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Kindle Notes & Highlights
called to minister with their whole being, including their wounded selves.
I am convinced that priests and ministers, especially those who relate to many anguishing people, need a truly safe place for themselves.
made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds.
leadership, for a large part, means to be led.
One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power—political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power—even
even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus,
we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.
Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.
The long painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led.
Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. Immediately
the servant-leader is the leader who is being led
unknown, undesirable, and painful places.
strenuous theological reflection will allow us to discern critically where we are being led.
Real theological thinking, which is thinking with the mind of Christ, is hard to find in the practice of the ministry.
The task of future Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solution of the pains and tribulations of their time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God’s people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom.
they have to say no to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God’s Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into kairos, that is, an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ.
A Christian leader is called to help people to hear that voice and so be comforted and consoled.
centers where people are trained in true discernment of the signs of the time.
The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but
temptations.
He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.
