Christian leadership: From relevance to prayer

This morning we had our last weekly staff meeting at church before summer break. Christian Binggeli, one of the current church interns, gave a devotional on the story of Mary being with Jesus while Martha was working getting the meal ready.

Speaking of meals, we had a great barbecue at Pastor Serge's presbytery home at lunch. One of my favorite parts of the week is the Tuesday staff lunch. As I'm currently not in a "small group," this has become my weekly group. We had chicken wings and a slightly spicy sausage called merguez for lunch. There was a couple there named David & Lesley who hope to work among the Jewish population in Paris in the future. They are among the quality workers whom God is sending our way.

We have over 70 people signed up for this week's (June 17-19) arts conference. I was in a meeting with Jim Beise, Mark Dirksen, and Beth Maynard about it. Mark and Beth are in Paris for a couple of months and will be very helpful for this conference.

One of my favorite books on leadership is Henry Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (Crossroad: New York, 1989). I originally read this during grad school in 1999. Nouwen is like the French theologian Blaise Pascal in that both Catholics and Protestants like him.

His chapter "From Relevance to Prayer" (pp. 13-32) is brilliant.

He describes one temptation of ministry as being the desire "to be relevant."

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God's love. The great message that we have to carry, as ministers of God's word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God ahs created and redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source of all human life. (p. 17)

Nouwen describes the question as "Do you love me?"

The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: are you in love with Jesus? Perhaps another way of putting the question would be: Do you know the incarnate God? In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that cares, that reaches out and wants to heal. In that heart there is no suspicion, no vindictiveness, no resentment, and not a tinge of hatred. It is a heart that wants only to give love and receive love in response. It is a heart that suffers immensely because it sees the magnitude of human pain and the great resistance to trusting the heart of God who wants to offer consolation and hope. (p. 24)

He describes the spiritual discipline to bring this about as "contemplative prayer."

If there is anything that the Christian leader of the future will need, it is the discipline of dwelling in the presence of the One who keeps asking us: "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" It is the discipline of contemplative prayer. Through contemplative prayer we can keep ourselves from being pulled from one urgent issue to another and from being strangers to our own and God's heart. Contemplative prayer keeps us home, rooted and safe, even when we are on the road, moving from place to place, and often surrounded by sounds of violence and war. Contemplative prayer deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everything and everyone around us keeps suggesting the opposite. (pp. 28-29)

It is not enough for the priests and ministers of the future to be moral people, well trained, eager to help their fellow humans, and able to respond creatively to the burning issues of their time. All of that is very valuable and important, but it is not the heart of Christian leadership. The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word and to taste fully God's infinite goodness. (pp. 29-30) (bold print mine)

Christian leaders cannot simply be persons who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for their words, advice, and guidance. Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love and to find there the wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them. Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of live, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses without being manipulative. (pp. 31-31)

For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required. (p. 32)