Leadership, the Self-Life and the Kingdom

The Franciscan, Richard Rohr in his book on Simplicity wrote:

“Three things that in my opinion we have to let go of are the following: First there is the compulsion to be successful.  Second is the compulsion to be right – even, and especially, to be theologically right…Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.” (Simplicity – the art of living  - p. 44)

I am aware that these three tenets might not be that important or convicting to some of you.  They might even seem insipid, but for me they strike at the very core of my “self-life.”  It seems as if I have been on a perpetual undulating cycle of victory over these aspects and re-enshrining them my whole adult life.  Success, being right, and attempting to control everything! 

The thing that makes it even more difficult for those of us in ministry as vocation is there is a baptized version that we need to learn and embrace from business and leadership types that look like they are related to a way that is right, but exacerbates the twitching nerve in us to win, to be aggrandized, to be powerful, to succeed. To be evenhanded, there are those, like Greenleaf, who espouse something more akin to Kingdom approaches, but at least from my vantage point, wisdom from the world jumbled with my own inner-weirdness often creates a striving that must be “put down” if I am to represent Jesus in anyway close to the real Kingdom rendering that is unmistakably found in the Gospels.

Peace,

r