Faith-based leadership models (2)

The Management Agenda 2003, produced by Roffey Park, claimed that nearly three-quarters of workers are interested in "learning to live the spiritual side of their values". The report also claimed that more than 40% of UK managers would value the opportunity to discuss workplace spirituality with their colleagues and that 53% were experiencing tensions between "the spiritual side of their values and their work."

George Starcher, in a paper entitled ‘Towards a New Paradigm of Management’ available from the European Bahá'í Business Forum, argues that a new paradigm of management is emerging from the current context. A paradigm involving:

• the formulation and communication of purpose, vision, and process (leadership);
• the balancing of economic and material goals with spiritual and human values; and
• the recognition by growing numbers of organisations of a social responsibility as well as an economic mission.

Starcher suggests that Bahá’ís feel that this new paradigm must inevitably reflect the new spiritual values and teachings inspired by Bahá'u'lláh. But each of the faith communities contains resources for leadership. Sometimes these come through the teaching of these communities and sometimes through the examples of past or current leaders within the communities. In recent years such teaching and examples have been increasingly applied to the realm of work with the result that a broadly-based Spirituality at Work movement has emerged in this country to provide additional resources relating to leadership.

This series of posts tries to summarise and signpost people to some of the resources for leadership that the faith communities and the Spirituality at Work movement contain. The range of resources now available for aspects of management and leadership from these sources is vast and this section can do no more than dip a toe into the ocean. The fact that each heading in subsequent posts does not contain resources from each faith group is not an indication that those faith groups not mentioned have no resources in that area.

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After The Fire - One Rule For You.

Five deeply de-Christian doctrines

Philip Ritchie tagged me with this meme on which topic lots of fellow bloggers have already posted (see here and here, for example). The problem with memes is responding quickly enough partly because if you're slow, like me, at doing so all the people you would tag have already been tagged and partly because others have then said all that you would want to say. Anyway, here's my response to this one:

List five doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply de-Christian.

1. The prosperity gospel - all those church adverts claiming to transform us from losers into into prosperous, healthy overcomers are simply buying into the spirit of capitalism not the Spirit of Christ. Jesus told us to take up our cross not our cheque books in order to follow him and to become servants not superstars.

2. Faith causes healing - this doctrine arrogantly locates the source of any healing that does occur in the faith of human beings rather than the grace of God and condemns all those who are not healed as lacking in faith.

3. "This world is not my home, I'm just a'passing through, my treasure's all laid up somewhere beyond the blue" or "Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace" - Oh no they won't, the things of earth will grow more precious and more significant in the light of his glory and grace that's why he taught us to pray, 'Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven'. This doctrine is brilliantly demolished in Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope; read it and create signs of the coming kingdom (heaven on earth) in the here and now.

4. Systematic theologies - God has not chosen to communicate with us systematically instead his communication is diverse and diffuse - creation, incarnation, scripture etc. To try to tidy up God's revelation into harmonious, systematic categories is to say that we know better than God and distorts the diverse revelation which he has gifted to us. To live in God we need to live with the creative tensions of his revelation instead of resolving it all to our liking.

5. The lingual trumps the visual - the idea that words are more important than images in Christianity which underpins arguments such as that scripture is the Word of God (not Christ), that evangelism is more important than social action, and that art to be Christian must have a message. But the Word become flesh and lived among us, faith without works is dead, and the greatest artistic creation ever - the universe itself - did not come emblazoned with a message from its sponsor.

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Extreme - Peacemaker Die.

Windows on the world (77)

Serpentine Pavilion, 2009

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M. Ward - Chinese Translation.

Jesus' wartime stories

Jesus told wartime stories. You can find them in Matthew 25. 1-13 and the other stories which are recorded for us in Chapters 24 and 25 of Matthew’s Gospel. That seems an odd thing to say about a story that is to do with a wedding and which does not mention war but the context in which Jesus told these stories to his disciples was one of trying to prepare them for a coming conflict.

Throughout the teaching recorded for us in Matthew 24, Jesus is telling his disciples about a coming crisis for which he needs them to be ready. This crisis will culminate in an invading army marching into Jerusalem’s Temple and laying it to waste. The wartime scenario that Jesus was describing here actually occurred about 40 years after his death and resurrection in AD70 with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the occupying Roman army.

What Jesus was doing through his teaching and through these stories was to try to get his disciples ready for that coming crisis so that they would respond appropriately. As loyal Jews their natural tendency might well have been to stay and fight but Jesus makes it clear to them that they must get out and run. As a result of Jesus’ disciples fleeing Jerusalem, the message of the Gospel spread around the world. Their message was that all that Jesus did and said was true and that this was confirmed by the coming to pass of his prophecy about the Temple.

How prepared are we, I wonder, for the crises that we face in our day and time and are we ready to use them as opportunities to share and show the good news of Jesus? That is ultimately, the challenge of this story for us.

We can, in a sense, lay this story like a template across the crises that we remember and face and use it to assess whether we are more like the wise or foolish women in our response. Ultimately, in relation to the Second World War we would probably want to say that the country responded more like the wise than the foolish women. Whether we are talking about those who were on the front line or those supporting the war effort from home, the country was prepared to accept and make sacrifices in order that the war would eventually be won.

But that is not always the case in situations of conflict. We could, for example, ask the same question of the current conflict in Afghanistan. If it is true, as senior people in the Forces have suggested, that our troops there do not have the equipment they need for the task they have been sent to do, then it may be that our Government has acted more like the foolish women in the story than those that were wise.

We can apply this story too to crises that are not to do with warfare such as the current credit crunch. The way in which banks have been prepared to lend money to those who have no means of repaying those loans, for example, suggests that they too have behaved more like the foolish women in the story than the wise.

In the background of the credit crunch crisis are the twin crises of climate change and the peaking of oil supplies. Experts tell us that as a human race we have only a short number of years in which to address these issues before these crises hit us full on and it will be too late to respond. As in Jesus’ story, the question is, how will we respond? Will our response be wise or foolish? Will we be prepared or unprepared for the crises that are to come?

For Christians the question of how we respond is also a question of how prepared we are to share the good news of Jesus in the face of the crises that we face now and those still to come. What have we to say as Christians about conflict within our world? About the credit crunch? About climate change and peak oil? Jesus’ call is clear we are to be ready to face the crisis and prepared to share his good news. As we look back this month to honour those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus’ question needs to echo and re-echo in our lives and world; are we ready?

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Monsters of Folk - His Master's Voice.

c4m webpage update (27)

This week posts on the commission4mission webpage have been to do with our showcase exhibition and Study Day at Chelmsford Cathedral. One post has images from the exhibition while another is the first in a series summarising the various presentations given at the Study Day by the Bishop of Barking, the Dean of Chelmsford Cathedral and the Chair of the DAC for Chelmsford. The series begins with the introductory presentation that I gave at the Study Day.

Philip Ritchie has also posted about our exhibition with subsequent discussion of the exhibition following in the comments to his original post.

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Paolo Nutini - Coming Up Easy.

The Art of Life

In one translation of Exodus 31. 6 God says, "To all who have an aptitude for crafts I've given the skills." Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God.

This phrase however can sound as though it is only certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, "artists are special people and every person is a special kind of artist."

Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative.

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms."

Does this mean that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc? Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, answers that question by saying no, of course not:

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich othr people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

Just as the expressions of our creativity will be diverse because we all have differing gifts and differing contexts for the use of those gifts, so creativity itself often also results from diversity. This is increasingly being recognised within society as, for example, in the recent sixth Brussels Debate where participants argued that cultural diversity enlarges and values the different ways of seeing and doing things in other cultures and that this opennes gives the capacity to select and absorb elements of other cultures, helping to produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating.

Each photo in my weekly Windows on the world series (see examples above) aims to tell a similar story. Each photo has both a foreground object which acts as a frame through which we glimpse something beyond. This mirrors the way in which each of us view life both from our own individual perspective and are able to see and engage with the perspective of others and, even, of God. These photos are, therefore, an attempt to see ordinary scenes from different perspectives and through fresh eyes. This is what art at its best does for us and, through seeing differently, we are opened up to new possibilities.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has argued that human being is possibility; that we are constantly changing by constantly exploring the possibilities of who we are and who we can become. This exploration occurs as we imagine possibilities that help us clarify the essence of who we are. We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities through imaginative variations. The philosopher Edmund Husserl gave an example of this in identifying the 'Essence' of a table. By 'free imaginative variation' we can alter the form, colour or material of the table. WE can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine the essence of the table.

We see this happening too in what is otherwise a rather strange Bible story. In Genesis 2. 18-25, God brings all the animals in the Garden of Eden to Adam for him to name and, at the end of this naming process, Adam recognises Eve as his soulmate. The key to this story is that names in ancient times described the essence of the thing that was named. So Adam looks and listens in order to understand the essence of each different creature and then creates a name that reflects that essence. By so doing, he also sees what is different between himself and the creatures, so that when he sees Eve he is able to immediately recognise her as his soulmate.

This is also what I understand the Bible as doing for us. The Bible is a diverse book. In fact, it is more of a library than a book; a library of 66 different books containing biography, drama, history, law, letters, prophecy, poetry and proverbs. Mike Riddell calls it "a collection of bits" assembled to form God's home page while Mark Oakley uses a more poetic image in writing of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have." They use these images because the Bible contains, as Oakley writes, "different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers" drawn "from disparate era, cultures and authors" which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: "The bits don't fit together very well - sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history."

The point is that the Bible gives us many different perspectives on God and on human beings. These different perspectives produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating in us. As we see God and human beings from different perspectives and through fresh eyes we are opened up to new possibilities. As we see and imagine possibilities we have the same experience as Adam and come to know ourselves better - we see the essence of who we are - and we change to become more like the people that God created us to be.

This is living creatively, living artisically, and it is something each of us are called to do and be. The art of life is to be open to the diversity of life in order to see life's possibilities from different perspectives and, as we compare and contrast these possibilities, to identify the essence of who we have been created by God to be and to become. By understanding ourselves and by responding to the essence of otherws, we are able to develop and use our talents for the enrichment of other people's lives. In doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

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The Call - Uncovered.

Windows on the world (76)

Piccadilly, 2009

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Bon Iver - For Emma.