Another Way

Living and Leading Change on Purpose

Stephen Lewis, Matthew Wesley Williams, Dori Grinenko Baker

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780827200845
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Another Way describes a new way of leadership for the 21st Century, one that inspires people to delve deeply into their own selves and that creates a mysterious relatedness among strangers. When this leadership happens, we remember people are created to experience community, to find joy in one another, and to create a better world out of a deep reservoir where the soul resides. Written by the leaders of the Forum for Theological Exploration, the internationally recognized leadership incubator for emerging Christian leaders, Another Way will shape the way you look at yourself, your leadership, and the communities that hold you accountable to making the world a better place.

Chapter 1—C: Creating Hospitable Space

In the story you just read, Matthew’s encounter with sage, scholar, and activist Vincent Harding unfolded unexpectedly and quite naturally. At just the right moment, in just the right way, an intervention occurred that shifted Matthew’s future trajectory, opening a way that allowed him to be true to himself.

We don’t have to wait patiently for such a serendipitous encounter with a holy messenger. We ourselves can mindfully create the conditions that allow us to midwife one another and a future that wants to emerge.

In this chapter, we describe a way of inviting those kinds of moments for both individuals and organizations. Here we focus on the first step in CARE—Creating Space, a space into which we welcome others in order to find head-heart-and-body knowing, to slow down the norms of efficiency, and to enter into new ways of creating a future that calls forth collective wisdom.

Living and Leading Vignette

We begin with a story, again from Matthew, years after his encounter with Vincent Harding and the ensuing journey toward mindful leadership practices he pursued within his role at FTE. He reflects here upon a time when he used the CARE practices to lead a group gathered to unearth and address systems that embed white privilege in the process of becoming a scholar in religion and theology.

Matthew writes:

Subtle insurgency. This was the aim of the design. Academic environments feed on hierarchy, rank, power struggles, and intellectual warfare. In this kind of environment, it is a countercultural task to design a space that invites scholars to drop their center of gravity from their heads to their hearts, to engage one another in ways that bypass normal professional patterns. We convened these scholars and leaders to address a field-wide challenge. The situation that drew us together one participant described like this: “The consensus which gave rise to the structures of which we are a part is fractured.”1

On its face, the meeting was about the landscape of doctoral theological education and how it tends to the cultivation of scholars of color. We invited leaders to discern what it would take to eliminate the persistent deficit of scholars of color in this sub-field of higher education, especially in light of the so-called 2040 moment when whites will no longer represent a majority in this country or in its seminary classrooms.2 We gathered to address a complex issue.

What do we do when the norms, assumptions, and basic ideas about our shared work begin to disintegrate? We knew we were convening stakeholders in the field of theological education who were living into an uncertain future.

We needed to create space for a different kind of conversation to take place, a space in which human beings:

• Slow down and enter a humane rhythm that allows us to see ourselves and one another
• Listen with attention to bodily sensation and gut feeling
• Suspend ego-driven patterns of critique and judgment
• Call on deeper ways of knowing to discern the present and the future
• Notice and operate from an underlying interdependence

The subject of our gathering was merely institutional and field-wide transformation. No big deal. More than thirty diverse gatekeepers and power brokers, academic executives, and organizational heads were present. The entire system was represented in one room, and it was my role to help the parts of that system to discern the stakes and figure out a future for the field.

So, we sit face to face. We gather around small bistro tables, large enough only for notes and conversation, small enough for each of us to be conspicuous and unavoidable. There is not enough space for laptops and phones, which operate as human shields. We have to show up to be here.

We start our time together in silence. It’s true, isn’t it, that often when we come into a room we are not yet fully in that room? So, we invite silence—extended silence that is long enough to feel unusual and possibly uncomfortable for those of us who earn our stripes by the words we speak and write. Silence asks us to become fully present to ourselves and one another.

My thank you breaks the silence. The room feels different. “Don’t speak unless you can improve upon the silence” it seems to say.

Silence asks us to become fully present to ourselves and one another.

Each step is an invitation to deeper engagement with ourselves and one another. We have to show up. So, our next move is to determine how we will choose to show up. It is fundamentally a human thing. When groups gather, shared guidelines—tacit and explicit—determine how people will relate to one another. We use the concept of covenants to establish how we will be present, engage with, and experience one another. We draw from a set of guidelines we call Covenants of Presence.3

And now, I’m still nervous. I’ve never led a meeting like this with academics, let alone academic executives. Will this work? Will they check out? Will they see this as hokey, feel-good stuff? Trust the process. I coach myself. This is designed for human creativity and innovation. At the end of the day, these people are human beings and the ordinary modes of engagement are unacceptable. Trust the design.

So we visit the covenants, speaking them aloud together . . .

Speak your truth . . .

Turn to wonder instead of judgment . . .

Slow down and pay attention to the stuff beneath the words . . .

We come as equals.

We own these statements and voice them into the room slowly, changing the space that exists within these four walls and between each breath.

Then I ask people to tell a story prompted by these two questions: “Why does this work matter to you? How did you come to care about this?” I watch as people, now operating at a perceptibly slower pace, turn to one another and begin to dip into their memory banks—those deep places where we know about racism, ethnicity, power, class, and gender through multiple layers of our own lived experience. Those things that we often avoid talking about locate us within the issues we’ve come together to address. As people begin to share their pain, passion, and hopes, the mood in the room shifts again. It feels different. Now we couldn’t get the participants to stop if we wanted to. It’s beginning to work, I tell myself. Trust the design.

Mindful Moves of Creating Space

During this difficult-to-facilitate meeting, Matthew choreographed five specific moves that include: sitting face to face, sharing silence and stillness, establishing shared guidelines, slowing d...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Dedication
• Praise for Another Way
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Another Way Manifesto
• Prelude
• Chapter 1—C: Creating Hospitable Space
• Chapter 2—The Inner and Outer Tug of Call and Purpose
• Chapter 3—A: Asking Self-Awakening Questions
• Chapter 4—Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have
• Chapter 5—R: Reflecting Theologically Together
• Chapter 6—Liberating Leadership
• Chapter 7—Enacting the Next Most Faithful Step
• Chapter 8—Embodying CARE
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Series
• Other books from the Forum for Theological Exploration
• About the Authors