I shall be challenging many of our often unquestioned assumptions: the success-values of our culture, our attitudes to suffering, struggle and failure, our expectations of perfection, because unless we accept the importance of being limited, not only our whole approach to leadership will be flawed, but as leaders in the Christian community, we will be leading our followers up the garden path.
Our culture is driven by success-values ? by the glory of achievement, whether in sport and show-biz, business or academe. Failure is what we fear, 'a failure' is how too many of us feel because we haven't achieved as expected. We're all infected by these values, even the church. Numerical decline is taken to be a sign of failure.
The human condition?
Long before Darwin, it was recognised that human beings are part of the created order. Such a recognition enables us to rediscover an enlarged perspective on ourselves and our life: nature, whether as a whole or in particular (in fact, you don't need an elephant, just take a tree) is so much bigger, older, younger, than 'me'. In creation, however, there is fragility and vulnerability ? indeed, of all species, the naked human is one of the most fragile and vulnerable.
It's a pity that it's taken doom-watchers to remind us that an ecological perspective is what the wisdom of our tradition has always encouraged. We are part of the natural order, and the whole natural order is threatened when we cease to respect our place there, when we forget our fragility.
I've been alerted to these things through relationship with persons who have mental disabilities. Persons limited in their capacity to learn and think not only reinforce what I've said about being part of the natural order and therefore subject to its vulnerabilities, but also enable a shift in values, away from individualism, dominance, competitiveness, to community, mutuality ? a human ecology which has the potential to be 'angelic'. What really makes us human is the capacity to ask for help, and that challenges modern claims to autonomy. It also challenges our individualism and success-values. We must learn to wash one another's feet.
Power or Servanthood?
In spite of the history of Christianity's failure to transform the world when the church had political power, in spite of the apparent tension between Christendom and the Gospel, deep down we still think Christ should triumph on earth. Even more we long for God's power to be displayed, for God to establish divine rule, bring peace and justice, deal with criminals and infidels, put the world to rights, demonstrate his goodness, bring all suffering and evil to an end and make the church a success. In the face of post-Christian disbelief, why on earth doesn't God do something? I would like to suggest that by entertaining the very thought expressed in that question we betray our continued captivity to modernity.
And the idea that if we could only get the right formula the whole world would be put to rights has come to pervade the popular mind, encouraged by a press that deplores anything going wrong and seeks to apportion blame for every accident. Post-modernity has not shifted our assumption that life is meant to be perfect, and, quite apart from anything else, the demand that puts on the NHS is inevitably crippling. And because we suppose life is meant to be perfect, the biggest problem for religious belief remains the issue of evil and suffering. For, life obviously isn't perfect, and the abiding impact of modernity is disclosed by our anxiety about this.
One thing that strikes me as I read Christian writings from past centuries is the lack of concern with this problem. Ordinary people in earlier centuries also suffered. Indeed, high infant mortality, brief life expectancy, inability to alleviate many medical conditions, epidemics and unrelieved famine meant they suffered far more than most people who are now troubled by the question. Once there seems to have been more general acceptance of suffering, and indeed death, as a natural part of human life.
Westerners now expect children to be born healthy and to surmount childhood illnesses through vaccination or antibiotics. Death even in old age is sterilised in hospitals. The result is that when things are not perfect, people react with horror. They cry out for better safety precautions and demand the development of miracle cures. We've failed to realise that taking control of our environment destroys its ecology and upsets its balance. But more fundamental is the loss of the right context for thinking about God. Surely for Christians, thinking about God should begin not with the projection onto the heavens of the most powerful agent we can imagine, a male fixer, with absolute power, but with the cross of Jesus. The extraordinary heart of the Gospel lies in God's acceptance of limitation. Omnipotence or servanthood? Jesus suggests that the latter is characteristic of the divine, and the model for those called to follow him.
Treasure in clay pots
The broken bodies of Christ's followers carry his sacrificial death, and to some this is abhorrent. The majority of people, if honest, do not wish to be reminded of vulnerability, disfigurement, incapability. But to those who can discern it, here is the incense of worship. Like the Corinthians, we find it difficult to discern power in weakness, treasure in clay pots. We look for the signs of success in our terms, not defeat. But what we get is a crucified Christ, and an apostle whose catalogue of hardships belies any idea that God is with him. So can we rediscover the importance of being limited? Can we accept the fact that the characteristically Christian leader is the one who embodies stories of vulnerability and sacrifice that give hope, point beyond the immediacy of current dangers as together we strain forward to what lies ahead, and give expression to wonder and praise?
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