Leadership 101: Height

It’s hard to oversee something when you’re crawling underneath it.

In the autumn of 2011 I was granted a three month sabbatical by my Bishop, Extended Study Leave to step back from the relentlessness of ordained ministry, to refresh my thinking on leadership, and to count the grains of sand on an Australian beach. Returning in January 2012 one of the surprising benefits of this disengagement was height. I understand leadership in the church (or anywhere really) to involve the overseeing of people and their life together, both their well-being and their direction - seeing both over and beyond, pastoral and prophetic. But it’s really hard to oversee something when you’re crawling underneath it, and over months and years the organisational dimensions of the pastoral and prophetic can gradually drag you in, making the over-seeing harder and eventually impossible to achieve – effectively ministering as an underseer. (I think I just invented a word.)

I was reminded of this as I crawled over the line this summer, a bit like the injured Olympian I’d seen on the BBC who bravely chose to finish the race even though one of her leg muscles was clearly shot to bits. Breaks from work this year had been curtailed because of significant pastoral matters and early-August was an oasis that couldn’t come soon enough. I was beginning to think that in the Kingdom of Heaven the out of office reply is always on and the answer machine whispers soothingly ‘leave that call to me, you go back to that nice dark room, vicar.’

But two weeks later I have height again. Was it the day on the beach, the lengths in the local pool, the new instalment in the Batman trilogy, or even the theology I enjoyed reading on a sunny, peaceful afternoon? All really, I guess. I think this regained height is a form of the practical, prophetic wisdom which the monk Thomas Merton references:

Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace,

it destroys the fruitfulness of our work

because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Although we don’t really do ‘frenzy’ in Wiltshire I like his point. His 'root' is my 'height'. I feel taller, I can see differently and I remember two bits of advice which I pass on. First, Bill Hybels saying that the best gift a leader can give to their church is a fully rested and energised self. And secondly, Jason Bourne in Robert Ludlum’s the Bourne Supremacy who points out helpfully to those of us engaged in a spiritual battle that ‘Rest is a weapon.’