The subject: what many call leadership but which SWNID would rather gloss as, following respected writers and mentors, "getting things done through other people."
This month's Atlantic Monthly (have you subscribed yet? N.B. that SWNID doesn't run blogads, so we have no pecuniary interest in this question) has two articles that begin the intersection. The first is Robert Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts," yet another installment in this intrepid, globe-trotting correspondent's chronicles of United States soldiers in the global War on Terror. Following Special Forces soldiers operating in the Philippines and Afghanistan, he notes that their successes today, as in the American-Philippine War at the turn of the last century, depends entirely on the ability of low-ranking soldiers, thinly distributed in far-flung locales, to adapt to their battlefields, shape policy and make major decisions without micromanagement from higher-ups.
Turn then to the monthly review by Christopher Hitchens, The World's Smartest Person, of Adam Nicholson's new history of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hitchens notes with barely constrained glee that the British prevailed in this crucial battle against Napoleon's French Navy and their Spanish allies because Nelson expected his captains to exercise their own judgment in the command of their ships. No battle plan survives the first engagement, so Nelson, capitalizing on the long tradition of discipline and skill among his officers and their sailors, shared his strategy with his captains and told them once in battle to improvise tactics to carry it out (cf. Russell Crowe in Master and Commander for a parallel). Meanwhile, the Spanish, their unreformed Catholicism rendering them strictly hierarchical and darkly fatalistic, and the anti-clerical French, the Jacobin purges having left them without experienced officers and the megalomaniac Napoleon having specifically ordered his admirals not to share strategy with captains, at Trafalgar slavishly followed initial orders until the clever Brits had harried them down to Davy Jones' Locker.
Consequently readers of this blog mostly eat inferior bread but do not sing La Marseillaise (and people say that "The Star Spangled Banner" is too martial!). On balance that's a very good thing.
But we're on the subject of leadership, not how good it is to be free of the French.
Nelson and Napoleon were both egotistical and capable. But Nelson didn't triumph because he was more capable than Napoleon. He triumphed because he wisely checked his ego to enable others to use their capabilities.
Turn now to the vector of Donald McGavran, Godfather of the Church Growth Movement. Among his many insights, McGavran railed against the tendency of missionaries to see the work of evangelism as "perfecting" the converts. While no advocate of lax Christianity, McGavran refocused missionary efforts from making nearly ideal Christians to getting the message out and making initial converts. "Perfecting," as he called it, is what the converts will do collectively as they depart the baptismal waters.
In other words, McGavran told the leaders of the church to stop micromanaging and let the church mature from the grassroots.
And in that, he paralleled the vector of a certain Second-Temple Jewish genius by the name of Saul of Tarsus, or Paul to his Hellenistic friends. Among Paul's many contributions to the life and thought of the successful Jewish sect that we call Christianity is the metaphor of the assembly of believers as a body, interrelated, working and celebrating and suffering together, each part with dignity, value and responsibility, infused with the Holy Spirit, and with Christ, not any other member, as the head.
A church functioning as the Pauline Body of Christ will therefore operate like American Special Forces rightly commanded, or Nelson's British Navy, or McGavran's missionary who largely lets the nascent church develop itself under the guidance of the gospel and the Spirit. Leaders of this church will not command from above. They will lay out the objectives and broad strategy, all of which has really already been laid out for them in that story with a cross at its center, and then foster creativity and facilitate implementation from below. To plot one more vector, this is the "leadership style" (ugh! we uttered that threadbare cliché!) of Augustine's directive, "Love God and do as you please."
Are excesses possible here? Of course. Special Forces master sergeants can't be allowed become local warlords, in the manner of Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Nelson needed captains with extensive knowledge and training, far greater than the enemy's, so that he could fire their imaginations and ambitions to make his navy sail together while improvising (compare Kaplan's remarks about the impressive number of Special Forces noncoms and junior officers with advanced degrees and the peculiar delight that they take in their daunting mission). McGavran had to remind his critics that he did not advocate a
But it remains a universal necessity in this present evil age. One human is sometimes smarter than another, but never so much smarter that he is justified in autocracy. Collective wisdom is generally better than individual intuition. Or to state it in theological terms, in the age of fulfillment the Spirit empowers the body as a whole through its individual members more than anointing someone special to take over. All y'all Jesus people are "prophets" with a very small p, if we view this from the grand salvation-historical perspective (see Acts 2 or Ephesians 1-2) and reckon that this is not just the present evil age but also God's new age of fulfillment.
Now, to confess. SWNID, as our title suggests, finds it hard to listen to others' points of view. Our default setting is: I am the smartest person in any room; therefore, reckon with me. But we are driven by our theology and experience, not to mention our recreational reading, to struggle against our overbearingly arrogant personality type. We think we know how to get things done. But we know to be got done, things must be done by the many, not the one. We continue to try to learn the means to draw the individual gifts and dreams of our brother-and-sister co-laborers together into a rich stew, not a homogenized broth, to the end that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
We encourage our gentle readers with similar concerns to join us in this most difficult and fulfilling of quests.
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