On being president May 7, 2008

This year, I am serving as cohort president. Biblical Seminary has designed the LEAD MDiv program to function in cohorts. When you begin the program, you are assigned to a chohort and spend the entire three-years with the same people (usually between 15 and 25 students). Every Tuesday night and one Saturday a month for three years, we go through every class together, pretty much year-round.  The point is, I think, to encourage the formation of relationships that go beyond the polite discussion of topics, beyond the surface.  The more time you spend with people, the more likely you will be to experience conflict with them, and healthy conflict leads to growth and learning– certainly in the area of theology and praxis, but also in the area of interpersonal skills.  I have certainly found this to be the case.  Rubbing shoulders with my brothers during the last year and a half has proven exciting, uncomfortable, challening, frustrating, and a true blessing in my personal and spiritual formation.

Part of my task as President this year is to help our cohort decide on a location for our final mission/learning trip overseas. We were given three options and asked to pick one… seems simple enough, eh? Well, it has been an interesting process.  I have decided that leading a group of leaders is a tricky balance between showing strength and basically keeping your hands off.  Leaders want a voice. They have an opinion and they need the space to share those opinions. Leaders also want to see your strength in order to respect you. They don’t respect wishy-washy leadership. They want to see action and they want to get things done. In short, they are a tough crowd to please.

I have been trying to walk this tight-rope. I have been trying to allow the space for people to share their opinions, and yet I’ve tried to lay out a clear process for us to follow in order to stay on track and actually get something decided.  To be honest, I have no idea how I’m doing. And there is another factor that plays into this role for me.  In a group of fourteen leaders, I am the only woman… and I am our president… and this is an evangelical seminary…

I wonder sometimes if I’m too opinionated for a woman, in their eyes. Or perhaps I am too soft and they wish I had some balls.  I wonder if I have earned their respect.  Leadership in any setting is a difficult balance, but leadership for a woman in an evangelical seminary among a bunch of male leaders… I feel like my feet are too big for the skinny balance beam.  What a clumsy president.

Power Seduction April 23, 2008

In this, my second year of seminary, we have had two courses in “The story of the Christian church”.  The first took us from the very beginnings of Christianity up through the Age of Anxiety (just prior to the Reformation).  The second class was entitled “Reformation to Present.”  Although these classes were comprehensive as far as covering the lifetime of Christianity, content-wise, they were certainly not. This is, after all, an MDiv program, which means we only get a survey of history, theology, church leadership skills, Christian ethics, etc.

In spite of the limited nature of this overview of Christian history, something struck me, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It seems to me that whenever Christians come into possession of power, we lose sight of Christian character. We losesight of the Way of Jesus.  With Constantine came peace and power for the church, as well as violence and coercion and corruption.  With the conversion of various political leaders, came the unique phenomenon of whole people-groups becoming Christian without a conscious decision to do so, without understanding the cost of following Jesus, the meaning of that decision.  The history of the Papacy at Rome is filled with abuses of power, love of money, manipulation, bribery, simony. The church-state relationship that the Protestants enjoyed in Europe meant more conflict, aggression and bloodshed, among Christians themselves! My own ancestors were burned and drowned and tortured in ways that I find intolerable to even think about for very long. In Calvinist Geneva, the Consistory and City Council believed they should lead their people into Christian morality, disciplining and punishing those who erred in behavior or belief.  They executed people for certain sins.  Executed them.  This is frightening to me.

Power is sexy. We love it. We grasp for it and hold onto it at all costs, it seems. It seduces us with promises of being an avenue for good, for change and transformation.  “If I held that position, wow, what I could do!” “If the church could just have more Christians in politics. If we could rule the land for God… if we had people in the right places….”  I hate to think.  I am not sure we are ready to handle the demons of power.  History proves we use it for ourselves; we use it over others.  We cannot be trusted with it.

Jesus shunned power, walked away from it every time people tried to give it to him.  He brought in the Kingdom with meekness, humility, poverty, nonviolence… by working the margins of society, not by becoming a member of the Sanhedrin or a leader of the Pharisees or a leader of a violent revolution to overthrow the Romans. This does not mean he was without passion or was not a leader of any kind.  What has captured my attention is WHERE he exercised his leadership and WITH WHOM. Perhaps we should learn from his example.

A fellow blogger has an interesting post related to this topic at—

http://redoraclejess.blogspot.com/2008/04/no-place-for-things-that-corrupt.html