Do you know when has the night ended and the day begun?

From the wisdom of the Jewish Tradition I offer up this story that I heard over the weekend:

A Rabbi once asked his students, “how do we know when the night has ended and the day has begun?” Immediately the students thought that they grasped the importance of the question. There are, after all, prayers that can be recited and rituals that can be performed only at night. And there are prayers and rituals that belong only to the day. It is therefore important to know when the night has ended and day has begun. So the brightest of the students offered an answer: “When I look out at the fields and I can distinguish between my field and the field of my neighbor’s, that’s when the night has ended and day has begun.” A second student offered her answer: “When I look from the fields and I see a house and I can tell that it’s my house and not the house of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A third student offered an answer: “When I can distinguish the animals in the yard – and I can tell a cow from a horse – that’s when the night has ended.” Each of these answers brought a sadder, more severe frown to the Rabbi’s face – until finally he shouted: “No! You don’t understand! You only know how to divide! You divide your house from the house of your neighbor, your field from your neighbor’s, one animal from another, one color from all the others. Is that all that we can do – divide, separate, split the world into pieces? Isn’t the world broken enough - split into enough fragments? No, my dear students, it’s not that way at all! Our Torah and Jewish values want more from us. The shocked students looked into the sad face of their Rabbi. One of them ventured, “Then Rabbi, tell us: How do we know that night has ended and day has begun?” The Rabbi stared back into the faces of his students and with a gentle voice responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you and you can see that that person is your brother or your sister, when you can recognize that person as a friend, then, finally, the night has ended and the day has begun.” 

My our Lent be a season of unity and not further division.

We Yell When We Are Out of Practice

We have two boys, seven and two. Our eldest is like most other seven year olds, I imagine. He is able to express a wide range of emotions but there is a limit on his ability to put to words to the more complex emotions. While he has grown these years he has gotten much better and more comfortable at talking about his feelings. However, there are still times when he grows so frustrated because he cannot come up with the words and so he yells. My wife and I try to work with him to calm down and talk about what he is feeling in order to get him to practice talking about what is going on in his head. 

In our minds, this practice is essential in order to be a functioning human being. You cannot be an adult and just yell when you are frustrated or angry. You cannot just shut down and not talk about things that are important to you.

And yet, this is a problem with out time. Adults are in social settings and not talking about religion and politics. That is we are a bunch of adults who are not practicing talking about the things that are important to us. 

No wonder we have adults yelling about politics on the television and adults yelling about religion on the street corner and adults who are so turned off by all this yelling that they shut off the news and don't engage in religion. Bottom line, we are people who are biologically adults but we are like seven year olds - yelling or shutting down when we don't know how to express ourselves.

For all that evangelism is made out to be, it really is just faith sharing. It is practicing talking about religion and the things that matter. As the saying goes, if we want people to stop yelling all the time and talk about the things that matter, then we have to being with our own selves. We have to "be the change." 

Church Leadership as Entrepreneurs vs. Artists

Church leadership is not outside the mainstream conversations about leadership in the world. And while there are many streams of conversation about leadership these days, there seems to be a few main rivers of conversation. One of those rivers is leader as Entrepreneur or leader as Artist. And these two metaphors are in tension within the Church.

Leader as Entrepreneur is a model that is very popular with those in the higher levels of Church leadership. There is a desire to raise up leaders who are visionaries, bold, decisive, and clear. These would be leaders that are innovative and have high energy to take on new challenges and markets. Part of what makes Church leader as Entrepreneur attractive is the underlying mindset of an entrepreneur is one of growth. Growing is the fuel of the entrepreneur. As the old saying goes, "if you're not growing you're dying." 

Leader as Artist is a model that is more popular with those entering the ministry or those still new in the calling. There is a desire to raise up leaders who are passionate, creative and focused on the purity of the call. These would be leaders that are worried about integrity and authenticity in order to remain true to the original call rather than bend to the will of new markets. Part of what make Church leader as Artist attractive is the mindset of an artist is one of creating something for the sake of creating it. Beauty is the fuel of the artist. As the old saying goes "Life imitates art." 

Ideally it would be great to have church leaders be entrepreneur artists (or creative entrepreneur as The Atlantic calls it), but that is a rare breed in current church leadership. While one model of leadership is fueled by growth, the other is fueled by "being". The entrepreneur creates in order to grow, the artist creates for the sake of creating. One sees creation as a means to an end the other sees creation as a end to itself. 

Want to know what leadership style is driving your local church? Take a look a the language that is used. Is is focused on growth or being. Are you doing things in order to get new members or are you doing things because they are worth doing? 

If you are not growing you're dying is not accurate when it comes to the Gospel. In order to grow you have to die. In order to made whole you have to be empty. In order to be made clean you have to get dirty. Sometimes growth is needed but growth for the sake of growth is not bringing beauty into the world. Mindless growth only brings weeds.