Authors as Artists

I was introduced to C.S. Lewis and his wonderfully captivating world of Narnia in third grade, when my teacher brought a radio to class so that we could listen to a reading of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Later, at university, I was introduced to another wonderful world – Middle Earth – first through The Hobbit, and then through the majestic sweeping saga of The Lord of the Rings, both by J.R.R. Tolkien,

People tend to assume that great authors such as Lewis and Tolkien are incredibly gifted individuals who, working all on their own with innate gifts of imagination and composition, single-handedly develop their plots and characters to tell a compelling story.

But that wouldn’t be true.

Both Lewis and Tolkien worked in community to develop their stories.

They were part of a group closely associated with Magdalen College at Oxford University,¹ the Inklings. This group met in Lewis’s rooms at the college from 1933-1949 to read their developing stories to each other for critique and suggestions. The picture below shows where C.S. Lewis lived at the time – on the middle floor just to the right of the centre section, where the two white blinds are seen.

The best known place where the Inklings met weekly for friendship and lunch, as opposed to readings, was at a pub called The Eagle and Child. 

They sat at the table shown on the left in the picture  below.

Leaders as Artists

Leaders, like authors, are often thought to work alone, but instead of crafting stories, they craft strategy and solve organizational issues. This leadership model, developed in the early 1800s, is called the “Great Man Theory,” and it certainly can appeal to a leader’s ego! After all, who doesn’t want to be great? The theory is that an organization’s or a nation’s success can be attributed to a single heroic person, who in olden days was always a man. This theory has since been discredited, but it still lingers on, particularly in the world of organizational leadership where successful leaders are lionized as individual heroes.

Now, there certainly are great leaders, but if they believe that they represent the Great Man Theory in action and that the organization’s success is truly all bound up in them, then they are ripe for a brutal reality check. The truth is, great leaders work with teams. They are not infallible nor are they omniscient. Some leaders are far more creative than others, but they don’t have to be. A leader is simply a person who recognizes opportunity, no matter which person is creative enough to spot it, and knows how to bring a group together to make something of it.

For an example of what could go wrong with leaders who believe otherwise, just read my post on the leadership failure that sent a short-term mission team to jail. In this case, the leaders thought they knew everything they needed to know, but it turned out there were a lot of crucial things they knew nothing about.

Drawing on the Community

Here are some tips to help you discern your plans in community rather than alone on your own:

• Every leader needs to be receptive to influence and critique from outside their sphere of influence. Pick people who you know have alternative perspectives to your own to consult with. This way, you will generate a much more robust and informed understanding of the topic at hand.
• The stronger your personality and sense of inerrant judgment, the stronger and more forthright your outside influence needs to be. You need to have people who will challenge you and push back on your ideas when they can think of something they believe is better.
• Look for confirming and disconfirming feedback. If you have a genuinely good idea, you will find confirmation in consulting with others. If your idea has flaws or isn’t the best, you will get disconfirmation. Be sure to pay attention to disconfirming information. In a country like Canada where we generally try to be so polite to one another, it’s a gift when someone is willing to say anything knowing that it is a challenge to the way you see things.

If you’re not sure who you should consult with, read the section “Ministry Peers” in my post It’s not lonely at the top!.

Key Thought: Communal discernment means better ideas! 

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The fourth threat to corporate witness is the most serious because, if it overpowers the culture of the ministry, it will leave you bereft of the most important way of communicating with your ministry’s owner. This biggest threat of all is the privatization of faith.

We are being conditioned by our society that faith does not belong in the public realm. People of faith are told to keep their faith in their places of worship and homes, to hide it away. Even Jesus said we should hide in our “prayer closets” when we pray, so as not to make a show of our prayers. But Jesus wasn’t saying that we should not have group prayer!! He was contrasting two ways of praying to make a point. Don’t take it too far.

The result is that a surprising number of Christians are not comfortable with group spirituality, sometimes even in church! We are especially not comfortable, it seems to me, with silence in a group situation, one of the central practices in group discernment. Sure we can pray at the start of a meeting that God will guide our minds and the discussion and be with us, but why not then take time together to listen together?

Paul talks about putting on the full armour of God. Yet when we do not engage in group discernment it is as though we take off our armour, lay down our weapons, and then walk into battle! We’ve needlessly neglected to make use of the greatest resource Christ gave us — his Spirit, our counselor and guide.

Negative Consequences

You know you have a problem with group spirituality when people treat the opening devotional and prayer time of a meeting as not the real meeting, but just an optional preliminary. Although the meeting starts at 7:00, some will arrive at 7:30 — in time for when the ‘real’ meeting starts.

The problem when people keep their faith private is that:

• Group prayer becomes a perfunctory exercise, consisting only of petitions and no listening.
• Discussion is limited to the ‘practical’ things and never ventures into a theological discussion to set context or to guide discussion.
• Without faith in the foreground, the work of the ministry is reduced to simply good deeds or need fulfillment.
• If people are embarrassed to share their spirituality with their teammates, how can they share it as a public witness?
• Something that God wants to tell us may not be heard, because it is often in the shared discernment process that a team discerns God’s leading.

The Truth

Privatization of faith can be overcome by the truth that we have the Holy Spirit among us, and that as a group we have divine guidance.

God wants us to know his mind. He wants us to have conversation with him! This truth does not just give corporate life a spiritual dimension, it fills it with a vibrant, living faith!

We need to become aware of the constant presence of God in our lives. We are the people through whom God works in this world! How can we possibly work together as a group unless we are listening to God as a group?

Building Group Spirituality

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ. We have his mind by learning to think like him and by listening to his Spirit. It’s a fact that God wants to communicate with us, but it is not always our experience that we hear him. Pastor Manoonsak at Jai Samarn church in Bangkok, said in a sermon that when people ask why God doesn’t speak to them they are asking the wrong question. The real question is, “Why am I not listening when God is speaking?”

I’ve learned that:

• If we do not expect God to speak to us, we will not likely hear him speak.
• If we do not expect the Spirit to be active today, we will not see what he is doing.

Therefore if you want to discern God’s leadership, either individually or corporately, you must expect to find him. God says he will be found, and if we ask for wisdom, he will give it to us.

I admit that it used to really bother me when someone said “God told me.” it always evoked the same, unspoken, response from me: “Oh really?” First, I was very, very skeptical of their claims, and second, I always was afraid of mistaking my voice for God’s voice, so of course I never heard from God.

But then about 1993 I asked God, “Please teach me to distinguish your voice from mine” and I started to have some pretty amazing experiences. Let me just say that over perhaps about five years, the Lord caused things to happen so that he could say, “That was me!” and I knew that anything else was me talking to myself. He was training me so that on May 25, 2001 when I asked God a direct question, I was equipped and ready to receive the most direct response from God that I have ever received!! That question changed my life.

Here’s what you can do to build your group discernment skills:

• There is a great little book called Practicing Discernment Together that you could read together. The CCCC board read and discussed this book earlier this year. It’s the best introduction to group discernment that I know of. Another book that I have ordered but not yet read is Pursuing God’s Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups by Ruth Haley Barton. If it is as good as her other books, it will be excellent.
• Have a professor from a seminary come and teach your staff some discernment practices. I had Dr. David Sherbino from Tyndale Seminary come and do a half day experiential spiritual retreat for all CCCC staff.
• Take your leadership team off-site to a more relaxed environment for a spiritual retreat. I did this with our leadership team and we made very good progress on some strategy work.
• Build extra time into your meetings for a spiritual exercise. When the leadership team began work on what became our strategy map, we set aside time to do lectio divina, and to leisurely debrief.
• Work through my blog series Hearing God Speak.
• Ask questions that will stimulate discernment, such as:
  • “Let’s think about this issue keeping God’s character in mind and see what insights we get.”
  • “Which doctrines pertain to this issue, and do they cast any light on what we should do?”

In Conclusion

In this series I have covered the four major threats to your corporate spiritual witness: individualism, careerism, self-centredness, and privatization of faith. Each of these is absolutely antithetical to our Christian faith and will severely impair our ability to be an authentic Christian witness through our corporate life.

By overcoming these threats with the four great truths: we are the body of Christ, we have a high calling, we belong to Christ, and we have the Holy Spirit, we will be a fully functioning Christian ministry that can, through our corporate life, be an authentic Christian witness that:

• points to God,
• manifests his character, and
• models his kingdom on earth.

May God bless you and your ministry as you seek to be true to his ways in all that you do.

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