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At Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, are the carved figures
of four great U.S. presidents – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln
and Theodore Roosevelt. Gutson Borglum was the artist and when
asked how he did it, he modestly replied: ‘Well, those figures
were there for forty million years. All I had to do was dynamite
400,000 tons of granite to bring them into view’.

This is a vivid picture of what God is seeking to
do with leaders in his Son’s Church. He is removing the debris,
the impediments, so that the real you, the real me, can stand
forth as a thing of beauty to the world. He works in us to help
us fulfil our destiny and calling, to be productive and accomplish
the task he has ordained for us.

The New Testament refers to Christian personality
in strongly purposive terms: there’s a goal to be reached, a race
to be won (Philippians 3:8-11); we hope to share God’s glory,
a process involving suffering (Romans 5:2-5); leadership gifts
are given to the body of Christ so that all may grow towards maturity
in Christ (Ephesians 4:11-16); the unifying factor in all Christian
experience is love (Colossians 3:14, Ephesians 3:17-19); a realistic
self-concept is enjoined upon us (Romans 6:13, 12:3, 2 Corinthians
13:5); God’s Spirit transforms us, progressively, more and more
into the likeness of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Put another way, Christian pastors and leaders need
to develop six personal qualities if they are to be comfortable
as ‘risk-takers’.

1. Love for others as for self.

The truly mature, in Christian terms, have a greater
concern for others than for themselves. And their ‘self-love’
avoids the extremes of self-despising on the one hand or narcissism
on the other. (The narcissistic may deliberately take risks to
hurt others; the self-despisers take no risks to avoid hurting
themselves). There’s a creative tension between self-emptying
and self-fulfilment, self-denial and self-realization. We are
to be ‘crucified with Christ’ but we also ‘live and reign with
him’.

For mature Christians love is the greatest imperative,
not orthodoxy. Such leaders take genuine joy in the successes
of others, and also ‘weep with those who weep’. And they know
that such love works, it’s contagious! Ghandi once said: ‘The
highest type of love of a single individual will be sufficient
to neutralize the hate of millions’.

J.C. Penney, founder of the well-known American department-store
chain, called his earliest stores ‘The Golden Rule’. A deeply
committed Christian, he introduced profit-sharing and made his
employees ‘associates’. When he died at the age of 95, The New
York Times eulogized his life and work, and included this sentence:
‘He seemed too good to be true, but he was as he seemed, and others
recognized it’. May his tribe increase!

2. Acting, rather than reacting.

Mature leaders affect their environment rather than
reflecting it. They are not chameleons, adapting to the choices
and confusions of others. As E. Stanley Jones put it, if we concentrate
on what others think, we are not a voice but an echo. We must
learn to say ‘no’ to some worthy causes, without guilt, just as
we will not be indiscriminate with our ‘yeses’. We do not help
others, or ourselves, or God’s work, by being involved in too
many half-tasks. It is better to do fewer things, but do them
fully and well: perhaps we mostly say ‘yes’ out of fear of the
implications of saying ‘no’, and ‘no’ out of fear of the implications
of saying ‘yes’. Further, many of society’s rewards to ‘yes-people’
are designed to neutralize their creativity. To strive to be acceptable
to too many is to become static and institutionalized. We tend
to compromise too often, and attempt to live up to the institution’s
images, rumours and myths. The most honest – and therefore the
most disturbing – people are the prophets, and so there tends
to be something prophetic in every ‘whole’ person.

3. Real risk is a life without risk.

The whole person, according to Carkhuff and Berenson
(Beyond Counseling and Therapy), is seen by others to be too dangerous,
too intense or too profound. Such a full person discriminates
among possible acts, makes his or her choice, and acts. The most
significant learning comes from acting on those aspects of life
the individual fears most. For the whole person there is only
security in risks. In this way, and only in this way, can the
individual gain or lose. In a life without risk, no one wins,
no one loses, and no one learns.

One of the risks such a person lives with is the
realization that few are large enough or whole enough to nourish
and love the creatively mature person. He or she is sometimes
too much of a threat to others who prefer to live safely and comfortably.
Such a person realizes that one must become one’s own unique pathfinder,
traveling a road not traveled before.

It was said of the great churchman D.T. Niles, ‘He
was uninterested in others’ praise, unaffected by their blame’.

Mature leaders can be ‘at home’ with others only
to the degree that they are ‘at home’ with themselves. And such
whole people are comfortable being alone with themselves.

4. Expecting the unexpected.

George Bernard Shaw used to talk about those who
were ‘dead at thirty and buried at sixty’. Surely this tragic
approach to change, when the young stop seeing visions and the
old stop dreaming dreams, is nothing short of a ‘living death’.
People have always had a horror of being buried alive, but what
of the tragedy of dying long before you are buried?

The only constant thing is change, so the only authentic
lesson in life is ‘learning never to stop learning’. For the disciple
of Christ all of life must be seen as a process of growth. We
remain students forever.

Life is also to be accepted as paradox, which is
simply to acknowledge the depth and complexity of reality. The
risk-taker expects life to be paradoxical, and responds to this
not in despair (we can know nothing) nor in arrogance (what we
don’t know isn’t important), but in enquiring humility (we know
something, but there is yet more and more to know). The challenge
for the fundamentalist is to move beyond ‘simplicity this side
of complexity’. For the liberal it’s to move to ‘simplicity the
other side of complexity’. To be absolutely conservative is to
deny the possibility of growth, and reality’s being a moving,
flowing process. But conversely, to ignore tradition and history
altogether is just as immature. We are to be ‘polytemporal’ -
not living only in the past or the future, nor even (with the
hippies) only in the present. ‘We must not wander in times not
our own’ as Helmut Thielicke warns, but learn from them and act
with courage and insight.

The last thing the church and our nation needs at
this time are simple-minded conformists or estranged antagonists.
Both conformity and alienation are somewhat childish. Rather we
are called to accept mystery, to live with paradox, to take risks,
to opt for redemption, to be faithful to him who commissions us
to go into the world and make disciples.

5. Discipline and hard work.

Discipline ought to be the sine qua non of discipleship.
The soldier, the farmer, the athlete, Paul says, work hard to
fulfil their callings. Timothy ought to ‘watch himself’, devote
himself to spiritual exercises, and thus save both himself and
those to whom he ministers (I Timothy 4). A religion that sits
lightly to discipline is worse than useless: it is blasphemous.
Discipline is the prelude to spiritual and behavioural victory.
(Two helpful books, one in each respective area – are Richard
Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and David Watson and Roland
Tharp’s Self-Directed Behaviour: Self Modification for Personal
Adjustment.)

A mature leader will set an example to others by
taking pains, working hard, renouncing addictions. But Jesus did
not glorify either asceticism or workaholism. We are not here
talking about mere ceaseless activity. Sometimes getting on a
treadmill can be a substitute for a balanced discipline!

Jeremy Taylor put it magnificently in this prayer:
‘Let my body be the servant of my spirit, and both body and spirit
servants of Jesus.’

One discipline we pastors and preachers need relates
to our propensity towards a special kind of one-upmanship. Let
this saying of Sydney Harris rebuke us: ‘Maturity begins when
we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling
the necessity to prove someone else wrong.’

6. Living with incompatible expectations.

The whole person, (Carkhuff and Berenson again),
is not neutralized when others demand ‘consistency’. Creativity
and honesty are a way of life for such a person. The full life
requires making discriminations, defining the parameters between
gifts and limitations, sharing these with others, and refusing
to be ‘spattered all over the wall of needfulness’.

Pastors, the research tells us, are prone these days
to feelings of inadequacy. Bookstores are replete with ‘How To’
volumes describing a zillion ways to be proficient in everything.
Pastors feel they do a lot of things mediocrely. Denominational
headquarters bombard them with programs, ideas and suggestions.
Wandering ‘experts’ sometimes unintentionally reinforce their
inadequacies, in a world where knowledge and skill are exploding
exponentially.

Then, of course, there are the conflicing traditions
and expectations of people in the pews. Leaders are expected to
be a sort of ‘homo competitus’, so its corollary – professional
jealousy – is endemic among us.

It is hard for leaders in our culture and churches
to believe that we already have worth – by virtue of God’s creation
and redemption of us – and do not have to be more or better or
different to get it. John Claypool, the preacher at the 1979 Lyman
Beecher lecture series at Yale once said he was a ‘slow learner’
in this area, but fortunately being a slow learner did not disqualify
him. ‘It may be death to pride, but not to hope’.

Martin Luther King, on more than one occasion, closed
off an address with the familiar words of an old slave’s prayer:
‘O Lord, I ain’t what I ought to be and I ain’t what I’m gonna
be, but thanks to you, I ain’t what I used to be’.

Where there’s hope there’s life!
by Rowland Croucher (GRID, Autumn 1984)

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