Editorial of the forthcoming issue of Perspectives, June-August 2016
Questions of leadership loom large in today’s world. As political tides ebb and flow, we can notice that the values that we find in the Bible and in the Act of Consecration have their roots somewhere other than the fashions of the time. In the Gospel of St John, Christ enacts a lesson in Christian leadership that has not yet been fully embodied, when he washes the disciples’ feet. Servant leadership was a buzzword in the 1980s and 1990s. The challenges of today’s world make the need for another stage of leadership development all the more pressing. Joseph Jaworski calls those who embody this quality ‘renewing leaders’.
[Such leaders] hold the conviction that there is an underlying intelligence within the universe that is capable of guiding us and preparing us for the futures we must create. They combine their cognitive understanding of the world around them with a strong personal sense of the possibility of actualizing hidden potentials lying dormant in the universe, a view that carries with it the power to change the world as we know it.
(From The Advent of Stage IV Leadership, tinyurl.com/mx6hfmd)
In Jaworski’s paper, which was written for people in the secular world, we can hear an echo of the working of the leader of ‘the heavenly forces upon earth’, through whom we attain ‘the re-enlivening of the dying earth existence.’ Leadership in service of renewal is leadership in Christ’s service; creating places where his world-renewing forces can be at work will benefit the world.
Tom Ravetz