Ending Leadership Erosion

From my journal: In the March 8th Christian Century, Kyle Childress has written a wonderful piece about the thought of philosopher/farmer Wendell Berry. He quotes Berry: “During the last 17 years … I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken 17 years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken 17 years. It can be better than it is now, but that will take longer. For it to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years.”

You can find this quote in Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace (Counterpoint Press, 2002), a book to which I have returned after reading Childress’s comments. Berry is worth reading if you don’t mind being knocked off balance a bit. He is not your blue-blooded evangelical, but he gets your attention.

Berry’s hill reminds me of some churches and some people. Churches left exhausted, eroded, wasted by careless leadership (Diotrephes in III John comes to mind). People whose personal issues are heaped up to a point where there seems to be no solution (King Saul?).

Berry would be quick to tell you that there has been a whole genre of farmers over the years who have raped the land, draining its topsoil of nutrients and leaving it to the mercy of the winds and the rainy run-off. Then they abandoned it and went on to other places where the agricultural raping happened again. But Berry stayed, and it’s taken him 17 years to marginally restore what the farmers before him so wantonly destroyed.

Seventeen years to restore a hill? So how long does it take to truly convert a person then? How long does it take to bring a church-community back from the wounds of disillusionment and distrust?

Berry’s a patient man, it seems to me. I visualize him returning to that hill for 17 springtimes and doing a little more each year of whatever it took to bring the soil back to pasture-like standards. And I take note of his humility: “For (the hill) to live fully in its own responsibility, as it did before bad use ran it down, may take hundreds of years.”

I’m not sure that most of us have that kind of patience. The God of the Bible does.

Books on my desk: Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (Abingdon Press, 1996), which speaks to the issues of hatred and reconciliation, a place where the Christian movement needs more championship behavior. And Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004). This bothersome footnote on the bottom of page 170: “If I were a non-Christian, the first question I would want to ask a Christian neighbor would be this: ‘Do you still keep the ethnic cleansing card in your back pocket?’ I wouldn’t feel safe in his neighborhood until I knew the answer.” Better read the entire chapter before reacting. Better: read the whole book.

From Henry Venn, 18th century Anglican pastor, a favorite of mine: “When I come into the pulpit it is after study, prayers, and cries for the people. I speak as plainly and enter into all the cares of the congregation as minutely as I am able.” A little harder to do these days if a pastor runs his or her church like a corporation.

Lately I’ve noticed … all the evangelical leaders who are getting air time on the TV talk-shows. Our movement suddenly seems to have a voice in American discourse. Terrific! I pray it is perceived as a humble, thoughtful and contributive voice. A voice both gentled and empowered by the Spirit of God, not arrogant, not shrill, not focused on small things while the larger ideas are neglected.

May I offer this observation? While I appreciate the discussions about certain issues, I think I hear a lot more about issues and our opinions on them than I hear about the “old, old story of Jesus and his love.” Media cannot dictate our primary agenda: to know Christ and to make him known.

The other night I watched four panelists (one a rabbi) talk for 45 minutes about all the virtues of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. It’s a remarkable conversation. Then in the last five minutes the producers bring on an evangelical brother who is more than willing to disassociate himself from the book and tell us all what was wrong with it. A closing comment from a TV commentator: sour grapes between luminaries seeking attention. If we’re going to enjoy the national voice, then St. Paul’s perspective is most instructive: “Christ is preached, and I therefore rejoice.”

Oh … I am reminded of words which Tony Campolo used to say to me when a few years back, for a short time, we found our names and pictures in the newspaper. “Remember, Gordon, today’s paper with your name and picture in it, will line the bottom of someone’s birdcage tomorrow.” It helped me to see things in perspective. And has ever since.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is also chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership.

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