Leadership from the Inside Out

Abstract

While varying slightly from diocese to diocese or province to province, Anglican Church has a formation process for leadership based heavily upon creation of one-size-fits-all clergy. An accidental by-product of process is a failure to honor unique giftedness each leader presents for leadership and, ultimately, to capitalize on his or her gifts. This process sits in contradiction to stories of emerging leaders from Scripture and history of church. In order to position ourselves for leadership in present and future, we must turn our attention back toward unique gifts of each emerging leader while remaining acutely aware of context from which he or she emerges and in which he or she serves. The story of Hurley and Steve Chen reads like stories of two of our own bibUcal leaders, Joshua and Paul. John Cloud, writing for Time magazine, says this of Hurley, one of founders of internet giant YouTube: Chad was unusual in that his artistic proclivities coincided with an interest in business and technology.1 Chen's family remarks that he was always a bit of a risk taker and Cloud describes him as peripatetic. In winter of 2005, after shooting video at a dinner party at Chen's apartment, two wanted to send footage to friends, yet had trouble sharing video online. Hurley, Chen, and Jawid Karim were colleagues at PayPal: Hurley was a graphic designer responsible for PayPal's logo, and Chen and Karim were engineers. Working together for some time and beating considerable odds, three managed not only to build a company that Google would acquire for $1.65 bilUon, but also to create a new way to see world. Both gifts and context helped these three to become such accompUshed leaders at a young age. Long before Moses consecrated him, Joshua, son of Nun, fought to preserve Israel. Both his gifts as a young military leader and his position as Moses' servant early in Ufe eventually propeUed Joshua to become one who led Israel into a stretch of land that had been otherwise insignificant, but today occupies prominence for each of Abrahamic faiths.2 The YouTube story can assist in drawing tighter focus on a theology of leadership as we examine their story over and against those of biblical leaders like Joshua or Paul. At same time that our Communion possesses a very specific ecclesiological process toward ordained leadership or conferring of authority - varying only shghtly from diocese to diocese or province to province - that very process seems to sit in contrast to narratives in Scripture. While narratives of bibUcal text tell tales of leadership developing out of gifts and context, our church's current model focuses mainly upon formation. The biblical text gives witness to an inside-out process of developing leaders. It is directly tied to uniqueness of aspiring leader himself and context or times in which he is leading. In biblical narrative these emerging leaders seem to begin engaging God-directed Ufe nearly right away, rather than entering a formalized or structured formation process. Our current process for identification of leaders in Episcopal Church is heavily dependent upon formation, that is, an outside-in process. An aspiring leader usually identifies in herself desire to assume a leadership role or is identified by clergy. As she declares an intention to seek role of leader, gears of institutional machinery are set in motion and aspiring leader is subject to evaluation and heavy formation that often does not honor uniqueness of aspirant's personality or her current context for ministry. Institutionally, we currently focus on development of ordained leaders in a seminary setting, assuming that we begin with a sort of blank slate candidate and then engage each potential leader in both academic and communal formation - testing, evaluating, teaching, encouraging - with ultimate hope of ordaining that newly formed leader for the whole church. …

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