From Leading to Being Led: Avoiding the temptation of Power

More Gathered wisdom from Henri J. M. Nouwen

You all know what the third temptation of Jesus was. It was the temptation of power. When I ask myself the main reason for so many people having left the Church during the past decades in France, Germany, Holland and also in Canada and America the word “power” easily comes to mind. One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power – political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power – even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are.

The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the Gospel is the greatest of all. Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the Church, such as the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the immense secularization of the twentieth century, we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.

Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life. We have been tempted to replace love with power. Tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.

The temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and received love.

Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. The servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. The downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world.

It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest. I am speaking of a leadership in which power is constantly abandoned in favor of love. It is a true spiritual leadership. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.

Excerpts from:
In the Name of Jesus
Reflections on Christian Leadership
By
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Crossroad Publishing Co.
1997

Leading in the Love of Christ

Gathered wisdom from Henri J. M. Nouwen

The Christian leader of the future is the one who truly knows the heart of God. Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul this is not something that comes from God. Many contemporary movies and plays portray the ambiguities and ambivalences of human relationships, and there are no friendships, marriages, or communities in which the strains and stresses of the second love are not keenly felt.

If there is any focus 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?” 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 becoming strangers to our own and God’s heart. Contemplative prayer deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everything and everyone around us keeps suggesting the opposite.

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? 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.

Jesus says, “Feed my lambs, look after my sheep, feed my sheep.” Having been assured of Peter’s love, Jesus gives him the task of ministry. In many ways, he makes it clear that ministry is a communal and mutual experience.

First of all, Jesus sends the twelve out in pairs (Mark 6:7). We keep forgetting that we are being sent out two by two. We cannot bring good news on our own. We are called to proclaim the Gospel together, in community. There is a divine wisdom here. “If two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three meet in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:19-20). You might already have discovered for yourself how radically different traveling alone is from traveling together. I need my brothers or sisters to pray with me, to speak with me about the spiritual task at hand, and to challenge me to stay pure in mind, heart, and body. Whenever we minister together, it is easier for people to recognize that we do not come in our own name, but in the name of the Lord Jesus who sent us.

Ministry is not only a communal experience, it is also a mutual experience. He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as “professionals” who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved. Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead.

We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. The world in which we live – a world of efficiency and control – has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd. It is a servant leadership in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need him or her.

Excerpts from:
In the Name of Jesus
Reflections on Christian Leadership
By Henri J. M. Nouwen
Crossroad Publishing Co. 1997

Expand your shrinking world

To the degree we get "inside of ourselves" and "caught up in our own contexts" we shrink. Often our worlds are little more than our routines. Leadership requires something more of leaders. Here is a great way to enlarge your world and think new thoughts - some of them engaging, some disturbing, some maddening and some that open up new vistas and frontiers.

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