Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership Quotes

“Parker Palmer observes, "A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Truly, the best thing any of us have to bring to leadership is our own transforming selves.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“God, gather me5 to be with you as you are with me. Keep me in touch with myself, with my needs, my anxieties, my angers, my pains, my corruptions, that I may claim them as my own rather than blame them on someone else. O Lord, deepen my wounds into wisdom; shape my weaknesses into compassion; gentle my envy into enjoyment, my fear into trust, my guilt into honesty. O God, gather me to be with you as you are with me.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“being angry is not the same thing as being called.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Only those who have been brave enough to ride their own monsters of anger and greed, jealousy and narcissism, fear and violence all the way down to the bottom will find a truer energy with which to lead.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“The first leg of Moses' journey as a leader, then, was not to lead anyone else anywhere; it was to allow himself to be led into freedom from his own bondage. Before he could lead others into freedom, he needed to experience freedom himself. In solitude he was able to let go of the coping mechanisms that had served him well in the past but were completely inappropriate for the leader he was becoming.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, meetings to attend, washing to do ... and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and forget what I am about or why. Oh God, don't forget me please, for the sake of Jesus Christ.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. HENRI NOUWEN, THE WOUNDED HEALER”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“And as Donald Capps so aptly points out, "Since our churches have taken on many of the characteristics of bureaucracies, it is not surprising that clergy are sometimes rewarded, not punished for their narcissistic behaviors.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Holy One,4 there is something I wanted to tell you but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and mostly I forget what I’m about, or why. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“For the darkness of waiting3 of not knowing what is to come of staying ready and quiet and attentive, we praise you, O God: For the darkness and the light are both alike to you. For the darkness of staying silent for the terror of having nothing to say and for the greater terror of needing to say nothing, we praise you, O God. For the darkness and the light are both alike to you. For the darkness of choosing when you give us the moment to speak, and act, and change, and we cannot know what we have set in motion, but we still have to take the risk, we praise you, O God: For the darkness and the light are both alike to you. For the darkness of hoping in a world which longs for you, for the wrestling and laboring of all creation for wholeness and justice and freedom, we praise you, O God. For the darkness and the light are both alike to you. JANET MORLEY, BREAD OF TOMORROW”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“But one thing is sure: the choice to lead something, to orient your life toward some vision or ideal and to lead in that direction, opens you up to a world of pain that you might not otherwise have to face.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“A natural outcome of time spent in the safety of God’s presence is that it becomes quite natural to engage routinely in a rhythm of celebrating who we are in Christ and the work of transformation that God is doing in our lives, as well as inviting him to show us those places where we are still living in bondage to sin and negative patterns. Without the regular experience of being received and loved by God in solitude and silence, we are vulnerable to a kind of leadership that is driven by profound emptiness that we are seeking to fill through performance and achievement.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“My prayer for all of us who gathered to work and plan for the future of our ministry was, “God, help us live within the limits of what you have called us to do. Help us live within the limits of who we are—both as individuals and as an organization. Help us give our very best in the field that we have been given to work and to trust you to enlarge our sphere of action if and when you know we are ready. Help us know the difference between being driven by grandiose visions and responding faithfully to the expansion of your work in and through us.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“But at the heart of spiritual leadership is the capacity to notice the activity of God so we can join him in it.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Spiritual leadership springs forth in grace from our very desire for God’s presence. This does not take effort or striving. It takes courage, a kind of showing up, attentiveness.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“But one of the things I know for sure is that those who are looking to us for spiritual sustenance need us first and foremost to be spiritual seekers ourselves. They need us to keep searching for the bread of life that feeds our own souls so that we can guide them to places of sustenance for their own souls.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes— the rest sit around it and pluck blackberries. If spiritual leadership is anything. it is the capacity to see the bush burning in the middle of our own life and having enough sense to turn aside, take off our shoes and pay attention!”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“This part of me, if left as it is, will be no good for anyone.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“knew that if his soul was to be well, he could not afford to live his life driven blindly by unexamined inner dynamics.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“God works miracles of transformation in the world through miraculously transformed people.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Christians are assimilating a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to 2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to 3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to 4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to 5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Jesus indicates that it is possible to gain the whole world but lose your own soul. If he were talking to us as Christian leaders today, he might point out that it is possible to gain the world of ministry success and lose your own soul in the midst of it all.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“In her book Leaving Church, former parish priest and award-winning preacher Barbara Brown Taylor describes what it was like to feel her soul slipping away. She says: Many of the things1 that were happening inside of me seemed too shameful to talk about out loud. Laid low by what was happening at Grace-Calvary, I did not have the energy to put a positive spin on anything. . . . Beyond my luminous images of Sunday mornings I saw the committee meetings, the numbing routines, and the chronically difficult people who took up a large part of my time. Behind my heroic image of myself I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval. I saw the forgiving faces of my family, left behind every holiday for the last fifteen years, while I went to conduct services for other people and their families. Above all, I saw that my desire to draw as near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for hurt things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue. Drawn to a life of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider. Drawn to marry the Divine Presence, I had ended up estranged. . . . Like the bluebirds that sat on my windowsills, pecking at the reflections they saw in the glass, I could not reach the greenness for which my soul longed. For years I had believed that if I just kept at it, the glass would finally disappear. Now for the first time, I wondered if I had devoted myself to an illusion.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“Behind my heroic image of myself I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“waiting on God to move or to shift something inside me while at the same time still needing to lead in the public arena.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“The New Testament reading for the day was 2 Corinthians 10:12-17 in which Paul talks about the danger of comparing ourselves to others and measuring ourselves against their accomplishments. His antidote for this all-too-human tendency was to learn to stay within the limits of his own life and calling. He says, “We, however, will not boast beyond limits, but will keep within the field that God has assigned to us, to reach out even as far as you. For we were not overstepping our limits when we reached you. . . . We do not boast beyond limits, that is, in the labors of others; but our hope is that, as your faith increases, our sphere of action among you may be greatly enlarged” (2 Corinthians 10:13-15). Until that very moment I had never realized that Paul used the word limits three times in just a few verses and that he seemed to be very clear about the limits and boundaries of his calling. He knew the field God had given him to work, and he knew better than to go outside it. He knew that there was a sphere of action and influence that had been given to him by God, and he would not go beyond it unless God enlarged his field. Paul seemed to grapple honestly with the reality of limitations in several different ways in his writings, and, in fact, this seemed to be part of his maturing as a leader who was both gifted and called. When he wrote about not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought (Romans 12:3), he was making a very general statement about limiting our grandiosity and pride by cultivating a realistic sense of our essential nature. He was talking about being willing to live within the limits and the possibilities of who we really are. As he matured, he revealed a very personal understanding that his deep struggle with a thorn in the flesh was a gift that was given to him to limit his own grandiosity and keep him in touch with his humanness. In 2 Corinthians 4 he talked about what it is like to carry the treasure of ministry in fragile, earthen vessels. He wrote poignantly from his experience of his own human limitations and his conviction that it is precisely in our willingness to carry God’s luminous presence in such fragile containers—without pretending to be anything more than what we are—that the power”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“But most of us have not had much training in waiting—or at least not enough to prepare us to help others wait in times when they feel highly threatened. Richard Rohr calls this waiting place “liminal space”; liminal comes from the Latin word limina, which means threshold. Liminal space, the place of waiting, is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run . . . anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. In solitude we learn to wait on God for our own life so that when our leadership brings us to the place where the only option for us as a people is to wait on God, we believe it all the way down to the bottom of our being. Because we have met God in the waiting place (rather than running away or giving in to panic or deceiving ourselves into thinking things are better than they are), we are able to stand firm and believe God in a way that makes it possible for others to follow suit. It is a sobering thing to ask ourselves this question: Have I learned enough about how to wait on God in my own life to be able to call others to wait when that is what’s truly needed? Have I done enough spiritual journeying to lead people on this part of their journey?”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry

“While you won’t be given ‘more than you can bear,’ you will be led by ‘a way you do not know”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry