Lent for Extroverts 13: Leadership Rap

Leadership Rap (Bring it on).

I am a relational (conversational)
leader; an undefended, mended, moulded and 
missional leader.
A leader without spikes,
a leader who likes
collaboration, 
innovation.

I have parish plans emerging from my
head; in bed I think of vision,
values and pyramids,
and discerning, co-opting,
co-operating,
one to one relating.

I want to thrive,
not just survive.
I want to equip and empower.
Now is the hour.

Courageous, contagious,
and vulnerable of course,
I weep with the best of 'em,
and cajole the rest of 'em.

I'm God-centred, well mentored,
wisdom infused, enthused by
stories of prophets, priests and kings,
when they weren't idolising, hesitating, 
or consummating with
someone else's wife.

Responsibility's my middle name,
I'm ready for the game,
in wilderness, feast or celebration,
even when there's no remuneration.

I'm even embracing chaos,
complexity, emergence.
I'm a 'quiet' leader, a great reader
of books. In fact if one looks carefully,
I am trying to do it all prayerfully.

The butterfly effect can be seen
across the other side of the world,
a small change cascades to the ground
like water.
Refreshing.

I'm fleshing out 
and about,
words on a page,
imagining a future great age 
of growth.

Sometimes I need a lie down.
I can be relied upon
to be found on the sofa
at three, just me 
and another leadership book, see?
Sleep comes easily.


Copyright Claire Alcock.

Lent for Extroverts 12: Leadership crisis?

The word 'dominoes' springs to mind with the current almost daily trend for leaders exiting public roles due to allegations of misconduct. Other leadership issues have surfaced with the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope's recent decision to step down from office. Leadership is a hot topic. Who is fit and who is no longer 'fit' to lead?


Edwin Friedman, (d. 2007), Rabbi, family therapist and leadership mentor, wrote A Failure of Nerve, Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (1999) in which he ruthlessly exposes what he calls the habits of 'chronically anxious and regressive' societies. Powerful emotional drivers which cut across race, class and other socially constructed frameworks, are at work, which sabotage leadership. We are over reliant on expertise and data; we think empathy will solve all relational problems and we think anything to do with 'self' is by definition 'selfish'. The reality is that technology will never be sufficient to address the moral issues of leadership; empathy is ineffective in the face of chronic societal dysfunction and attention to the 'individuation' of 'self' is crucial for leaders who want to escape the emotional entanglement of inward looking systems.

Bringing Friedman's thinking to bear upon the tortured wrangling of Church and State over Women Bishops and gay marriage and the recent political mismanagement and sex abuse allegations is enlightening. 'Blame displacement' and 'herd instinct' spring to mind. 

How does this image make you feel?

Was Jesus a model of a perfect leader? 'Servant leadership' is a term much bandied about in the church, but should you 'serve' an abusive member of a group, or expose them? Are the abusers examples of 'weak' or 'powerful' people in society? 

Perhaps Jesus used his wilderness experience to face the possibility of all the ways he might have chosen to lead, ending up with choosing the 'weakness' of the cross, which turned out, or course, to be its power. 

Lent for Extroverts 11: Not fed by ham

Online food shopping is a mixed experience. For the joy of having someone else traipse round the supermarket on your behalf and deliver it to your door, you must spend a few intense minutes patiently trawling through lists on the store website and making hundreds of minute decisions. 

'Chicken', for instance, gives you 110 options; chocolate, 408. You need to decide price, brand, fair trade, air miles, etc., all from hundreds of clicks, at least two days prior to when you actually want the food. It can go wrong.

For instance you need to distinguish between choosing by number of items and choosing by weight. Four packets of biscuits, but 0.5 kg of broccoli. So when I spotted a packet of Waitrose hand carved dry cured roast ham costing £4.19, I thought, that's pricey but I bet those thick slices taste good: I'll have ONE of those...Click!

...Just after the delivery man had driven away from my door I unloaded the ham, and then another one... and then another one, and another one, and another one, and another one - I had 8 packets in the end, because it isn't sold by number of packets, but by kilogram. And I had ordered ONE KILO (cost: approx. £28).

The next week I discovered you could re-use the previous week's order and make it the basis of your next order, just adding in the items to your trolley as you go. But it wasn't immediately obvious when you had successfully added them in, so first I added everything in three times. It was then that I noticed I had nearly £84 worth of ham in my trolley. Luckily this time I hadn't yet proceeded to checkout.

Ham somewhat dominated thoughts about food that week. It would be nice not to have to think about food so much. The food Jesus offers in the gospel today (John 6:41-51) is his own self; life everlasting. 'In whom all our hungers are satisfied' is one of the lines of liturgy I most appreciate, because hunger can come in many forms. Jesus refused to turn stones into bread because we are fed by more than just food. In Lent, and always, we are fed by him.

Lent for Extroverts 10: Gift shop spirituality

Every time I go to one of those gift shops that look and smell amazing, you know, the ones with scented jasmine candles, strings of painted wooden hearts and Emma Bridgewater pottery, I start imagining that with a little work, my home could look just like that - full of desirable objects, ordered, stylish, clean and tidy and of course artistically stimulating. What a life that would be.

I sometimes buy something just to kick start the process, like a lime green teapot with just the right metal insert and lid, purchased during a recent gift shop experience. It could also have been a framed print of a Beatrix Potter mouse, a £70 scarf or a dozen important looking books about art, all of which would have made my life complete, but inevitably there's always a budget.

Of course it's no good coming home and just plonking it down on a surface; the surface has to be cleared of biology homework, unopened bills and breakfast cereal crumbs first, with a cloth. But the cloth is manky, so better clean that first, or better, bleach it and find a fresh one from the cupboard.

Underfoot the floor is covered in bits. Find the hoover; no suction; the hoover is blocked; empty the hoover bag over my hand; clean the filter. Hoover now working. Use hoover. Now the kitchen floor has no bits, wipe kitchen floor. Now the cupboards need a wipe too. Someone has left out half their lunch and the washing up needs doing. The once beautiful handmade papier mache fruit bowl (from a gift shop) is looking sad and dusty. Everything looks dusty. The perfect home (and life) is not magically materialising around the lime green, gift shop tea pot. 

Come to think of it, it's the second green teapot we've had: the other one (from a gift shop) was all funky glass and metal. The metal bit rusted and the lid expanded in the heat and got permanently stuck.

Maybe Jesus knew a thing or two when he refused to turn the stones into bread. Bread perishes. You can't live by bread alone and you can't fundamentally change much in your life by applying gift shop mentality.

Lent for Extroverts 9: Too scary for kids?

The combination of small children and difficult bible stories is one of the more challenging aspects a Minister faces. On more than one occasion I have launched in to a great Bible story, only to falter half way through, suddenly hearing how it sounds to 21st century ears. 

'And God sent his final plague on the Egyptians, which is where we get the Passover, when the angel of death passed over and all the first born little baby boys died...'

'And it wasn't just Pilate who handed Jesus over; the Chief priests, the leaders of the Jewish faith, also wanted him dead...'

'And Jesus went into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil, errr...however you wish to imagine him...' 

'What did you learn in school today?'
'The lady from the church came in and told us all about the Devil. I'm scared Mummy...will the devil visit my bedroom tonight...?'
'And on Ash Wednesday she put ash on our heads and told us not to sin and we're all going to die...'

However you cut it, the Christian story pulls no punches. And Lent is not the easiest season to inhabit. In preparing for this Sunday I toyed with the idea of visual aids for children, to illustrate the three temptations of Jesus, but dark figures in red cloaks, or worse, someone's modern idea of evil (which is always scarier) did not seem such a good idea.

Then I remembered Stanley Spencer's Christ in the Wilderness: The Scorpion (see above). It is one of five paintings exploring Christ and the idea of
wilderness, and was completed the year World War 2 broke out. I had always imagined the scorpion was the artist's impression of the Evil One but can't find any references to this interpretation, with most writers taking the creature at face value. 

But imagine the scorpion is in fact a depiction of evil and it opens up some interesting thoughts. Christ holds it in his hand. His expression is inscrutable. He could perhaps extinguish it with one blow but he appears to allow it to do its thing. Its sting is dangerous but not overwhelming. It is feared by most and must be treated seriously, but it is seen in the context of something much greater.

Meanwhile we'll make do with a basket of pebbles and loaves on Sunday (have you ever noticed how alike they look?) and leave depictions of dark temptation to the imagination of the film makers.

Lent for Extroverts 8: Communication fragmentation

I often feel poised on the cusp of losing it with technology and slipping into complete Luddite-dom; in fact my kids are convinced this has already happened. They adopt a strained, 'patient' tone with me when trying to explain something technology-related which I cannot appear to grasp, but which they clearly came out of the womb fully cognisant of. 

But I suppose it's all relative. Bits of the Church are completely backward about technology; I think some see the church as refuge from such a thing, forgetting that the fact we have electric lights and microphones would have been at one stage innovative. 

So to some I may seem 'young' and technologically competent: I check my emails on the move; I arrive at school with the assembly on Power point; I download worship tracks and play them in church. But the reality is that I often feel confused and defeated by multiple mobile phone bills and apps which help you 'track' the progress of your son's football team in the local league.

I think it's the overwhelmingly complicated nature of communication nowadays. There was always the phone, but conversations were conducted on the house phone, in the kitchen, which was embarrassing when it was a boyfriend (cue sniggering and 'it's him again' from family members). 

In 2000 I got a big silver mobile 'brick', then a small pink one, then a 'clam shell', then a touch screen; lastly a smart phone.  All that took 12 years, during which time I learnt to text and email and got a laptop. In 2008 I joined Facebook and began to communicate by status updates or 'Messenger'. I started tweeting in May 2012 and now 'read' the papers entirely by tweeted links. I have inadvertently wandered into the background of a Skype call in my daughter's bedroom (I was fully clothed). Recently we were at lunch at someone else's house  when a face literally 'appeared' on a nearby iPad to 'Facetime' us all. Now even texting is fragmenting: my daughter and I 'whatsap' each other if there's no mobile signal; then I go out of WiFi range and have to resert to 'old fashioned' texting.

Today, in a pinnacle, or was it nadir, of communication development, I was reduced to 'chatting' with an 02 on line 'virtual assistant', a surreal experience only marginally less excruciating than asking teenagers to explain stuff to you at home.

You're through to 02 Suzie.
Can you help me...I have 3 bills but I can only remember one password.
Please can you tell me the 3rd and 4th character of your security answer?
d and l.
It's not correct. Your security question is Mother's maiden name.
y and n.
Perfect.
Can you match £46.50 to a phone number? It seems very high.
The bill for this account is £24.10. May I know your other number?
My son's number is 07977653992 and our security answer is toynbee
It's not correct
Can you tell me the 1st and 3rd digit of your sortcode?

(A perfect transcript, apart from the number).

What kind of conversation is that? It made me feel like jumping off a tall building.

All of which is to say life is complicated and prone to fragmentation, and no amount of withdrawing into the wilderness to pray this Lent is going to make it simpler. But it might make me saner.

Lent for Extroverts 7: Fed by the negative

If, like most extroverts, you are fed by external things which give energy, what do you make of the experience of wilderness? Can you be fed by an experience of absence, a place of nothingness?

I didn't discover the Apophatic tradition till about halfway through theological training - the idea that we can only describe God in the negative, 'the via negativa', because all the pictures we try and use are sooner or later found to be inadequate. So, yes, He is like a shepherd and a rock, up to a point, but these images really fall short to describe the indescribable. He is not like so many more things that He is like. It is negative, but in a good way. It sets God free to be Himself, or to be more accurate, to be 'Godself' (you even have to watch gendered pronouns).

Christ in the Wilderness, 1898, Riviere.

Like Jesus in the wilderness. He experienced everything stripped back to bare essentials. And here, apparently, was the nub of his temptation, the heart of what made him tick: would he rely on miraculous physical provision coupled with desire for power, glory and fame, or would He insist on God's provision only, choosing the way of single minded obedience? The wilderness was crucial to growth.

That's what the wilderness does for you - it strips you back to essentials. James Fowler*, in his writing on faith stages, which he plots like psychological stages, always shows the journey of development as going from certainty to questioning, then to some kind of broad and contented 'synthesis' between what you knew, what then became worryingly less clear. In other words, questions are good, and we mustn't fear uncertainty.

* http://www.usefulcharts.com/psychology/james-fowler-stages-of-faith.html

So we shouldn't be put off by an apparent absence of something spiritual that used to be present and nurturing, and which now seems to have gone, or at least to be ineffective. In the end, the negative, the absence, might lead, by God's grace, to something deeper and more long lasting. 

Which is why, despite my extroversion, I try not to fear the wilderness.