I’ve been reflecting on the New Testament text, II Timothy 1:5-7: “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” (NRSV)

In all honesty, I don’t turn to II Timothy often, but I find these among the most moving words in the New Testament. They were written by a leader for a leader. They highlight the multigenerational aspect of church leadership, both within the family and within the church.

I reconnected with a cousin last weekend. Her father, who died 10 years ago this month, was a pastor and college Bible professor, who took part in the laying on of hands at my ordination 19 years ago. I was moved to pull out the pictures from the service, which I haven’t looked at for years. It reminded me yet again that my call took place within the context of my own family: including my uncle and my mother, a pastor’s secretary in a time when women couldn’t be pastors, and their father, who was a pastor for 50 years.

And of course there were other clergy in the photograph, not to mention all the lay leaders who made a difference for me over the years, before my ordination and since. We are all a product of many influences working to make us who we are. Some of these influences we experience as a source of strength, and we may see others as holding us back. But they are all an opportunity to learn more about how we want to be in our families, in the church, in the world.

Where does your calling come from? Or, as Ed Friedman liked to ask, “Who in your family ordained you?”

Angela Booth in her excellent writing blog includes a writers’ prompt each week. Her most recent exercise suggests: “You’ve met a genii, and have been offered three wishes. You can have anything at all. But… there’s a catch. You must give up something of importance to you. So, what are your three wishes? And what will you give up?”

In leadership as well as in life, there is often a direct connection between what I want and what I have to give up. Here are three wishes we as leaders may have: 1) to get to our goals, 2) to have an impact over time 3) to have good relationships with those we lead. But we don’t get these things for free. To get to our goals, we have to give up being liked by everyone, not always easy for church leaders. To have an impact over time, we have to give up the notion that there is a magic bullet, a formula or program which will make our dreams come true, and hold on to the long view. To have good relationships with those we lead, we have to give up the idea we can control others. We can find leadership easier when we focus more on ourselves and how we function than we do on others.

We may not have a church genie offering to grant our wishes, but I do believe God is at work in congregational life. If we’re motivated, God can help us little by little to let go of the things that get in the way of real progress in our own leadership.

Try this as an exercise for yourself: Write three pages about three things you really want for your leadership, and what you’ll have to give up to get them.

At a workshop I did yesterday with my colleague Debbie Highsmith at Ministry Days for the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association, we started talking about helping. Someone raised the question, “Does helping ever help?” It’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about the help I’ve gotten that has truly helped. When I’ve struggled, the people who have been the most useful show some qualities: 1) they stay calm 2) they ask more questions and give less advice 3) they don’t have too much invested in how I do. They are happy when I start doing better, but their sense of self is not dependent on my actions. When I’m the “helper,” and can stay in that same place myself, I find I’m more good to others, too.

I called my father yesterday for Father’s Day. He is 84 years old and still working 2 days a week, for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. He gave up golf a couple of years ago, but still likes to walk around the course or at the mall. I am grateful for the way he never met a stranger (even though his conversations with them embarrassed me no end as a child). I am grateful for the way he loved his work, for much of his career selling locking systems. Dad didn’t retire until he was 72 and then only stayed home about six months before finding a part-time job. The ability to talk to strangers and a love of work are gifts I have, too. I’ll be travelling on Wednesday to visit my parents for a few days, part of my ongoing research into my connections with my family which shaped me as a person and as a leader. I’m taking my 21-year-old daughter, because I believe connections between the generations are good for everyone.

I’ve been hearing a lot about “church transformation” lately: many church denominations have transformational initiatives, to help turn around declining congregations. There’s a lot of pressure on clergy leaders to produce results, especially numerical growth. The pressure exists elsewhere, too: a recent survey of CEO turnover by Booz Allen Hamilton found that in 1995 one in eight departing CEOs was forced from office, but by 2006, nearly one in three left involuntarily. (The Oregonian, June 11, 2007). Booz Allen suggests this is performance-related turnover, as corporate boards want to see results in company sales and stock prices.

I’m starting to think these trends are part of the anxious, quick-fix mentality that pervades our society. “Transformation” puts unbelievable pressure on clergy to whip their congregations into shape, using methods that don’t benefit the leader-church relationship and that are unlikely to bear significant fruit in the long term. In the wider arena, all results are increasingly measured in short-term increments. These short-term gains are unsustainable, and quick fixes don’t promote the health of the congregation.

Many church transformation initiatives are anxiety-driven. Denominational leaders think, “Churches are declining, so we’ve got to do something.” Clergy think, “My church is declining, so I’ve got to do something.” But an anxious response to a problem rarely leads to a productive outcome. Pastors try to convince churches to join the transformational process offered by the denomination. Then they try to convince people to implement the suggested procedure. People resist, and then pastors try harder to persuade people to go along. Leaders get tired, and the initiative goes nowhere. Outside the church, the story gets repeated with different players in business, government and education.

What’s the answer? Setting clear goals and moving steadily toward them is qualitatively different from willfully pressuring people to move in a given direction. People resist being willed. Leadership involves you, the leader, being clear about where you are headed, and inviting others to follow, giving them room to make their own choices. Leading is a long-term process, not a short-term outcome.

Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, said, “Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.” I’m starting to wonder if transformation is not a goal but a by-product. The harder we seek happiness, the less likely we are to be happy. The harder we pursue transformation, the less likely we are to be transformed. The pressure to change can lead to the opposite effect. But when we calmly and clearly set some goals that arise out of who we are, and move toward them slowly but with determination, we can find new life emerging.

No clergy leader can transform a congregation. No CEO can transform a company. Change happens organically, in the relationship between leader and led, and it takes time. We live in an impatient society, a society that doesn’t give change the time it needs. But we as leaders can set our own goals, and work on our relationship with those we lead. That can lead to real results, if we allow time and space for them to appear.

I tried an experiment this weekend: doing nothing. My time management guru, Mark Forster, wrote an article titled, “In Praise of Doing Nothing,” which I took to heart. I’m working hard on a book on sustaining leadership, and I had taken a satisfying but slightly grueling trip to a conference in Vancouver, BC. The next day, I did a few things and realized how tired I was. This was supposed to be a day “off,” but I still had a long list of things to do. I dumped a few items on relatively willing family members and postponed the rest. The next day I jumped out of bed ready to get back to the book and the still-lengthy to-do list. Mark Forster suggests, “A whole day spent deliberately doing nothing can be a wonderfully re-charging experience.” I agree.

Doing nothing is a spiritual exercise, too. How indispensable are we, really? Can we begin to learn that God can manage the world without us? Try it: one day a year of doing nothing won’t kill you, and you may be surprised at the effect.

Are church people like apes? If so, how much? Frans de Waal’s book, Our Inner Ape:A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, is about the apes that are most like us, chimps and bonobos. De Waal observes the mixture of aggression and cooperation that is seen in both groups (far more aggression in chimps, far more cooperation in bonobos), and observes that humans have both qualities. De Waal has the greatest respect for the complexities of ape communities. He writes, “Keepers who fail to take apes seriously will never get along with them, and those who take them too seriously will succumb to the web of intrigues, provocations, and emotional blackmail that suffuses every ape group.”

I wonder whether there might be a corollary for church leaders: “Leaders who fail to take church people seriously will never get along with them, and those who take them too seriously will succumb to the web of intrigues, provocations and emotional blackmail that suffuses many church groups.” I hope we all have the same respect for those we lead that de Waal has for the communities he studies. Some pastoral leaders don’t respect their followers and don’t take them seriously. They assume the followers need to be enlightened and that they are the ones to enlighten. These leaders often end up in a battle of wills with their congregations. Some leaders spend all their time caught up in the emotional morass church life can become when people are anxious. They end up sucked into the web of intrigues and unable to move forward.

When you respect those you lead, without taking them too seriously, you honor their perspective and contribution, and you stay free enough to keep your sense of humor about the vagaries of church life. “Here it comes again,” you may think, and move on to the next goal. At least, on a good day, you can. When you get caught up in the web, you can get out of it a little more quickly. God created relationships, in ape communities and in human communities, and we all get the chance to practice relating every day.

“When emotions arise, wisdom ceases,” said Lin-chi, a Chinese Zen master (d. 867). I’ve been reflecting on this quote in the light of my last post on emotions and leadership. I’ve certainly been in church meetings where emotions arose and wisdom ceased. When we are in a strongly reactive emotional state, we find it hard to make wise choices. The fight-or-flight instincts have their place, but most of us are not in a life-or-death situation very often.

Staying calm may be the better part of wisdom. Wise leaders express themselves with conviction and passion, but they are thoughtful about where and when they do so. They don’t get derailed from their goals in the heat of the moment. They don’t get anxiously defensive or lose their temper (or at least, they work on managing these tendencies in themselves). Are any of us wise leaders? Becoming wise is a process that takes a lifetime. Are you a little closer than you used to be?

Why is it so easy to get tripped up by our own emotions? Someone makes a comment in a meeting and you find yourself flooded with emotion. Your heart starts pounding, your knees are shaking. You open an e-mail from a key leader who is criticizing your position, and you can’t read past the first sentence. What is going on?

I’ve been reading a book by brain scientist Joseph Ledoux called The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Simon and Schuster, 1996). It’s over a decade old now, and I want to move on to his more recent book The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. He talks in detail about the amygdala, a part of the brain which seems to be particularly active in the fear response, and in the memory of emotions. I was struck by these words, “It is well known that the connections from the cortical areas to the amygdala are far weaker than the connections from the amygdala to the cortex. This may explain why it is so easy for emotional information to invade our conscious thoughts, but so hard for us to gain conscious control over our emotions.”(p. 265)

Leaders can spend a lifetime working on gaining conscious control over their emotions. Nothing is more difficult, but nothing is more important. None of us will ever get there entirely. The goal is not to be a rational robot but to manage our own reactivity to people and situations. When we react anxiously rather than taking a bit of time to reflect, we can sabotage our own leadership goals. We all have vulnerabilities in this area, arising from our family of origin and our life experience.

The best way to work on this task is to get more thoughtful about our family story, where we learned many of our automatic responses. That takes time, hard work, and some coaching. Of course, we’ll always have moments of reactivity. But when we work on responding more thoughtfully, over time we’ll be able to get back on track more quickly.