It is much more than leadership – by José R. Irizarry
When the announcement came out of a new 3-D screening of Disney’s beloved The Lion King, I was sure I wanted to take a second look, part out of nostalgia and part to test out the various claims made about the lessons on leadership we can derive from its characters. Even in respectable academic journals such as the Journal of Management Education, in an article by Debra R. Comer (2001), the Lion King is posited as a textbook for leaders who need to learn how to overcome self doubt, how to add a spiritual dimension to their mundane tasks, and to recognize the high price a community pays when the leader abdicates to responsibility. Yet every good story, even in a flat 2-D version, models more than one perspective in life. Against the lions’ lessons in leadership are the claims of a relentless group of hyenas, who, excited about the prospective disappearance of the leader-figure, dance around chanting “Who needs a King? No King, No King!” As the term “leadership” becomes common coinage in current discussions about the future of theological education, inexorably linked to the Church’s “Circle of life,” we need to consider our presumptions about this elusive social construct.
A misplaced concern by institutions of theological formation on proper leadership for the church has the potential to clash with emerging forms of congregationally-centered ministries where the faithful ask the question, “Who needs a Leader?” After all, the assumed connection between leadership effectiveness and congregational health is very loose, and its claims circulate around without much empirical evidence. In part because there is little consensus of what effective leadership should look like despite decades of research and myriad publications on the subject. This conceptual imprecision has produced certain inadequacies:
- in theological institutions trying too hard to focus on leadership skills;
- difficulty in distinguishing leadership from mere organizational management;
- lack of clarity on the boundaries between authority and power;
- the presumption of a division of labor between leaders and followers;
- and the prevailing sense of clergy exceptionality based on the acquisition of a theological knowledge that is often denied to lay people under the pretense that the average Christian is not able to handle higher levels of theological inquiry and biblical criticism.
More significantly, theological notions of leadership have not been able to clarify with precision how they relate to the biblical mandate for discipleship.
Adding to these flaws in the “leadership discourse” of churches and seminaries is the limited scope of models for leadership development (almost always defined around personality traits such as charismatic, servant, transformational, visionary, and spiritual). This narrow approach seems to attempt to impose a normative character on clergy, ignoring the fact that any effective of leadership is ultimately contingent upon the context of the congregation’s life and the subjective experiences of its members. The question posed by management scholar Richard Barker is as challenging as accusatory: How can we train leaders if we do not know what leadership is? Or more properly to our argument: How can leadership be the ultimate goal of theological education when it is an area of little research, teaching, and practice in the overall curriculum of seminaries? While leadership is central to how organizations function under a legitimate form of authority and hierarchy, it can easily further existing social beliefs and structures that need to be challenged if we expect the church to grow and thrive into the future. To be sure, theological education provides the sort of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that engender leadership in the church, but in assisting the shaping of the church’s future, theological education should strive to do much more than leadership training.
For observant Christians, the challenges of congregational life in contemporary culture are no surprise. Declining membership, fiscal constraint, organizational staleness, and the erosion of public credibility – all can be seen as the concrete expression of a corporate memory that has showed analytical deficiencies in reading the “signs of the time” and that has lost the creative impetus to seek elsewhere (away from the ecclesial organizational culture that holds it captive) for vision and inspiration. We have only to remember that, at times, this decline has happened around and despite good leadership, for it is the Christian culture that has gravitated into a complacent accommodation to social norms and ritualizations, and congregations have taken the role of domesticating that Christian culture in predictable patterns of worship and mission. This situation has ignited the anxieties of churches, seminaries, and other religious institutions confronted with frequent claims about the church’s decline and its inevitable demise.
In a somber assessment of Christianity, the Times Magazine published in 2009 an article entitled “The End of Christian America” in which the author underscores the public opinion that religion is becoming less influential in responding to people’s major life quandaries. In an age of informational surplus and scientific sophistication, the subject matter of theological thinking consumed at theological education institutions (whether it has mystery, inconclusive revelation, and rudimentary tradition as a source) is seen as a questionable tool for forming culturally-functional individuals. Here is but one clue to the known distance between theological institutions and congregations: theological institutions, in their reflexivity, create a space for envisioning a church that places culture in critical dialogue with traditions (and this is the same for liberal and conservative institutions). Congregations for the most part, in their practicality, function in tandem with culture in order to guarantee the continuation of their traditions in an undisrupted flow. For many of us who teach at theological institutions, it has become commonplace to hear the usual complaint that seminaries and theological schools do not prepare clergy for “real ministry.” Responding to this criticism, seminaries have often revised their curricula, engaged in deliberate dialogue with faith communities, and incorporated into their programs research initiatives to study congregations and their needs. No effort seems to calm the criticism now morphed into a truism. After many attempts to solve the problem, one then wonders if theological institutions are, in fact, not responding to the “realities of ministry”, or if it is the ministry of congregations that is ultimately “unreal.” By “unreal” I mean, modeled after premises, behaviors, organizational structures and ritualizations that deny the church the opportunity to be a real option for meaning makers and faith seekers. So before we rush into writing the epitaph for the church, let’s consider that it is not its disappearance we should fear, but its irrelevance. It should be the goal of theological education to assist the church in recapturing this relevance, for it was out of deep theological reflection in the midst of crucial cultural debates that the church has historically grown its public confessional identity and authority.
The question of church leadership as the goal for theological education, important as it is, is secondary to the task of recovering ecclesial relevance. The question that should take precedence seems to be: in a culture where the church seeks relevance, who needs theological education? The ecology of theological formation needs to be expanded to address the vocation of professionals who articulate faith matters in media, social service organizations, health and caring professions, and schools, among other institutions conversant with religious values. Taking seriously the ministry of laity not only in congregations but in day to day work situations should be a future agenda of theological institutions. The growing and vibrant fellowships and congregations of non-Anglo-European groups need to be given access to theological education. A theological education needs to be formed that is at the same time ready to change and adaptive to the faith experience of these groups. This will require theological institutions (in the US and elsewhere) to retool their pedagogies and organizational structures in order to respond to this new Christianity spreading from the South and the East of the globe into our neighborhoods. Theological institutions have survived too long by catering to one type of church; and, by doing so, turning its back to the Church’s confessional Catholicity. A skeptical public needs theological education and seminaries may consider surrendering their cloister mentality to become open institutions that provide the appropriate fora for public debate on matters pertaining to faith and religion, especially as they help debunk overly simplistic and uni-dimensional views of the Christian tradition in culture. Theological institutions- their learners, faculty and administrators- need theological education, particularly a theological education that opens our reflection to a God is experienced in the tradition of various world religions. The church cannot be relevant in the 21st century in isolation from the experience of faith of those who inhabit the world with us and who also contribute to shaping the realm of values and hope expectations in our culture.
Thus conceived, theological education will infuse the church with new life, renewed outlooks, and fresh gifts to bestow upon seekers and the faithful alike. It can foster once again congregational excitement for the generative power of the Word and meaningful faith experience. It can build up healthy faith communities ready to welcome the pastoral leaders that theological institutions also help to equip.