My son shared this with me. If you know Brooks, you know he is a little off the wall, so it won’t surprise you that he thought this would generate some good discussion in some of my leadership training. I think he is right! What does this teach us about leadership?
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Are there no ‘Missional’ women?
Today’s blog is a bit of a rant. It keeping with the Vanilla post I am not going to worry about editing my comments too much although I will not use any names! There was a time when I would have been worried about being labeled a feminist if I wrote about this topic. I’m not worried anymore. In fact, some days I think that is exactly what the evangelical church needs – a strong feminist movement. But I digress.
This morning I was reading through an email from a national organization. Here’s a quote from their website, “we are a growing network of leaders and churches in Canada who are committed to training leaders and churches to transform their neighbourhoods”.
I had attended an excellent day they had hosted in a local church and had signed up for their mailing list.
So, I took a walk through their website and here is what I found: there was not one woman on their advisory board OR on the leadership team. There was one woman listed on the website and she was listed as a regional coordinator. That was it. And if that wasn’t enough to stir me up they had ironically recommended a book called: Slaves, Women and Homosexuals.
As you can tell I am a little ruffled by this. I did email them and expressed my disappointment. It’s not about having token women on your team or board. It’s about missing the opportunity to have the balance of women’s unique perspectives. How can we possibly become missional if only half of us are being equipped to do the work?
If you are interested in seeing Canadian women being equipped. Visit NextLEVEL Leadership. Now there’s a group of missional women!
A Walk In The Park
Like many of my peers, I struggle with organized religion aka church. What may be slightly odd is that I am married to a pastor. For 23 years of our marriage we have been a ‘ministry couple’. The explanation for my disillusionment may be related to my experience with the view from the inside. Although I know that there are lots of people who are disillusioned and they are not married to clergy.
I think I started out ripe for disillusionment. I got into this whole Christianity thing at a time when I was disenchanted with life to begin with. It was the perfect set up. I was driven by a desire to find answers, black and white solutions and hope for a pretty messed up life. I embraced, hmmm – maybe grasped is a better word – faith with desperation. This was my ‘fix’.
What I discovered is that, to paraphrase Ghandi (with apologies) I had to be the fix I wanted to see. Fix is a process and it takes a long time and just when you think you’ve got everything fixed, something else breaks.
Yesterday, I was at a church picnic. I looked around at the group of people gathered together. The only possible explanation for such an eclectic gathering of people had to be that we were a church community. Age, gender, health, wealth, emotional stability, marital status, sexuality, race, or intellect was irrelevant. We were a group of people who had assembled, hoping it wouldn’t rain, cheering on a seminar student preaching his first sermon, sharing a meal together, playing a crazy game of four way tug of war, laughing together, praying together and having a great day.
It was one of those days when everything came together. It made community seem like a walk in the park. We’re still broken for the most part but days like yesterday offset the disillusionment – at least for a while.
