses did - or perhaps worse, simply oblivious to the appeal? 
   

It is commonplace these days for us to be rather critical about
leadership.  Some of the commentary is deserved.  But there is also
another side to the failings of leadership that is just as
sobering.   Thirty years ago Robert Greenleaf wrote an essay called
"The Servant as Leader."  In that essay he asked:

 . . . who is the enemy -- what is holding back more rapid
movement into a better society that we all presume is reasonable
and possible.  Who is standing in the way of a larger consensus on
the definition of the better society and paths to reaching it?” 

[He concedes it is] “not the evil, nor the apathetic nor the
stupid, nor the system itself. Granting that fewer evil, stupid, or
apathetic people or a better "system" might make the job easier [he
says], their removal would not change matters -- not for long.  The
better society will come, if it comes, with plenty of evil, stupid,
apathetic people around, and with an imperfect, ponderous,
inertia-charged "system" as the vehicle for change.  Liquidate the
offending people, radically alter the system, and in less than a
generation they will all be back . . . The real enemy is fuzzy
thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people, and their
failure to lead and to follow servants as leaders.  Too many settle
for being critics and experts.  There is too much intellectual
wheel-spinning, too little preparation for, and willingness to
undertake, the hard and high tasks of building better institutions
in an imperfect world . . .  In short, the enemy is strong natural
servants who have the potential to lead but who do not lead . . .
They suffer. Society suffers. 

Servant church, arise!  Servants of the church, are you hearing?

Perhaps a reason why there isn't a more hearty response is that the
calling isn’t as easy as it might appear.  What we would be
expected to do, or to be, may not be very alluring to just
everyone.  There are several overlapping reasons why I believe that
is true.

First, "servant church" and "servant leadership" imply servanthood
as a prerequisite to leadership.  Yes, I know, that sounds like a
contradiction.  But the word "servant" does precede "leadership,"
after all.  As Jesus reminds us in Luke 22:27 and several places in
the other gospels, the one who is at the table may be the greater
one, but he (Jesus) is nonetheless among us as the one who serves. 
Jesus, the great model of all time, showed us what it means to have
influence on people’s lives, to have impact on the world of his day
and a later day by adopting an attitude of service.  Servant
leadership rests on the premise that the true servant leader feels
called first to serve others.  As a commitment over time, that
service may result in influence and impact, and in due course,
leadership may be invited, or may just evolve.  So the one who says
"I must be a leader, therefore I will act like a servant so I can
justify myself in a leadership position" -- has it backwards.  

Secondly, in our Church of the Brethren tradition, we hear God
speaking with each others’ help, and we do God’s work with each
others' support and counsel.  That is a simple statement with some
complicated consequences for how we even visualize leadership in
the first place.  For a few minutes here let me test the boundaries
of what we usually think leadership is, what it is we are called to
be as a servant church and as servant leaders.

Leadership isn't just about individual persons we call the chiefs. 
It is about a process we call getting things done together.  Jim
Kouzes, co-author of The Leadership Challenge and several other
currently popular books on this subject says that "leadership is
everybody's business.  The notion that leadership is the private
preserve of a few charismatic men and women who are somehow born
with a special gene is myth, pure myth."  Leadership is a process
by which there is influence on the movement of a people toward some
worthy goal.  At any given time that influence may be exercised by
any of a variety of people, sometimes the designated leader,
sometimes not.  Sometimes the pastor, sometimes a lay person in the
church.  Sometimes the moderator, sometimes not!  It is a dynamic
that takes place in a community context, with a focus on the growth
of the community, rather than the direction of an individual.  Meg
Wheatley, another author of currently popular literature on
leadership says [loosely quoted] that "one of the great stumbling
blocks of our time is this strange belief that we exist as
individuals separated from one another.  There has to be a new
balance of how we use our individual creativity as a gift to the
whole.  Einstein described our belief in our separate existences as
an 'optical delusion' . . It is a great myth of our lives that we
are created to grow into ourselves rather than into a community." 

What does all this mean -- what does it suggest about the
attributes, the distinctives, the markers, of those who would be
drawn into leadership?  

Everybody's list of leader qualities says that leadership has to
have vision.  "A ship that is in harbor is safe, but that is not
what ships are built for -- and that's not what leaders are for -- 
you know, that kind of language.  But our understanding of
leadership here implies more.  It implies that leadership has to
inspire a sharing of the vision across the broader community. 
Being able to inspire a shared vision is critical.  When Moses had
the encounter with the bush, he questioned the vision, or at least
his ability to communicate the vision.  He ultimately discovered
that God's purposes were at the heart of the vision, and the
community came to be inspired by a sharing of that vision.  

I have oft repeated a story I once heard from a professor some
years ago.  It is a story about a Texan who was traveling in New
England.  Now even if you haven’t ever met this Texan, I bet you
can help me describe him, right?  What does he look like?  Tall? 
Broad shouldered?  Wearing a 10 gallon hat and funny shoes with
pointed toes and high heels.  And when he talks he says stuff like
"Hooooowdy, pa'dner!"  And his car -- probably a Cadillac, with a
longhorn hood ornament?  You get the picture.  

Well, our Texan is driving down a country road in Maine and his car
overheats.  He has to go for some water for the radiator.  He gets
out to walk and presently comes upon a Maine farmer working in his
yard.  Now even if you haven't met this Maine farmer, perhaps you
can describe him too.  Somewhat slighter build, wearing Biltwell
overalls, and when he talks he says stuff like "Aayyyyup" or 
you can't get there from here."  The Maine farmer is glad to oblige
the Texan with a bucket of water, and he goes off to cool down his
car.  

When he returns with the bucket, the Texan figures he might as well
have a little conversation with this friendly New Englander.  So he
says "Say, pa'dner, how much land you got on your spread here?" 
Well, the Maine farmer swells up with pride and says "You see that
stand of pine down there on the hill -- 500 feet.  Then round the
corner and up the fence row another 400 feet.  And here along the
road about 600 feet and back to the pine."  The Texan smiles a bit
and then says "You know back home in west Texas where I come from
I can get in my car at 6:00 in the morning and I can drive and
drive and drive and drive until noon before I get around all my
land."  

The Maine farmer paused a moment, then he put his hand up on the
Texan's shoulder and he said ". . . you know sonny, I had a car
like that once myself!"   

What is so remarkable about that story of course is that we have
two perfectly rational, literate folks carrying on a face to face
conversation, and yet they are worlds apart.  A shared vision they
would not have.  Church of the Brethren, servant church, what is
your shared vision?

Inspiring a shared vision is the first marker of leadership.  The
ability to implement that vision into some kind of credible reality
is another.  Transforming the vision into reality, integrating the
vision into the fabric of the community’s daily life is equally
important.  That requires understanding the constituency, it
requires patience, and sometimes compromise.  The lone prophet may
be right but still not contributing to movement of the community. 
A short little ditty I know I’ve shared before capsulizes it:
     This is the story of Joshua Gray,
     Who died disputing the right of way.
     He was right, quite right as he drove along, 
     But he is just as dead as if he'd been wrong.  
This is not a call to be political chameleons.  It is a recognition
that leadership must establish its credibility with the
constituency before the vision can become reality.  

There is one last brief but pointed commentary about leadership
attributes.  It has been amazing to me the convergence of focus by
secular writers in recent years on what we have always thought of
as a fundamental Christian theme, a basic Brethren value.  That is
the alignment between saying and being and doing, between policy
and practice, between word and deed, between the talk and the walk. 
An ounce of example is worth a pound of advice, as the saying goes. 
Modeling and mentoring our beliefs -- we sometimes call it
integrity.  It is a simple principle, easy to forget in the fray of
daily life, and usually fatal to the moral authority of the leader
and the fabric of the community when it is rationalized away.  

I could continue the list, but my job this evening is only to get
the discussion started, to put the first few brush strokes on the
image.  Other messages throughout the week will focus on the
spirituality dimension of leadership, more directly on servanthood,
more directly on community and reconciliation, and on the
leadership opportunity to call new members into the fellowship. 
All the while the question may be ringing in the background: Who,
ME?  Am I ready to do all that?

Now as we look back over our shoulder at those several attributes
we have observed the last few minutes about leadership, we can --
coincidentally -- capsulize most of them with words that begin with
the letter "I," but do note that not one of them is the capital
letter "I."  What are those "marker words?"

* Invited -- invited into leadership effectiveness through the
     community
* Involved and included -- as a contributor to leadership without
     always being "it"
* Inspiration -- Inspires a shared vision 
* Influence and impact -- on the lives of others and of the
     community.
* Implementation -- integrates a shared vision into the being of
     the community
Integrity.  

Are we prepared to assume these attributes -- to accept or be these
things -- as servants?  

Last Saturday evening we had the opening session of Standing
Committee.  Around the dinner table we had placed a gift for each
person -- a small key ring that displayed an etching of the
Conference logo and theme -- "Let the Servant Church Arise!"  As
one member left the room at the close of the evening's activities,
he tarried a moment, held up the ring, and said "You know, what's
interesting about this is that it has no meaning unless I provide
the key.   

The voice in the bush is speaking to us -- "is there anybody
there?"    

Those who would have gifts for Ministerial leadership, are you
ready to hear the invitation of God through our community to be a
servant of the church?  Who, me?  Yes, you.  

Those who would have gifts of lay leadership, are you ready to hear
an invitation?  Who, me?  Yep, you too!

Church of the Brethren are you inspired with a shared vision as a
Servant Church Arising?  Who, us?  Yes, us!