Leadership and Spirituality: the inner life of the leader constructs the outer life of those who are led.

I am grateful for this invitation. It has provoked me to consider, reflect and articulate what is the basis of my life, the spirituality that both drives and sustains me, questions and heals me. This reflection has taken me to deep places from which I may have, in the routine of life and work, operated unconsciously. I am therefore all the more grateful that this kind invitation has provoked deep reflection for me.

I have been nurtured within a particular Christian tradition - Anglicanism. I have to concede that this environment has shaped me as a human being in degrees that I may not ever be conscious of, but such shaping has propelled me into a deep love of humanity, respect for human beings, and a sensitivity to the human condition that impacts profoundly upon me. I tend to be conscious of the glory and travail of human beings, pretty much for most of each day.

I surmise that this audience may include a wide spectrum of spiritualities, so I am sensitive to my own limitations and formation that may differ from others. In no way would I suggest that what I say is prescriptive, but rather descriptive of one man's consciousness of the spirituality that shapes his leadership.

I am a bishop of the Anglican church which makes me a reasonably public figure, although as an assistant bishop my influence is not as public as that say of Archbishop Carnley. However, I am aware that I function in the mind of the public, especially the church public, as a representational figure. Therefore, I recognize that there are public consequences to the leadership I offer.

Given the limits of any one individual, I think that what I have to say will be generalizable and thus of use to others. At least, I hope so!

I want first to talk about leadership, as I understand leadership, and then to identify and describe the spirituality that I believe consciously influences and undergirds my practice of leadership. I then want to mention practices that have informed my spirituality, for these might be of interest to others.

The dynamic sequence that I will detail is both action that I undertake externally, but is also an internal operation that is informed and influenced by ethics that are products of my spiritual awareness. There are three of these: sympathy, sensitivity and modesty (about myself). Deep within my consciousness is that echo from the Hebrew Scriptures of the rehearsed identity of Israel, that once they had been slaves in Egypt.

The identity rehearsals in the Deuteronomic tradition in the Hebrew scriptures creates an awareness of their past so that it might make Israel sympathetic to others. It was as simple as, having known pain, you are to recognize the pain of others and not mistreat them. This rehearsal of identity that is constant and explicit in the Hebrew scriptures is designed, I think, to counter what Paulo Frere named as the pedagogy of the oppressed - that those once oppressed when liberated become the oppressors of others.

The ethic of modesty cautions against manipulation or the misuse of the power that is implicit in leadership. I bring this ethic to my consciousness each Sunday, a rather public day for me, because I desire that whatever I say will have to survive on the basis of its own truthfulness and relevance, rather than on the fact that a bishop has said it.

I try to brace my leadership then with those three ethical elements - sympathy, sensitivity and modesty.

I spend a great deal of my leadership in the cycle I am about to describe. I may adopt different styles of leadership throughout the cycle itself, or in response to the features of particular contexts, but generally speaking, this is the cycle of what I do. Now, this cycle might be a matter of the particular context of leading a church that is presently a very stressed organization. I do not want to digress into the nature of the stress, but suffice it to say, that the stress is a matter of confidence in identity and discernment of context. I think these might be two sources of stress for our nation as well.

Much of my leadership, in whatever form it is offered, is first about appealing to people's imagination, exciting their imagining, and seeking an imaginational shift in their perception. I invest much energy, time and reflection in offering imaginal constructs that might assist people to reconsider their view of reality or their meaning systems. This imagining is both at the macro and micro levels.

There is a rather purple passage in Don Watson's biography of Paul Keating. The passage relates the context of the famous Redfern Speech - the speech was made to a black audience but its core was an appeal to white Australians. The speech included these lines, and these were the lines that altered that original audience's negative reactions. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

Don Watson commented that the first principle of the Redfern speech was that the problem could only be solved by an act of imagination. ¹ My experience suggests that imagination is a most basic element of leadership. Imagination is the substance of vision, sensitizing people to consider life, the world, themselves differently and graciously.

Sometimes we do need to see the past differently, not in a revisionist form, but simply to appreciate the complexity of the past or even the conjunction of formative events of the past, and not just to ascribe immutability to those conjunctions. In other words, the past may be the past, but it need not be the present or the future.

Alan Jones (not the Sydney radio shock-jock, but the Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco) suggests in his seminal book Exploring Spiritual Direction that a question that addresses us (I think at both personal and corporate levels) is: "What kind of images want to take possession of my imagination? They might be images of hopelessness, nastiness and despair. How are they to be resisted? ...The most intense part of spiritual combat, for me, is with the many images that struggle to possess me." ²

These questions raise the prior issue of what or who is it to whom I have surrendered myself. For each person has a meaning system that is derived from some primary commitment.

The questions that Alan Jones puts to himself, are basic questions designed to effect wholeness and health. These questions have individual application as much as they have corporate application, especially at a time when the nation is wrestling with its identity, its sense of security, its knowledge of how it is perceived by other nations, and its sense well-being.

I have committed myself to, and am still in the process of committing myself to, the vision of God's justice, hospitality, and passion for humankind, that energized Jesus Christ. I understand this vision to have ramifications for society, for the church and for individuals. These ramifications interlock, and cannot be quarantined from one another, as it were. However, at various times throughout history, one dimension seems to have captured the mind of society at the expense of the other dimensions. Then some lopsided structures emerged with the usual damage. At the moment, infected as we all are by the liberal western notion of personal autonomy, the vision of Jesus has been shrunk to a version of a personal insurance premium. This has given rise to much evangelical zeal that celebrates the individual's spiritual worth, but fails to attend to the structural and corporate dimensions that can deplete the justice that is at the centre of the originating vision.

A precursor for the imaginal shift is the question, are there other ways of looking at my world, or myself? This question introduces instability through the notion of alternatives.

My task, at a time of disconnection for the church, is to raise other possibilities, even simply to give permission for the alternative thinking to begin. Of course, this was the story framework that Jesus favoured. His stories were models of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of world views, so that with the element of surprise (in the reconstruction phase) people might be excited into a re-imagining of their world.

Such re-imagining, the offering of imaginal shifts, and assisting people to read experience from another as yet untried perspective, is demanding, especially if it is constant work, as I find it to be. Therefore, I have discovered that I am energized in this leadership task by having my own imagination excited by both continuous reflection on the original vision (in my case the life, teaching, ministry of Jesus and the historical reflection upon that which we term the Christian Tradition), as well as by association with those whom I detect embody aspects of that vision. Such personal embodiments might be within or without the church.

The latter (those outside the church) I tend to meet in social justice events, or through the media, especially thoughtful television documentaries. But I know, given my personality type, that I am further inspired by the human dimension of such figures who tell me emphatically just because of who they are, that the vision is realizable.

This leadership of offering imaginal construals needs the fuel of passion. This passion is an interactive dynamic that cannot simply be talked up from inside, as it were. I consider passion to be a response.

This is again a significant theological principle, that human beings have such a capacity for passion because God relates to the creation with the same dynamic. My passion seems to be drawn out of me, evoked, by the surging power of the vision that has taken hold of me.

I am driven to use the passive voice about this. Because although I might be passionate, I detect that the energy that fires my passion is ignited not by some act of will on my own part, but by the incendiary inspiration of the originating vision. In my own case, by the theological understanding that I have been given.

This passion comes to me, I think, from my sense of delight in God, and by the reciprocal sense that God delights in me as much as in any other human being. I sometimes catch myself surrendering, in moments of daydreaming, to the sheer wonder of people, or places, or thoughts.

There is in these moments such a felt sense of pleasure that surges through me with the strong awareness that, is not this amazingly wonderful that people or things or thoughts are as they are? It is just terrific, and this sense of 'the terrific', does make me resonate with the world-view that the world is good, despite the abuse of freedom that goes on in the world.

I hope this does not sound as if I have embraced an emotional Disneyland! For this passion is not unidimensional.

As the etymology of the word passion suggests, there is openness to pain too, and to passivity - an experience few seem to enjoy. Passion does sensitize to the beauty and pain of the world, to sacrifice and redemption wherever these emerge, as much has in the recent Bali disaster.

And leadership that is about transformational change will involve both excitement, but also pain.

Passion enables resurgence. Leaders need a sustaining energy source. Passion provides such an internal resource. This resource is sensitized to the usual struggle of humankind, yet it can delight in the 'original goodness' of humanity, as much as be pained by the radical suffering of humanity.

I suspect that anyone with vigorous passion recognises the gift dimension of life, or more probably, has known deep change within themselves that has elevated them to new self-awareness, new appreciation, a new self-image. Such an experience has generative power within it that, in my own experience, is able to stay as a powerful motivator and shaping dynamic that is not exhausted by its origin in the personal past.

In other words, just as there are negative experiences that seem to arrest a person's self-development, so there are positive experiences that continue to enhance a person's self-development. This enhancement matures into passion of a spiritual kind.

So I find that my imagination is captured by the meta-vision of the disclosure of God through Jesus, and the extension of this disclosure, its concretization as the Kingdom of God, affecting human social structures. There are personal as well as social dimensions to this actualization.

Alan Jones, the Dean of Grace Cathedral San Francisco, has noted the last word for believers is not their own failed efforts, but the free, spontaneous, and explosive love of God forever making new space in them. This affirming love allows the fearful self to let go of its usual and habitual defensiveness. The Christian tradition calls this explosion of love the Kingdom or Reign of God.

The Kingdom of God is concerned with the restoration of lost harmonies, with the healing of fractured integrities, with the creation of new spaces within the soul. One way of understanding the Kingdom of God is to think of it as a code word for 'mending the creation' and for enlarging the space in which it can flourish. ³

It is my own sense that in unexpected and in anticipated ways I have been mended, and always within the ambit of a felt-love that embraced rather than discarded me. So, I live from an expectation of goodness without wishing to avoid the perplexity and haunting challenge of dealing with radical tragedy and suffering. And I expect that I must take my share of such tragedy and suffering too, although I prefer that such might pass me by.

My imagination is captured by the vision I have explicated My imagination is resourced by passion that itself is connected to the vision as the direct experiential outcome of having been claimed by the vision. The vision is not domesticated, however, and contains its own disquieting provocation. This is another element of spirituality, akin, I think, to the long prophetic tradition within the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

Inevitably, if I am true to this vision of 'mending the creation', I am outraged by injustice, marginalisation, and all that thwarts people knowing their value and realising their potential. The pursuit of social justice can be a healthy transformation of anger. Indeed, it has been suggested that Christian leadership tends to be abrasive because it is service to the vision of the Kingdom of God rather than to popularity, efficiency, productivity, and celebrity.⁴

This is not to make an exaggerated claim that these tangents have not also deflected church leaders. However, the goal of Christian leadership because it is connected with the vision of 'mending the creation' can be assertive and confrontational in its purity.

Just as there will be this externally focussed abrasion, so also I have found the discomfit of the independence of the vision, that is its truthfulness being independent of me, abrasively questioning my motives and actions. Such a vision for its integrity must question those who embrace it, and require from them, deepening self-knowledge, so that it moves beyond the level of spiritual trinketry.

Because I have a highly developed feeling function, I can be too sensitive to the impact of criticism or disagreement upon another. I have sought to affirm my thinking function by disciplining my reading, my articulation of my views, by preferring 'thinking' words to 'feeling' words, and by empathising with thinking others. This has freed me from being too much the prisoner of niceness.

Indeed, I have come to the awareness that the church, the milieu in which I spend so much of my life, suffers from what I now term a conspiracy of niceness. That is, people with whom I mostly associate tend to want to be nice, believing that niceness is a prerequisite for being Christian. I now think that is not the case, although, of course, I do not want to lurch to the extreme of offending everyone.

But this realization that the vision is a provocateur because of its content, has freed me from the fear of offending. Mostly, I detect I am most strident when I perceive an injustice done to another. Yet, there have been occasions when I have felt the full force of my own perpetration of an injustice. The abrasive pain that confronted me was in the longer term therapeutic and salvic, but at the moment of confrontation, reduced me to a recognition of my diminishment as a person.

More than any other experience, the sense that one is diminished as a person, that through injustice or wrong-doing one has lost some basic aspect of one's personhood, is the most salutary of experiences, more disarming than guilt or shame, I think. It is a sense of shock - that I have come to this or I did that. Such a shock wakes me up, at least to the casual way I may have been living, to the spiritual drifting, to the living off yesterday's inner resources, rather than from the resources needed for today.

I therefore as part of the practice of being spirituality sensitized place myself in the scrutiny of one who can be abrasive, who can assist me to face my own reality, and my own darkness, especially that element of myself that I want to deny or to avoid.

I have found that a substantial element of leadership is about provocation. Thus what I do on an external front, I must have done to me internally, if I am to be congruent with the vision that overall gives me purpose and personal cohesion. And at present I am a leader in an organization that is stressed, facing identity issues, and is within a turbulent and sometimes beguiling culture. Therefore, there is much to provoke, but this has to be undertaken not from irritation, but from concern for integrity and faithfulness.

I have found the truth of what John Keats said in a famous letter, At once it struck me what quality went to make a man of achievement, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. ⁵

There is for me the matter of waiting, of being patient, of past experience teaching me that there will be the luminous moment, but it is not yet, so I am not to dissipate my energy or focus by becoming irritated. Past experience of the fruitfulness of waiting assists me greatly in the negative present. I guess, unlike women who give birth to children, we men are not conditioned into such active waiting, and usually are frustrated by the absence of an immediate response or immediate understanding.

Again, I return to my nurturing tradition that has within it the lesson of the two Greek words used for time in the New Testament. One word is chronos from which we get our English word of chronological time, measured time. The other Greek word is kairos which means the critical moment, the opportune time, the pregnant moment. The focus of time, usually in the New Testament, is this latter sense of time : the moment of opportunity, the pregnant moment.

I have found as simply as in the experience of not being able to penetrate a theological book that when I have returned to reading it some time later, maybe even a year later, it is as if I am ready for it, or it for me. This experience is trivial, but sufficient, to alert me to the general notion that in spirituality there is waiting, creative waiting. Of course, waiting is at the basis of so much of life's momentuous events. And waiting does disturb us.

One of the best minds of the latter decades of last century in the Church of England, Bill Vanstone, wrote, waiting can be the most intense and poignant of all human experiences - the experience which, above all others, strips us of affectation and self-deception and reveals to us the reality of our needs, our values and ourselves. (There are moments when one) waits in an agonizing tension between hope and dread, stretched and almost torn apart between two dramatically different anticipations.⁶

Waiting is thus a spiritually cleansing experience, as well as being an experience that deepens our self-awareness of our natural (though often disguised) dependence. This waiting in spirituality is attending.

Simone Weil in a remarkable essay said that true attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of...Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its truth the object which is to penetrate it. ⁷


I find, for instance, that this is a usual weekly experience for me as I prepare to write the sermon for Sunday. All through the week I have been mulling over the text of scripture that is set for the public reading and which is to be the focus of the sermon's exposition. I read critical background material, exposition on the detail of the text, cultural contextual comment, and of course the daily newspapers, the myriad pieces that come across my desk, and whatever the mix of ordinary socialisation brings me.

This is the pot-pouri out of which arises, within the accumulated resonance of the Christian Tradition working surreptitiously within my mind, the thoughts that germinate into the theme of the sermon. As I plan it out, usually on Friday mornings at my computer at home, and when I begin to type, I am really surprised at where the thought-lines go. This is not to say that it is the gush of a stream of consciousness, that others on a Sunday might receive as a spiritual vomit. Rather, it is the surprise of thoughts that I did not know I had, or of understandings that were shadowy and had not been called up into the light of day, into real consciousness.

I look forward to that required writing, for there is an immediacy about it that I find thrilling, in that I make discoveries about myself as much as about the theology that so informs my life. I recall years ago on a flight to Townsville reading of the spiritual practices that might be most usual for ENFJs in the Myers Brigg Type Indicator. It was a rapturous moment of sweet affirmation - that people with my personality type preferences pray best at the point of a pen! Or nowadays, at the keypad of a computer!

Even though I am aware of the creativity of waiting, I still am somewhat anxious about whatever I have to produce, and usually like to be prepared early, ahead of the time. I guess as so many of us are, I am a slow learner about the fertility of waiting.

I have sketched in what I have already said four basic components of the spirituality that shapes my leadership. These four features of imagination, passion, provocation and waiting shape my inner life, and thus the outer life of those whom I lead. I believe this is discernible as my leadership style is compared and contrasted with that of other bishops here in Perth.

I apologize for being this personal, but I think that by speaking of my own experience I can offer raw data that might resonate with your own introspection, or with your analysis of leadership. Certainly, I found in reading Don Watson's mammoth book, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, the story of Paul Keating's Prime Ministership, that the inner life of that leader (Keating) did affect the outer life of those who were led, and not just the members of the two governments Paul Keating led, but of all of us.

There is, I would argue, a discernible correlation between inner life and outer effect.

Dorothy McRae-McMahon in her book Daring Leadership for the 21st Century has written of spiritual leadership, I believe that spiritual leadership encourages our living to be conscious and chosen, to live with intent, rather than being washed around by whatever waves of life exercise power around us. and I would also say that any spiritual leadership that I find in myself is related to moments of being empowered to live beyond myself, by a power outside myself, whom I would choose to recognise as God. ⁸

This living beyond oneself is a discernible consequence of spirituality. It is the extroverted face of the meaning that lies at the base of a person's life. It might be as simple as the notion that one Bali survivor articulated of her daring rescue of another, It was the right thing to do.

The notion of 'right thing to do' had an implicit and hugely demanding sense of claim attached to it. This was a claim, instantly recognised, that put someone in a deadly situation, yet the moral imperative could not be ignored nor resisted.

My point is this last example is that at whatever level of instance, there is this correlation between the inner and the outer, between a determination from the inner value system or spiritual state influencing behaviour and action.

I turn now to how I have nurtured and resourced my spirituality, especially those four components of imagination, passion, provocation and waiting that are key elements as well of my leadership. I want to detail three practices.

First, immersion in stories. John Drury in his tantalizing book Angels and Dirt says of stories, a story is both a direct and indirect means of communication and so both satisfying and teasing....the story will always be about someone who is rather different from me and set in more or less different circumstances. This teases me out of myself and leads me on into something other than myself which I will never be able to master or overcome entirely. In some way it will always elude me.⁹

Increasingly we are in our café society a narrative culture. That is, we find meaning and understanding in stories in whatever medium. Hence, the strong cinema revival, addiction to soaps, and the still high level of reading of novels in the Australian community. Indeed, as one cinema reviewer put it, people go to the cinema nowadays not so much as to be entertained as to understand their lives.

My spirituality is nurtured by narrative. Certainly, I am enriched by the narrative of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. These classic stories that are central to the tradition in which I am immersed are stories that are multi-layered. That is, one can return to them time and time again, and with one's own altered experience (for we are not constant) obtain new insights and further reaches of meaning.

Classic scripture stories are stories like Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story of a new identity, a new name, a new beginning. These changes come at a cost. Jacob is wounded in the wrestling, as those who have done inner wrestling are also wounded. But the morning comes for Jacob, as does a new chapter, but he limps, as do others who have wrung meaning out of terrifying situations.

The reality of the lives of others laid bare for us in stories offer pieces of meaning that we can forrage over, and make our own, if the narrative somehow intersects with our own. I guess my own response to most novels I have read or to films I have seen is to be grateful for having been taken into another's live, to connect with a common humanity, and to have been graced by an encounter with others who quest as I do myself.

Even the Harry Potter stories offer us substance for spiritual formation. I want to take you to that scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when Harry stands before the mirror of Erised.
Dumble describes the Mirror to Harry this way:
"It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible."

The mirror raises the crucial issue that is at the heart of all spirituality - what is your desire. As one Jesuit writer says, only by attending to our deepest desires are we able to encounter our deepest self - the image of God within us. ¹⁰ and our deepest desires to some degree move us beyond self-centredness to self-giving. ¹¹

Another novel that repays attention is Salley Vicker's Miss Garnett's Angel. The title suggests that this is a story of personal transformation, and it is. Miss Garnett a retired spinster school teacher visits Venice for the first time, and from a life of flirtation with Marxism and dour Protestantism she is suddenly immersed in a city replete with catholic symbolism.

For so many years, Miss Garnet has not ventured beyond the safe; let alone into that wonderfully strange territory we call intimacy. Later, after she has been led to a place that resembles it, she sees that "for her it had always been a matter of taking what was given: she would never defy injunctions or make waves." It is her belief that there are just two kinds of people: those who tangle with their fate, who take issue with what life brings, and those who bear their circumstances, who take life's meaning from what comes to them rather than wrestling with it. All her life, it seems, Miss Garnet has opted for an unadventurous acceptance. There has been a very English restraint. Has she been paralysed by prudence?

That is a question of the intensity of spirituality - there is the prudential kind that looks for safety rather than for integrity. In her elegant novel, Salley Vickers reminds us that transformation has its costs, its doubts, its delight. For those who prefer to define life in terms beyond the purely rational, this story of pilgrimage and quest is "subtle, unexpected and haunting."

Narrative offers the rich texture of the human condition to explore for meaning, purpose and insight. Inevitably, I find, that in most stories my life is engaged, I intersect with others in the pursuit of meaning, and I am affected by the encounters.

The second practice that I undertake is a simple form of the Ignatian Examen. I review the day and ask myself two questions: what gave me energy today? and what took energy from me?

The focus on energy is usually an opaque focus on God, or at least, my awareness of the presence of God in my daily experience. As well, I do become aware of recurring patterns, especially issues that I must attend to, if I am to fulfill those leadership tasks that I identified earlier that centre around imagination, passion, provocation and receptivity (waiting). Ignation spirituality does focus on the level of desire. As the Jesuit Philip Sheldrake comments, to allow ourselves to touch deep desire is to open ourselves to being purged of thoughtless and self-centred wanting....this is why the way of desire is also a way of conversion and transformation. ¹²

Desire has various levels or intensities within it so that the quest of spirituality is to move deeper than the surface desires to those desires that do drive us at the base of our personhood. When these desires are ignited by our consciousness they flame into energy and passion. Of course, the Christian tradition like the Jewish tradition considers that encountering our deep desires is the means to encountering God for God's sake. Thus, identifying gains and losses in energy is a short-cut and simple way of becoming aware of our desires.

The third spiritual practice is that of contemplation. At its simplest, contemplation is a matter of attending. The attending is a surrendering to whatever it is that feeds your vision, the first purpose of leadership. For myself, it is a conjunction of attending to the source of the vision that has grabbed hold of me, namely the Kingdom of God, 'the mending of creation', and the various contexts that I have to address. I find myself thinking long and spontaneously of both, allowing the one to hover as a template over the other, looking for the intersections for action.

Leadership requires constant re-fuelling. The demands of output are strikingly obvious from a government, and it has become unusual for governments to go beyond three consecutive terms. The vision that attracted the electorate seems to be exhausted by term two. A befuddled opposition can be a godsend to a government, but not so to the electorate who endure pedestrian leadership within the third term.

Built into our practice of leadership ought to be the continuous activity of contemplation that allows us to be more deeply immersed in our controlling vision so that we are able to project its requirements into the various contexts for which we have responsibility. I have found, for instance, that the technical support of biblical scholarship affords me much information that further opens up dimensions of the original attracting vision. The vision of 'mending the creation' does seem to be as endless as the creation itself, given the supply of meaning that emerges from attending more deeply to the vision.

I guess contemplation allows me to gradually filter the density of the original vision, and to integrate the vision into my mind and belief system so that these are saturated to the point where connections are made almost automatically, or at least intuitively. I think this is the most satisfying outcome of contemplation, that I become immersed in the mental world of the vision, or in my own case, of the Christian tradition. For even though I live and work in a consciously religious environment, because the dominant culture of society, consumerism, is so pervasive and insidious, I find myself thinking in commodity terms rather than in Kingdom of God terms.

So, I need theoretical (theological) resource, time to play with the ideas or information thus given, and recall of the contexts in which I exercise my leadership. This time should be quiet, reflective, musing time. It will be a period of generativity.

For instance, and this is a theological and pastorally practical outcome of this process of contemplation for me, I became aware that in the gospel of Mark, the author uses a word for crowds that is unique to his gospel. Mark uses the word ochlos some 34 times, and occasionally uses the more normal term laos, the term that is used in the other gospels. Until about the last twenty years not much attention was paid to this usage in Mark. Indeed, not much attention was paid to the crowds. Most scholars had concluded that the introduction of the crowds was a literary device in order to arrange an audience that Jesus might teach.

However, as scholars probed the word ochlos they uncovered a very interesting nuance: that the ochlos are always inferior in whatever relationship they are. These are the people who are always at the bottom of the pile, as it were. These were those who were crushed in spirit.

It became clear that the ochlos were more sinned against than they were sinners. The general public think that the church, and thus Jesus, is against sinners. In fact, people could be excused for that confusion, given the public statements of church leaders. However, a careful study of Mark discloses Jesus attacking structures that injured or burdened these ochlos.

Now this became the stuff of liberation theology in Latin America, and South Korea, in particular. I have found this particular piece of technical information hugely rewarding to contemplate, for it has sensitized me to those structures that turn people into the sinned against. And this has energized me to ensure that the church is alongside such people as they extend the boundaries of their legitimate freedom.

May I conclude with an observation from that classic story of the Good Samaritan?

The priest and the Levite are not to be understood as cowardly, only self-protective in obedience to the prohibitions of their code. They are victims of their own spirituality.¹³ For their spirituality constrained them, and even choked their humanity so that they could not see in the victim the image of the God to whom they considered themselves committed and obedient.

The outcome of all spirituality is the enhancement of human beings in a justice that ensures the dignity and value of all so that people are not sinned against by the structures that emerge from the vision we pursue. I assess spirituality by that aphorism of Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop in a tiny Roman garrison town in Gaul (France) in the second century, The Glory of God is a person fully alive.

What I strive for in spirituality are those external resources that will enable me as a leader to have an inner life that is sufficiently gracious and passionate to work for those whom I can influence to be more fully alive. For I am convinced from personal experience and observation of other leaders, that the inner life of the leader constructs the outer life of those who are led.


          1 Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Knopf, Sydney, 2002, p.289.
          2 Alan Jones, Exploring Spiritual Direction, Seabury, Minneapolis, 1982, p.83.
          3 Alan Jones, Soul Making - the Desert Way of Spirituality, SCM Press, London, 1985, p.94.
          4 William Willimon, Pastor, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2002, p.276.
          5 Quoted in John Drury's Angels and Dirt, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1972, p.24.
          6 W. H. Vanstone, The Stature of Waiting, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1982, p.84.
          7 Simone Weil in Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies.
          8 Dorothy McRae-McMahon, Daring Leadership for the 21st Century, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001, p.155.
          9 John Drury, Angels and Dirt, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1972, p.46.
          10 Philip Sheldrake, Befriending our Desires, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1994, p.ix.
          11 Ibid, p.14.
          12 Op. Cit., p.40.
          13 Bennett J. Sims, Servanthood -leadership for the Third Millennium, Cowley, Cambridge, 1997, p.53.