Birthing Church Leaders

I've discovered the answer to the age old question, "Are leaders born or made?" They're born ... but not biologically. Rather, leaders are born by the formation of their community.

This is not the same as saying leaders are made. Yes, we can learn certain leadership skills, but to make leaders implies that I could take any person, teach him the magic skills, and presto . . . we have a leader. Take situation 'x' and apply skill 'y' and 99.9% of the time we could get the desired outcome. Yet, anyone who's ever been in a leadership position knows it's not that simple.

Uncertainty and pain are involved. Birthing pains to be specific. The pain of a community looking in the mirror and wondering who those strangers are staring back at us. When did we lose our hips? Will our cheeks ever return to their normal size? How much longer can we stand morning sickness? Get this baby out of us now!

In an ancient church writing called "The Letter of the Martyrs of Lyons" (c. 177) the author likens the church to a mother. In her womb Christians were equipped to face martyrdom, which was seen as one's final birth into the fullness of heaven. Those who denied their faith to avoid martyrdom were considered "stillborn." But amazingly the witness of a martyr could restore the stillborns into the mother's womb in which they learned to confess the Lord.

A doctor named Alexander who loved to preach in Lyons attended the tribunal of accused Christians before he himself was accused. There he pantomimed the behavior of a woman giving birth. When Christians who had previously denied their faith saw his actions, they began confessing Christ again.

Congregations take on this mothering dynamic of birthing leaders to witness Jesus. Going into it we're often afraid of the prospective pain. We wonder to ourselves, "Why would we want to put our bodies through that torture?" It would be much easier to wait around for a charismatic leader to waltz in and make all our troubles go away. But such heroic endings are fantasies found only in fairy tales.

Congregations who want to discern the joyfully surprising in-breaking of God's reign need to birth our own leaders for the church's mission. Conception takes place in baptism. In the sacrament of water, we are flooded with Jesus' call to follow him in the community of his disciples. An exchange of promises accompanies this call: to bring the new disciple to worship, to teach her to read scripture, in short to make her a disciple who practices her faith (is there any other kind?).

Here's where it starts to get painful. To keep this promise to the newly baptized, each disciple in the community has to take his own call seriously -- Jesus' radical call to pick up one's cross and follow him. This is the process of gestation prior to birthing a leader in the church. During this developmental period congregations continuously re-examine basic questions to guide our life together such as:

• What is church?
• How can we be church more faithfully?
• Why does being that visionary church matter to us? to our neighbors? to God?
• What does worship, education, and service look like in such a church?

Congregations who constantly wrestle with such questions are forming disciples in utero. As we use our collective imaginations we look in the mirror and say to ourselves, "Stretch marks? Who cares? The joy that awaits us in birthing new leaders is well worth minor scarring." Congregations adapt their body shape and appearance as the next generation of leaders grows inside us. There's anxiety. There's fear. There's drastic mood swings and manipulative cravings. But we get through it together, because we anticipate the joy of birthing the next generation of disciples.

Some are born ready to lead through their witness. Others are stillborn, not ready to confess their faith through their decisions and actions. God does not abandon these least fortunate, so neither does their mother give up on them. Rather, the community continues to hold them accountable by restoring them to the womb until the time comes when they are prepared to confess Jesus as Lord in the face of all obstacles.

The process which congregations traditionally call "confirmation" should be questioned in light of the church's role as mother. What loving and responsible mother would give birth then leave her baby to raise itself? Sadly, this is the misconceived paradigm of confirmation held by most congregations. We tell confirmands that they are now adults in the congregation, but we fail to tell them what it means to be an adult disciple.

Our typical understanding of what it means to be an adult comes from a secular view stemming from the Enlightenment's emphasis on autonomy. In society, adults are people who are capable of leaving home to fend for themselves. But in the church, there is no such thing as a disciple with such capabilities. To be a disciple of Jesus means to participate in the mission of his gathered community and to be held accountable by the church.

Being confirmed into church-adulthood doesn't mean a young disciple is now free not to practice her faith if she so chooses. Rather, now that she is an adult in the church she is to be held directly accountable. If she does not witness to the Lord by practicing her faith actively, then she is a stillborn who is returned to the mother's womb by faithful witnesses.

How this is done exactly is through continuous formation. Confirmation, or more accurately "birthing", is not done only in grades 7 through 9. Birthing a disciple occurs from his baptism until his death. Stillborns are not abandoned to their misappropriated freedom. Parents, mentors, and peers hold them accountable to continuous discipleship formation through worship, education, and service. Each of us at times are born faithful witnesses to Jesus, and at other times each of us are stillborn -- neglecting our call. The life of discipleship, therefore, is one of continuously re-entering our mother's womb, re-gestating, and re-birthing.

Giving birth to a new leader is a messy and chaotic ordeal. Fluids gush out and stain the hands that long to weclome her. At various times during the deliviery, both the mother and the newborn scream and cry. We can never predict what the new leader will look like when we first hold her in our arms. Her leadership challenges the church to remain open to new possibilities. Welcoming a newborn leader into the world means our lives are changed forever in unimaginable ways. And so we accept the immense responsibility of motherhood, as we stare into her eyes and beam with joy.