Fryling Leadership Ellipse

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7927-4
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

Everyone in a position of responsibility knows the tension of leadership. It may be between tasks or people, money or mission, the present or the future. One often neglected tension is between our inner spiritual longings and the outward needs of the group we lead.But we need not feel forced to choose between the two. Leadership has more in common with an ellipse with two focal points than a bull's-eye with a single target. The Leadership Ellipse is designed to help Christian leaders embrace both halves of the tension--our internal relationship with God and our external relationship with others--to find a truly authentic, integrated way to lead.If you find yourself in a lonely, isolated place of leadership, this book can be your companion. If you find yourself longing to lead in a way that is truly Christian, this book can be your guide. And if you are simply exhausted, then this book can offer you a new way to find refreshment. There is life beyond the bull's-eye.

Robert (Bob) Fryling is publisher of InterVarsity Press and senior vice president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He lives in Illinois with his wife, Alice, an author and spiritual director. Together they have coauthored three books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fryling, Robert A.

Leseproben

Introduction

In her book The Creatures’ Choir, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold wrote a delightful collection of poems putting prayers in the mouths of animals and birds. These prayers express many deep human longings even when associated with the dominant physical attributes of the creatures she chose. She has a poem on the lion and its noble strength, and another one on the swallow and its delight in flight. Though whimsical in style, she is profound in her insights.

My favorite of these poems is “The Peacock,” in which this regal bird is debating its own identity. It is proud of its external beauty and presence, but is humbled by its “discordant cry” and “meager heart.” The peacock ends its lament with the request “Lord, / let a day come, / a heavenly day, / when my inner and outer selves / will be reconciled in perfect harmony.”

The yearning this prayer conveys is consciously or unconsciously at the core of every Christian who seeks to lead others with greater spiritual integrity. But it also highlights the dissonance between our inner and outer worlds. This discord often is experienced in the clash between our outward leadership responsibilities and our inward spiritual lives.

Currently, there is an abundance of excellent books on business leadership, church leadership and organizational leadership that are well authenticated by success stories of size, growth and bottom-line profitability. Many of these books have helped me better understand and practice good leadership principles.

There are also many other valuable books written for how to develop the interior spiritual life. In recent years there has been a wonderful rediscovery of classical spiritual disciplines and the value of feeding and caring for the soul. I have been tremendously helped by many of these books as well. They continue to be a regular part of my reading and contemplative diet.

Unfortunately, much of my experience is that these two worlds—external organizational success principles and internal spiritual disciplines—don’t readily intersect or necessarily inform each other. As a leader I have sometimes felt forced or have chosen to live in a dichotomized world that segments my internal spiritual life from my external life of leadership.

Even trying to evaluate these two worlds seems to create irreconcilable differences. Much of my external world is measured by my accomplishments according to planned objectives and goals. In contrast, I tend to evaluate my internal world by a sense of spiritual peace, which is often more a factor of sufficient rest than that of being closer to God.

In fact the very practice of measurement, which is a foundational principle of organizational life, seems suspect in the realm of spirituality. The spiritual virtue of “letting go” seems like leadership suicide. Because of this, I have often felt like the proverbial person whose head was in the oven and feet in the freezer but on the average felt okay!

I necessarily asked myself, Is the world of success so different from the world of the soul that I simply have to live with this split personality and hope that God is okay with this kind of “average” life? I alternatively have struggled with the opposite temptation to retreat from organizational leadership because it is too hard, or conversely to reject the interior life because it seems so irrelevant. I needed another way of thinking and living.

A New Mental Image

Throughout my struggles in cultivating a more integrated spiritual life, I became aware that part of my difficulty was that I had the wrong mental and spiritual image of what a life of integrity should look like. I had a neat Western culture’s bull’s-eye mentality that wanted to reduce everything to a clear point of focus without any ambiguity. My task as leader was to be an organizational sharpshooter that hit the bull’s-eye every time.

But that way of thinking and living was limiting and unsatisfying because there are ambiguities and tensions in life that cannot be reduced to a bull’s-eye. For instance in orthodox Christian teaching, it is fundamental to believe in both the full divinity and complete humanity of Christ at the same time. It is heresy to believe that Jesus was not fully divine or to believe that he was not fully human. Two seemingly contradictory truths are brought together into the much grander unified truth of Jesus as the incarnate Son of God.

Another example is the classic tension of form and freedom. My experience in organizational life suggests that most of us want structures for others but freedom for ourselves! But without honoring both needs at the same time, organizations can easily become imbalanced or schizophrenic. They become too dependent on structures and control, or conversely too flexible and chaotic. Like the human body with its bone structure and muscles, organizations and leaders need a definite structure to give them strength and stability while also having the capacity to be flexible and create movement.

These kinds of observations helped me realize that I needed a different mental image than the bull’s-eye to help me not only understand theology and healthy organizational life but to better understand the seemingly unsolvable conflict between my inner and outer worlds. The mental image that best describes my tension comes from my interest in math: the ellipse.

One of my favorite topics in high school was geometry. I loved doing proofs and solving problems. There is a wonderful clarity and a certain precision in geometry that ironically helps explain ambiguity as well. For instance, an ellipse, which looks like an elongated circle, is defined by two distinctly different focal points that are of equal importance. One point is not inferior to the other, and both are needed if there is to be an ellipse.

The Leadership Ellipse

Spiritual leadership can be understood as an ellipse. One focal point is our inner spiritual life, our longings, our affections and our allegiance to God. The other focal point is our outer world and organizational life, what we do and how we do it. Together these focal points define an ellipse that circumscribes our true spiritual leadership. It represents the dynamic tension between our soul and our actions, and gives us a mental image for personal, spiritual and professional integrity in who we are and how we lead.

Historically, God’s people have emphasized different focal points of their inner and outer lives. For instance, the desert fathers and mothers in the early church practiced their spirituality by retreating to a desert and experiencing extended times of isolation. They wanted to nurture their inner life of the soul away from the temptations of the outer world. Their dedicated example of prayer and solitude is part of our Christian heritage and understanding of spiritual formation.

Many centuries later the Jesuits practiced a far more active involvement in the world of business and education, which was the external focal point of their spiritual calling. Their spirituality can be characterized as “contemplatives in action” and “seeing God in all things.” Faithfulness to God was reflected by their advances into the world rather than by their retreat from it.

Jesus’ life was characterized by these contrasting practices of piety and activity. He spent time alone in the desert praying, but he also got exhausted in feeding and healing the multitudes. His life was not limited to a singular way of spiritual behavior, yet he always exhibited a consistency or integrity. His teachings and his life were shaped by his relationship to God the Father.

Inner and Outer Worlds

Christian leaders today need to embrace and embody both spiritual focal points of our internal relationship with God and our external relationship with others. We cannot successfully separate or isolate our interior life from our exterior life. Both are part of who we truly are. The more there is harmony and integrity between who we are in the deepest recesses of our being and in the most visible expressions of our lives, the more we will be authentic to both ourselves and others.

But there is even a deeper spiritual dynamic at work in both of our inner and outer lives. It is not sufficient to just be authentic, no matter how attractive that might be at a certain level. Even a criminal or a racist can be authentic if their attitudes of hate manifest themselves in acts of hatred. The flippant criticism to “get real” may be a necessary exhortation to someone who denies what is truly happening, but just blurting whatever we think or feel is not sufficient for personal spiritual maturity or effective Christian leadership.

The Bible eloquently describes and illustrates that we are in the midst of a spiritual battle—the battle between “the flesh and the spirit,” the battle between our compulsions to sin and our commitments to God. We have this struggle both internally and externally. We wrestle with what we think and what we say, in what we feel and how we act.

So we may communicate authenticity by being vulnerable in what we say, but we may be using our vulnerability for soliciting the affections of others. Or we may develop our piety in solitude but then control others for our own purposes through our aura of spirituality. The temptation for self-promotion is never far from anyone in leadership.

In other words, our interior lives not only have to align with our external lives but they need to be aligned with the call of God’s Spirit in our lives. Authentic spirituality means that we are living with a...