One of my favourite jokes: A chicken farmer is dismayed to see that his favourite chicken has stopped laying eggs. He tries everything he knows to fix the problem but no success. Then he remembers that his next door neighbour is a very clever man, a professor of theoretical physics at the local university, so he goes to seek his advice. ‘Come back in a couple of days’ says the professor ‘and I’m sure I’ll have an answer for you.’ A couple of days later the farmer comes back and the professor looks pleased. ‘Well,’ says the professor ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I have the solution to your problem. The bad news is, it will only work for a perfectly spherical chicken in a vacuum.’

I spend a fair amount of my time involved in the appointment of new vicars and I am frequently conscious during the appointment process how we can so easily fall into the trap of looking for perfection. How many job adverts seem to be seeking the Archangel Gabriel? And how many job seekers look for the perfect next job – the right church in the right place with a wonderful, supportive congregation that is tireless in mission and never complains about your sermon? At one point during a recent process I had to remind myself that the candidate is an imperfect person and we are offering an imperfect job – the best we can do is to try to make sure our relative imperfections in some way can fit together without too many sparks flying.

One way or another, I spend a lot of time (imperfectly) helping imperfect people to overcome the frustrations and annoyances that arise when we attempt to work together for the Gospel in community. My aim is to help them get back to a place where they can work together effectively again, a place of peace and harmony on the other side of the sea of conflict they find themselves in at that point. A while ago, I found myself meditating on the story of Jacob on his way back to meet again his brother Esau from whom he has been estranged for many years. The night before he meets Esau, God comes to Jacob and wrestles with him until morning. At the end of the encounter God renames Jacob ‘Israel’, which means ‘struggles with God’ and that is the name that becomes the name for all of God’s people. Perhaps, I thought, the wrestling is the point, not something to be overcome as quickly as possible so we can get on with what we should be doing, but a defining characteristic of us as the people of God. The jostling together of imperfectly shaped stones creates perfectly smooth and shiny pebbles; maybe the jostling together of imperfectly shaped people in the presence of God’s Spirit is what will eventually result in the perfect people we will be when we finally meet Him face-to-face.

This reflection has made me a little more patient with the process of mediation, allowing it to take the right amount of time so that God’s work can be done in the process as much as in the solution. It would be lovely if we were all perfectly spherical people who existed in a vacuum but that’s not exactly real life – real life is, after all, what God has gifted us with and He does know what He is doing!

Whether it is in the so-called secular world or in the Church, most people’s definition of ‘success’ at work is being invited to take up a more senior leadership role. It is, at the very least, an affirmation by someone that they think that you’ve been doing a pretty good job in the role you have at the moment and can be trusted with more responsibility. And there is a positive biblical precedent for this way of thinking – Matthew 25. We are given gifts for the sake of growing the Kingdom and we are expected to use them to the maximum of our potential.

Being promoted to a more senior leadership role is often about increasing one’s span of control (or span of influence depending on the kind of role one has) beyond the point of being able to do everything oneself.  The Chief Executive of the bank I used to work for had a span of control which encompassed 20 or 30 different business units, more than 80,000 people across 500+ locations around the world.  Our Bishops have a span of control covering 200+ paid staff, 2,000+ volunteers, across 500+ locations in the diocese. The leader of a large church has a span over maybe 2 or 3 paid staff and 30+ volunteers, the leader of an average group of churches works closely with maybe 5 or 6 key people to enable ministry and mission across multiple locations.   As the span increases, the depth of interaction with each person / situation decreases until eventually the leader is spread so thinly that they can spare only a glance at situations at which most of us would quail.   

Some people are good at managing this spreading of control and some are not.  It is a wise human being who can look at a request to spread themselves more thinly and says ‘that is not for me’, even though it feels like a great honour to be asked to be the leader across a larger enterprise.  Increasing span means less opportunity for reflection, requiring an approach to management which is more about reaction than thoughtful response.  Large spans result in far less ‘strategy’ and more ‘tactics’, less engagement with individual people’s lives and more ‘crowd management’.  This is not to denigrate the role of the ‘Chief Executive’ leader but it needs to be noted that not everyone is going to be temperamentally suited to that kind of role and should think very carefully about being promoted out of their ‘sweet spot’.  Some people are made to be able to manage ‘wide and shallow’ and some are better suited to be ‘narrow and deep’.

We also need to pause to consider the value of creating space for the creative mind to think and the pastoral heart to engage.  Too often we allow, even encourage, good people to fill their lives with doing stuff, crowding out the activities which are often less visible but have a much greater impact in the longer term.  Jesus did preach to the crowds but how many people in those crowds had their lives fundamentally transformed in the same way that the men and women who travelled with him did, those who spent long hours in quiet teaching and contemplation with him?  Our value as leaders should never be assessed by how wide a span of control or influence we have but by how we transform the lives around us, how deeply we impact the space we inhabit rather than how big an area we can superficially touch. 

Keith Lamdin’s book ‘Finding your Leadership Style’ is one of the better books on leadership that I know, and helpfully written through a Christian lens. He identifies the 3 main requirements for being a leader as: discontent – to see what is wrong with the present situation, vision – to see how it could be better, and courage – to step out in faith and lead people forward.  Courage is one of the most under-rated virtues in leadership and I’ll come back to this another time.

Keith also identifies six models of leadership found in the Bible which he uses as a lens to investigate different ways in which we lead: Warrior,
Monarch, Elder, Servant, Prophet and Mystic. Each has pros and cons as a style, times when they are more or less appropriate as the dominant style, and each of us feels more or less comfortable in each style. We are all able to call on many or all of them at any time as the situation dictates.

I want to propose a seventh model ‘Theotokos’ or God-Bearer. My argument is that all of the models that Keith describes evolved during a time of patriarchy, in the public sphere at least. The exercising of public leadership is almost entirely masculine – the examples of women in leadership are, on the whole, portraying a style of leadership which is as masculine as any of the men – ‘better’ rather than ‘different’. And whilst many men show more feminine characteristics in their styles, I would suggest that leadership which evolves in an almost exclusively male arena can never be essentially feminine.

Mary offers us a radical new model of leadership which moves even beyond ‘servant’. Mary creates and holds the space in which God comes to be in human form. This is no passive act as anyone who has ever borne a child can attest – the womb is one of the strongest organs in the human body, capable of immense strength and protective softness at the same time. Mary, by what she eats and how she cares for herself, has influence over the way in which her baby develops but the baby itself is essentially ‘other’ – bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh but with a different blueprint for design. Reproductive experts will tell you that a baby which is too similar to the mother with regard to its DNA is rejected by the body and can’t be brought to term. What Mary brings to birth is not another version of herself but something quite different over which she has influence but no control. This is, to my mind, the epitome of truly feminine leadership.

The seven models of leadership now form a complete continuum in gender terms from which men and women alike can choose a style, or combination of styles, which suits them and the context in which they are acting. Men are freed to explore models of leadership which are truly empowering and enabling of the other, servanthood beyond servanthood if you like.

What might Theotokos look like in practice? How might one lead like Mary? Perhaps it starts with the statement ‘Let it be’ and moves on from there?

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to write about women – or more accurately ‘the feminine’ – in Christian leadership. It is a topic that is only slowly finding currency and, as a woman in leadership roles for most of the last 25 years, I think I have some experience to offer. For the last 20 years, I have been striving to live out my developing Christian faith in my working life, first in leadership in a secular institution and, latterly, in the Church of England and I think I have something to say about that too.

Those wonderful modern day pioneers of women’s leadership in the Church of England – those made Readers in 1969, those who were ordained priest in 1994 and those consecrated as bishop since 2015 – had to forge a new pattern of leadership for themselves alongside the male colleagues who had inhabited these roles from their inception. And like many women entering ‘a man’s world’ for the first time, they have had to prove that they could do it better than their male counterparts in order to be accepted.

The problem with ‘better’ is that it is, essentially, comparative. To be ‘better’ means you have to do whatever it is you are doing similarly to another, only more effectively, more efficiently, more …something. As someone once said about Fred Astaire “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, …backwards and in high heels.”

And people tend to assume that most of our leadership models are, broadly speaking, gender neutral, with the exception, perhaps, of those very macho models of leadership we see played out in war films or the ‘Greed is Good’ films of the 1980s and 90s, or my particular bete noire ‘The Apprentice’. But the truth is that pretty much all of our leadership models, except those in the domestic sphere, are essentially masculine – they were developed in an almost entirely masculine world in industry, finance, politics, the arts, and, of course, the Church. The models might be on a spectrum from overtly macho to something closer to the feminine but, I would argue, they can never be essentially feminine if the only people living them out are men.

So now we have an opportunity to complete the full spectrum of leadership styles, from essentially masculine to essentially feminine. But we can only do this if, as women, we can free ourselves from the need to be ‘better’ and explore what it means to be ‘different’. And that will take a lot of courage because ‘different’ is, well, ‘different’ and, on the whole, society doesn’t like ‘different’, it likes ‘what we know’, ‘what we’ve always done’ or ‘what everyone else does’.

If we get this right, I believe that we will be living out the biblical image of humanity as it was created to be, masculine and feminine in perfect balance. And men as well as women will be freed to find their proper place on the gender spectrum of leadership styles, men able to bring out their feminine aspect as well as women being able to be more confidently and honestly masculine when they want to be.