Not every one should lead

Wisdom from Leadership guru Pat Lencioni,

Whenever I hear someone encourage all young people to become leaders, or better yet, when I hear a young person say glibly that he or she wants to be a leader someday, I feel compelled to ask the question “why?”

If the answer is “because I want to make a difference” or “I want to change the world,” I get a little skeptical and have to ask a follow-up question: “Why and in what way do you want to change the world?” If they struggle to answer that question, I discourage them from becoming a leader.

Why? Because a leader who doesn’t know why he or she wants to lead is almost always motivated by self-interest. Whether that manifests itself in terms of fame or money or power, it is a very dangerous thing.

True leadership, the kind that results in the greater good, requires a level of selflessness and vision that most people simply don’t have. We forget the loneliness and sacrifice and great personal risk that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln endured during their times, and that the personal benefits they received for their sacrifices were minimal, if not non-existent. But that is what was—and is—required of any truly great leader, which explains why leadership is a rare trait in society, and always has been.

When people without selflessness become leaders, they often end up exploiting people and leaving them worse off. As long as they escape relatively unscathed, they feel that they have succeeded. And this is not limited to CEOs of big companies or members of Congress, though those cases are both more public and potentially harmful. It applies to small business owners, little league coaches, school principals, and mid-level managers as well.

Perhaps that’s why society has become so cynical about leaders, especially in the world of politics and, more recently, big business. People have come to expect—even accept—that their leaders are motivated by fame and fortune more than real service. Which is a shame because we are starting to get cynical as a society. As a result, the wrong people are being drawn into positions of leadership for all the wrong reasons.

How safe do we need to keep them?

More from the New Yorker on Helicopter parents

As for children’s safety, Honoré makes what will no doubt be the controversial recommendation that we stop fretting about it. He quotes Samuel Butler on the subject: “Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” Allergy rates in children are rising throughout the industrialized world. Honoré blames this on oversanitized environments: “Just look at what happened in Germany. Before unification, allergy rates were much higher in the western part, even though the Communist-run eastern half had much worse pollution and more children living on farms. After the countries reunited, East Germany was cleaned up and urbanized—and allergy rates soared.”

Finally, Honoré takes on domestic psychology, in particular the “self-esteem movement” born of the nineteen-seventies. To him, as to other writers on overparenting, this is a matter of disgust. “Every doodle ends up on the fridge door,” he says. According to the research he’s read, such ego-pumping confers no benefit. A review of thousands of studies found that high self-esteem in children did not boost grades or career prospects, or even resistance to adult alcoholism. If I am not mistaken, however, there is something about the self-esteem movement that strikes Honoré at a level deeper than the question of our children’s competence. Marano, as the title of her book tells us, is worried that we are producing a nation of wimps, people who won’t “make it.” Honoré is worried that the Stepford children produced by overparenting will make it, and turn the world into a rude, heartless, boring place.

Our Failing Economy

A friend of mine published these thoughts on his blog. I thought I'd pass them alone. You can check out his blog.

An Economy that Doesn't Deserving Bailing Out?

I was reviewing the Uni student newspaper where I teach part-time and got very annoyed by a passing headline, "An Economy that Doesn't Deserve Bailing Out". David Brooks - one of my favorite New York Times columnists - summarizes nicely why I think this kind of cold hearted and isolating cynicism is profoundly inappropriate in thinking Christians.

In his piece today on The Formerly Middle Class Brooks aptly notes that some people think recession is good because it means a moral revival - that Americans will learn to live without material extravagance and simplify their lives, rediscovering "home, friends and family".

This is a very naive impression of 'recession', and betrays the fundamental political, economic and cultural illiteracy of Christian moralists. Recessions breed more than Wendell Berry's idealist agrarianism - they breed pessimism. Birthrates drop and suicide rates rise. Recessions are about fear, and diminished expectations.

Brooks argues that it is the recently mobile middle class that will feel it, especially in developing economies where millions of people have climbed out of poverty. This recession is pushing them back down. What kind of form will this disillusionment take? Will it be the populism and nativism of the 1880s and 1890s, with the apocalyptic forebodings and collectivist movements crushing individual rights? Or the cynicism of the 1970s when Bretton Woods fell apart, and the oil shock rocked the global economy? Presciently Brooks asks, "will the Obama administration spend much of its time battling a global protest movement that doesn't even exist yet"?

It will not merely the material deprivations that will bite, but the loss of social identity, networks, status symbols and social order. Naive young undergraduates can have the luxury of bemoaning a consumerist North American capitalism which is "finally getting what it deserves", but my heart breaks when I hear them disassociate themselves from their politics, their culture, and their nation - as though somehow they bear no common responsibility to pursue justice in the public sphere. Real people, with real loves and desires are being hurt, and spiraling into psychological and social cacoons - people are afraid and alone, and we're gloating.

Shame on us.

Helicopter parenting

The New Yorker has an interesting article on Helicopter parenting. Here's a paragraph

While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own. Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves—making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration—their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

Engaging

As we get ready for a new president it strikes me as important to hear what he has to say so we can rightly engage in this part of our Christian calling. Here's a link to 60 Minutes' first interview with President Elect Obama

Sunday's Sermon, Flight 90 and Arland Williams

I talked a moment about Arland Williams who sacrficed his life in 1982 to rescue other passengers from the crash of flight 90. One of those rescued was a flight attendant. A friend from EverGreen emailed me the rest of the story.

"She was rescued twice. Two times, two complete strangers made a decision to rescue her, within two days of each other. Not bad, huh? Her name was Kelly Moore which means absolutely nothing to you. You don’t know Kelly Moore but most of you know some of the circumstances about the day that she was rescued, at least the first time. You see Kelly Moore was a flight attendant for Air Florida. The plane she flew on was a Boeing 737. Specifically it was Air Florida Flight 90. On January 13 1982 Kelly Moore began her day just as she always had, never suspecting what the day had in store for her. Two minutes after take off flight 90 began losing altitude and crashed into a Bridge spanning the Potomac River. When Kelly came to she was in the frigid waters of the Potomac clinging to a piece of wreckage with five other survivors.

Remember the story yet?

One of the survivors clinging to that raft helped Kelly and the other four into the rescue harness of a hovering helicopter one by one before succumbing to hypothermia and slipping beneath the surface. And so that was how she was rescued the first time, by a stranger she had never met, who was later identified as Arland Williams.

Two days later Kelly was rescued again, listen to her words. A couple of days later, when I was moved from intensive care to a regular room, I woke to see a nurse standing over me. She smiled, covering my fingers with her warm, gentle hand, and said, "Little girl, I could get in big trouble for telling you this, but God loves you and he saved you from that plane crash for a reason." In response to my eager interest, my nurse risked her job to tell me of Jesus’ love for me. As she spoke of how he died for me, I responded by turning my life over to him. For the first time I felt real peace.

When I prayed to accept Christ, I asked God to show me how I could know more about him. I knew he would answer me.

Not only that but it was by two separate strangers in a course of two days. Why? What qualities did Williams share with other heroes whose stories we read about in the newspapers, you know the ones who save babies from burning buildings, rescue motorists in mangled cars, and plunge into freezing water to save struggling swimmers? Well they are all ordinary people who came to a critical turning point and made an extraordinary decision to rescue someone whose life was in danger. And more often then not they put themselves in peril doing it. Listen again to what Kelly Moore said:

I don’t know why God saved me from the Potomac that day when others died, or why he answered my desperate prayers for contact with him. But I do know God used compassionate, ordinary people to bring his love to me "

Worth a Read

From Steve Garber's article on Proximate Justice. The entire article is worth reading.

In the here-and-now, I vote—but always with a torn heart. I have not yet met a candidate or a political proposal that embodies all that I dream for as one whose deepest loyalties are grounded in the hope of the Kingdom. But I do vote. As William Imboden wrote in the Public Justice Report, “It is clear that the precepts and practice of proximate justice are deficient when judged by the standards of the City of God, but they may be superior to no justice at all.” We take up our responsibility as citizens, realizing that our best efforts are clay-footed, our best insights are flawed. And yet it matters for this earth and the one that it is to come that we work alongside others to establish what Walker Percy called “signposts in a strange land” of what is already real and true and right in the now-but-not-yet of the Kingdom.

What to say?

...whenever I am asked what I think about the so-called ‘other faiths’, which I often am, including on radio shows and the like, one of the things I normally say is that Krishna didn’t die for me, that Buddha didn’t rise again, that Mohammad ruled out as an impossibility what to me is the very centre of my life, that in Jesus Christ the one true God became human and lived, died and rose again for the world’s salvation, and for mine. That is what Solus Christus [Christ alone] must say when faced with relativism.

N.T. Wright

A Prayer to Use in the Morning from Psalm 119

33 Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes;
and I will keep it to the end. [4]
34 Give me understanding, that I may keep your law
and observe it with my whole heart.
35 Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it.
36 Incline my heart to your testimonies,
and not to selfish gain!
37 Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
and give me life in your ways.
38 Confirm to your servant your promise,
that you may be feared.
39 Turn away the reproach that I dread,
for your rules are good.
40 Behold, I long for your precepts;
in your righteousness give me life!

Those Calvinists

"I had rather see coming toward me a whole regiment with drawn swords, than one lone Calvinist convinced that he is doing the will of God."

--words of a 17th century Englishman

Living what we profess 3

Passing affections easily produce words; and words are cheap; ...Christian practice is a costly, laborious thing. The self-denial that is required of Christians, and the narrowness of the way that leads to life, don't consist in words, but in practice. Hypocrites may much more easily be brought to talk like saint, than act like saints.

Jonathan Edwards

Living what we profess 2

Good works are not the cause, but the fruit of righteousness. When we have become righteous, then we are able and willing to do good. The tree makes the apple, the apple does not make the tree.

Martin Luther

Irony

It would seem that the election of Obama actually slowed the move toward gay marriage... From the NY Times:

"Supporters of same-sex marriage in California, where the fight on Tuesday was fiercest, appeared to have been outflanked by the measure’s highly organized backers and, exit polls indicated, hurt by the large turnout among black and Hispanic voters drawn to Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy. Mr. Obama opposes gay marriage. Exit polls in California found that 70 percent of black voters backed the ban. Slightly more than half of Latino voters, who made up almost 20 percent of voters, favored the ban, while 53 percent of whites opposed it."

Living what we profess 1

By opening his heart to the grace of God and by striving to obey God's will, a Christian may acquire the virtues that fit a Christian life and may begin to perform the good works that flow from them. It's not that good works save anybody. It's just that they demonstrate God's saving grace in a person's life. We are not saved by good works, but neither are we saved without them.

Neal Plantinga in Engaging God's World

The Day After

The strong negative response to the election of Barack Obama by some of my friends went through my mind yesterday as I was working on the Luke 6 passage for our weekly dusty Bible study for EverGreen. It seems to me that some see president-elect Obama as truly their enemy. So the quesiton is: "If I'm going to be faithful to Christ in these days, how do I treat my enemies?"

The words of Jesus from Luke may have something to say to this. Although I don't find myself fearful that persecution or any other kind of abuse is going to come, perhaps for those who see Barak Obama as an enemy, it may be wise to take the route Jesus calls us to.

27 “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29 To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. 30 Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. 31 And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them. Luke 6

How well this passage connects to the election may be a bit tenous, but it just might be a good place to start.

The Divide

Watching election returns last night I was struck by a powerful divide that was revealed between African American believers and white believers. As Obama was winning NBC had interviews with black pastors, with black Christians who had been through the civil rights movement and others. Many of these attributed Obama's win to a miracle of God or the working of God to bring about justice after the days of racism. This attitude was a powerful contrast to the last minute emails I received from largely white voters and coalitions. These people and organizations pointed out that McCain was God's choice and that any other choice would reflect a falling away from God by our nation.
As I watched the divide unfold between African American Christians and white Christians it reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend who also happened to be an African American Pastor in the Reformed Church in America. He pointed out to me that the central issues for white Christians were barely on the agenda of Black Christians and the central issues on the agenda for Black Christians, were rarely considered by white Christians.
It all makes me wonder about how we heal this divide and seek the picture of the book of Revelation where people from all nations come and worship.

God's Promises Bigger

I'm in the book of Jeremiah in my OT reading. In Jeremiah 33 it says, 14 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16 In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’ 17 “For thus says the Lord: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, 18 and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings, and to make sacrifices forever.” The thing that particularly caught my attention was the double promise: a king on the throne and a priest to offer sacrifices. Who would have imagined in Jeremiah's day that one person would keep both of these promises? The book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek 6.19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. The book of Revelation and elsewhere shows us that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords.
But there is another surprise. Not only is Jesus both King and Priest, he is also this for a much larger "nation" than Israel. He is King and Priest for Jew and Gentile alike. God's vision turns out to be so much larger than the vision that people would have assumed from Jeremiah's words. It leaves one to wonder how much larger God's vision is than we assume.