COMMENTARY: Passion, Leadership and the Way of Jesus

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) UNDATED _ I can feel my passion rising. It surprises me. Toward the end of my retreat with a church leadership group, I offer a brief teaching about how Jesus […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _ I can feel my passion rising. It surprises me.


Toward the end of my retreat with a church leadership group, I offer a brief teaching about how Jesus viewed his 12 disciples and what that moment might say about church leadership circles today, especially theirs.

It isn’t about rules, I say, or managing budgets, or making institutional decisions, or representing constituencies. It isn’t that easy.

Church leadership is about oneness at the center. It’s about leading the body forward into God’s newness, and doing so by themselves seeking newness and, when newness bears a cost, remaining one, remaining “friends,” to use Jesus’ term, sharing with each other the burden of living into the gospel.

The Last Supper wasn’t offered as a model for Sunday liturgy, a ritual to be picked apart and fussed over. Jesus gave them his life as a promise and urged them to lay down their lives for others. He even fed his betrayer.

I find myself begging them to try the way that Jesus set before them. The first disciples were unable to do so. In their fear and vanity, they immediately formed an institution, declared hierarchies and rules, fell into bickering, and in the end did little of what Jesus commanded them to do. But the call remains good and worthy, and the traditional way clearly leads nowhere.

I can write this today with a calm hand, but speaking these words was difficult and passionate. For I know firsthand that the absence of oneness at the center can be destructive, the focus on “doing business” can distort mission, and the failure of leadership groups to pray, celebrate, struggle, submit, forgive, listen and love has brought God’s noble dream to its current fragmented state.

Even more than personal wounds still healing, I feel a larger passion. For it isn’t just clergy getting beaten up, it isn’t just well-intentioned leadership councils getting wasted by bickering and three-hour sessions on trivialities. It’s the entire enterprise.

It’s my family sitting in a pew begging to be fed. It’s my son in Sunday School needing community. It’s my 80-something parents needing their church in a new way. It’s my city, state and nation splintering into hate-filled camps. It’s overlapping cancers of poverty, greed and cruelty spreading unchecked across our land, while the privileged debate doctrine at conventions held in lavish places. It’s politics falling into the hands of the shallow and mean-spirited, for whom religion, like race, is a card to be played.


I am confused by my passion. This parish isn’t mine. Their life together won’t affect my life. I am here as outside facilitator, not team member. But I think I am tasting that very oneness of which I speak. For we are bound to one another, not by organizational ties, but by the passion of the Lord.

When his dream of oneness is realized, anyone who comes near is warmed by the flame. When his dream is abused and turned into rules, exclusion and the working of institutional agenda, as if the Body of Christ were no different from a bank or a swim club, then anyone who comes near is wounded.

I have dared to draw near to them. Theirs is a good flame, and I pray they will nurture it and not lapse into business as usual. The Christian enterprise doesn’t need one more committee. But the mere act of drawing near to them brings me into the presence of the one whose life is both amazing and disturbing.

I leave exhausted, not from lack of sleep, but from the passion itself. I am disoriented when I return home. At one level, this feels like the days when I dragged home from vestry meetings beaten and frustrated. But it’s different.

This passion isn’t about career or scars on my own hide. It’s about the dream itself, the dream Jesus shared with his friends, the dream they couldn’t embrace, because it required too much self-denial, too much work, too much newness _ and yet still a dream worth allowing close, even at the cost of feeling Jesus’ passion.

DEA END EHRICH

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