Get thyself a spiritual director!

Len Hjalmarson writes: If you are in paid ministry, or if you are overseeing a group of people and have oversight of their souls (you may be a CEO but your heart is pastoral), find a spiritual director. For your sake, for the sake of your family, for the good of the kingdom – do it.

He goes on to quote Henri Nouwen, (writing in Reaching Out):

“At least part of the reason for this lack .. is that we ourselves do not appeal to our fellow human beings in such a way as to invite them to become our spiritual leaders. If there were no students constantly asking for good teachers, there would be no good teachers. The same is true for spiritual guides. There are many men and women with great spiritual sensitivity whose talents remain dormant because we do not make an appeal to them. Many would, in fact, become wise and holy for our sake if we would invite them to assist us in our search for the prayer of our heart.

“A spiritual director does not need to be more intelligent or more experienced than we are. If is important that he or she accepts our invitation to lead us closer to God and enters with us into the scriptures and into the silence where God speaks to both of us… Often we will discover that those who we ask for help will indeed receive the gift to help us and grow with us toward prayer.” (p 98)

Hero to Host

Two quotes from Len Hjarmalson’s article on leadership - Post Modern Leadership: From Hero to  Host - in a recent edition of Next-Wave: 

Margaret Wheatley said “We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host. Can we be as welcoming, congenial, and invitational to the people who work with us as we would be if they were our guests at a party? Can we think of the leader as a convener of people? [We need] a fundamental and unshakeable faith in people. You can’t turn over power to people you don’t trust. It just doesn’t happen.”

Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic.” And Henri Nouwen reminds us, 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 receive love.

The rest of the article has some very good things to say about individuals and community, gentle and vulnerable leadership.

Henri Nouwen

Only when we have the courage to cross the road and look in one another's eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.

Henri J. M. Nouwen
Bread for the Journey

Henri Nouwen

Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. No mystics can prevent themselves from becoming social critics, since in self-reflection they will discover the roots of a sick society. Similarly, no revolutionaries can avoid facing their own human condition, since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find that they are also fighting their own reactionary fears and false ambitions… The appearance of Jesus in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross. — Henri Nouwen, in The Wounded Healer.