This past Sunday, we celebrated congregants who are stepping away from leadership roles, and we commissioned congregants stepping into new roles. And as wonderful and meaningful as this was, I also felt somehow—out of synch. A part of me thought I had somehow failed to communicate about the service. But in the hours and days after the service, I learned a little more.
Of course, there will always be people who have other commitments on any given Sunday. That’s just a feature of our community. But at least a couple of people admitted to me that they didn’t want to be acknowledged as a leader. Leadership in their mind means being in charge of other people. Or being responsible for all that happens in a committee or ministry team. Or some kind of elevated position above others. So, it felt inappropriate to them to be called a “leader” by that definition.
I deeply feel that. Leadership gets defined in a lot of different ways that don’t really align with who we aspire to be as a spiritual community. We may need to explore more about what we mean by leadership. On top of that, though, some of our committees and ministry teams are embracing collaborative models that completely eschew hierarchical roles, which is really exciting to me! There’s not really a “chair” so much as a contact person or convener. And maybe that role even rotates.
That “flat,” nonhierarchical, collaborative model can be really healthy in a community like ours, and the context for a part of our service celebrating “outgoing leaders” was not in synch with that model of doing ministry teams or committees. I get the disconnect, and I certainly don’t want to discourage collaborative models that are working well. We can find other ways to celebrate and show gratitude for that kind of collaborative ministry.
There’s another piece that we missed, though. Whenever a person steps away from something that has been meaningful, there can be some grief. I might even say, there’s usually some amount of grief when we let something go. We didn’t really lift that up at all in Sunday’s service, and it’s worth naming. Letting go of a role in a community can be really painful, and in some ways it can be scary.
We invest a lot of ourselves into our community roles, and sometimes it isn’t clear how our work will be carried forward. It makes sense that we want others to care well for what we’ve worked hard to create. Maybe our transitioning can include a little more honest acknowledgment that grief is a part of the process, and we can create room for naming and holding that grief. We may never feel completely ready to release a role we’ve really cherished into someone else’s care.
More than anything, though, I hope we continue to deepen our awareness that we are all co-creators, regardless of titles or positions. On Sunday, I encouraged folx to empower people relentlessly, and the other side of that coin is that everyone is hopefully ready and willing to be empowered! I admonished “leaders” to be unafraid to fail on behalf of the congregation. That also means that we all get to be unafraid to fail on behalf of our community. In accepting that mindset, everyone demonstrates leadership.
How we do what we do is our gospel—our “good news”—if we’re willing to wrestle together with how our values call us to do what we do. That may very well look and feel different than how we learned to do things in another context. And also, when we genuinely allow our values to lead us, we live into a powerful vision for the world.