Scott’s Column: How Are You Developing Your Leadership Skills?

How are you developing your leadership skills for our current times?

That was one of the key questions of this year’s Conversations gathering of United Church of Christ Senior Ministers.  Sarah Drummond, the Dean of Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, facilitated a conversation about leadership development.

She began with a declaration that the church has never been good at leadership development, which gives us the freedom not to worry about how we’ve done it in the past, but to create something new that’s relevant for our times.

And what are those times?  She talked about different eras and how they change so quickly now.  Many of our churches and denominations were formed during modernism and haven’t kept up as that age began ending more than fifty years ago.  We’ve passed quickly through other eras–postmodern, new tribalism, emergent (some of us thought she missed what we would consider the current era–polycrisis).  And each of our congregations have people formed by these different mindsets.  She stated, “Congregants are genuinely thinking differently about the Christianity project.”

Which means that the expectations of leaders is that they must be good at everything, otherwise they are bad.  Which leads to exhaustion and burnout.

What, then, do we need to cultivate for this season?  She said we are in a period of gestation and don’t know what the goal is.  We no longer have a clear roadmap of what we ought to be doing (a point I made in a series of newsletter columns this time last year).  Our problems are going to require more creativity and less structure.  Embodiment becomes more important, as we must embody the best ways through our era.  Congregational leaders have to cultivate a vibe.  And that vibe she called “wonder and wherewithal.”

She later moved into more of the details.  She presented a three-part model of what congregational leadership development should now look like.  It requires–learning, reflection, and expanding our horizons.  Learning involves education, gaining content and theory, but also building skills and capacities.  Reflection involves spiritual practices and theological thinking.  Expanding our horizons is about new ideas and experiences that challenge us.

Sarah Drummond talked about how once our churches benefited from people bringing their expertise from outside endeavors into the church, but that many sectors of the economy now train and develop people in ways that are not helpful to the church and can even be unhelpful.  Now leaders in the church often have to unlearn what they’ve learned in their professional lives to be effective congregational leaders. 

And the church’s role has changed.  Now the church must train leaders who return to those other sectors to advance the values of the faith.  We must deconstruct the myth of progress and teach people how to circumvent the algorithm.  Pastors now have a public teaching office, and the skills and values developed in church are now carried out into the world.  We help congregants develop skills for their professional and personal lives, so that they become better business people, physicians, teachers, sisters and brothers, friends, etc.

She believes that pastors must now function more like deans, challenging and guiding people in their own development.  Churches, like all institutions, often help people get stuck, whereas maturity and growth arise when people are uncomfortable.  Our times also require: greater focus on role clarification, not just passing along information but creating opportunities for people to discover ideas themselves, and giving leadership away as soon as possible to involve more people and their gifts.  One participant used the phrase that churches are “gyms for the soul.”

I need to read Drummond’s books to get more into the details, but I’m intrigued by these ideas.  

And want to ask you–what are you doing to cultivate your leadership?  Do you need to learn something, spend more time reflecting, or open your horizons with new experiences and ideas?  And how can the church help you to grow, mature, and develop?

Next week I’ll write more about our other conversations at the conference.