A Non-Anxious Presence: How a Changing and Complex World will Create a Remnant of Renewed Christian Leaders

by Mark Sayers

The root of our anxiety is our disconnection from God; this means we cannot be a non-anxious presence without God’s presence.

The absolute failure of nerve is when we recoil from the idea of fallenness—our impotence to improve the world without God and our need for redemption through the person of Christ.

The seed of the anxiety that invades and infects human social systems is found in the disconnection from the presence of God, which occurred in the garden.

As he faced the complex gray-zone dynamics of Iraq, General Stanley McCrystal turned to the ideas of John Boyd, a maverick strategist, both maligned and celebrated in equal measure. Boyd created the now-famous strategic tool—the OODA loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

The anxiety of the crowd clouds our observation. Orientation is required. Yet orientation requires humility, for when we understand our weakness, it enables us to trust fully in God’s strength.

Before Samuel could gain direction from God’s voice, he first had to learn to hear God’s voice; this is the missing component for many leaders. We are awash in rich resources on how to lead. Yet much of it, even some Christian works, emerges from an observation only attuned to the earthly environment.

Taylorism may show us the most effective path from A to B. However, it cannot show us if the path is the right path. To partner with God as He brings renewal in the world, in the systems and organizations where we live and lead, we must learn to detect His voice before moving forward; this is a countercultural act in an anxious system, which demands instant action, quick fixes, and fast-acting remedies for pain.

Samuel at first mistook the voice of God for Eli’s voice. As he learned to detect the voice of God, he had to learn to differentiate the voice of humans from the voice of God. Voice recognition is a crucial leadership skill because we must learn to distinguish the voice of God from the inevitable anxious voice of the crowd that the leader encounters as they emerge into their leadership.

God’s presence turns an unformed wilderness into a garden of holy growth.

Over every wilderness, chaotic environment, and gray zone, the Spirit hovers.

The plans, the heavenly blueprints that signal the renewal of any moment, and the reordering of the most chaotic environments. Every moment, every action, every thought, every problem contains the renewal potential of remaking that moment according to the pattern of heaven. This is hope.

You are not created to remain paralyzed in anxiety. You were not created to offer an anxious crowd quick-fix solutions and a panacea for their lostness. You were not patterned after heaven to retreat into a comfort zone. You were made in the image of God to bring chaos into order, as you act as a channel of God’s will on earth. The Spirit manifests the pattern of heaven in the world, and we mediate that pattern as God’s workers in creation.

The kingdom of God operates according to its own power laws. With God, the weak are strong.

Rumelt notes that what David possessed was a “decisive asymmetry.” In other words, David uncovered a power imbalance that no one else saw. Rumelt notes that a decisive asymmetry rests on “how someone can see what others have not, or what they have ignored, and thereby discover a pivotal objective and create an advantage.”

David won the battle by applying the lessons learned in the wilderness. Before David had even approached the Philistine front, the battle was already won. Where? In the quiet spaces of the wilderness. In hiddenness. In the growth that can only occur off the radar.

David is not in the wilderness taking ground. Nor is he trying to find himself as he expands the frontiers of civilization in a heroic quest. David is not an explorer. David is a shepherd. In the shepherd, we find a biblical model of leadership, of a non-anxious presence, which is not dependent on reserves of personal power but on the presence of God—encountered in the wild places.

Without God’s presence, the wilderness offers only isolation. With the presence of God, the wilderness offers us insulation from the deception of the crowd.

With God, differentiation becomes more than the distance from the anxious crowd; it becomes a calling. A holy set-apartness. A return to the right order in which God is our primary connection, the foundational relationship of our life, around which all other relationships can be reordered.