Leadership traction, a mission, and a toolkit.
How do you get traction as a leader? I’m often left looking to regain it whenever a church council or a committee meeting – even the ones with well-planned agendas – slide into excessive detail and round-about exchanges. One tool I like to utilize is circling back to the group’s mission. How does any specific matter relate to our mission? How does this matter to our ministry?
If I can locate the direction for my actions with clarity on mission, the group can make swifter decisions. If I can rally others to focus on mission, then together we can locate the right tools to advance our purpose. Good tools are often close to templates or maps for springing toward the actualization of something that isn’t made yet.
The mission-and-toolkit approach I’ve just described helps me find my footing in leadership. My purpose is not to dispute its clarifying power, which often saves me from getting lost, but to ask what aims and tools might miss. As congregational leaders, are we at our best when we identify ourselves as components functioning in a mission-machine? I often place myself in that kind of functional stance but it puts me in what feels like a losing struggle against resistance and inefficiency, or it leaves me constantly out of breath chasing after “the next thing.”
Especially in smaller congregations like mine which face age and decline, a mission-and-toolkit approach running on full steam might aim away from what’s here, and neglect what’s particular about these people and their gifts. In the next sections I want to complement the tools’ traction with what I’ve gleaned from the concept of practical wisdom.
Holding together the particulars and moving with the Spirit
I’ve brought the concept into my own self-awareness through reading the collection of essays, Christian Practical Wisdom (Eerdmans, 2016). The book taught me that through practical wisdom, a Christian leader:
- Engages a situation in multiple modes at once: cognitive, emotional, relational, spiritual, biblical, and of personal identities carried in the body.
- Tunes into the richness of a situation’s particular details, and how each mode of engagement mentioned previously all help to bring those details into play.
- Draws from past experiences known and felt in memory which give familiarity and depth for facing and adapting into this new particular situation.
- Recognizes the flexibility and spontaneity that a situation calls for while balancing concern to take care with courage and willingness to risk.
- Realizes that rules of thumb or experiential wisdom that has guided in the past may need adjustment to meet the new situation and its open possibilities.
- Receives the gift of becoming transformed through an encounter with newness or unexpected difference.
- Participates actively with others to bring forth something concrete that might differ from any template or mold.
Take the word wisdom with the breadth of mind and perception you might already associate it with and add these nuances: practical wisdom is situated, personally enacted, and cares for holding these particulars well. Most leaders in the church already understand the dimensions the term illuminates even if they haven’t used the specific phrase. Not as many might realize the concept’s depth in Greek philosophical sources, or how the Scriptures show the concept taken up by the Spirit in the mind of Christ. (If you’re interested in checking this out further, see Romans 8:5 “setting the mind,” 12:2-3, “sober judgment,” and Phil 2:2-5, “same mind.” In each, the Greek words relate to the philosophical term phronesis.)
How does practical wisdom point us toward future aims and offer us templates to spring from? Tools give us intelligence for reaching aims, and practical wisdom takes the particulars of the situation you care for into those aims. The race for “the next thing” that’s always ahead can bend to take up what’s already here, and learn to name (through practical wisdom) what’s prophetically close by.
Gifts, limitations, and the prophetic aim close by
It’s precisely where prophetic aims and particulars meet that I’ve found practical wisdom to be of saving value. I brought the tools, templates, and terminology I’d learned in seminary about anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion to my congregation. These are tools that aim for prophetic futures which challenge the status quo with God’s mission for the church to bring about justice and mercy. Out of seminary, my role has been to find out how to hold these tools together with my people in the practical wisdom that brings the aims prophetically close.
Even if growth on DEI or antiracism or LGBTQ inclusion isn’t dramatic or immediate in my service to this congregation – likely not coming at the rapid pace of online interaction—there are still risks to be taken, small possibilities to move, spaces to open up, new people to welcome, relationships to create, truths to speak and hear, which, for this place and these people with their gifts and limitations, are rich in power and meaning. In watching and caring for these specific opportunities, wisdom brings the particulars and the prophetic future together, but the creative action that follows might well be taken into the Holy Spirit’s own work: the wisdom of Christ Jesus dwelling among us.
Recommended Resource: Christian Practical Wisdom: What it is and Why it Matters. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016.
