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!