Leading People Through to Hope
by Viv Thomas
Christianity is about hope. We have ‘faith, hope and love’ at the end of 1 Corinthians
13 with the greatest being love but faith and hope are not far behind. Christian
leadership is about bringing people to hope. Hope is an anticipation that what is
happening today will be enhanced and possibly transformed by what takes place tomorrow.
It is a feeling of desire for something and confidence in its possible fulfilment.
Hope is a positive and optimistic view of how our lives and the world are going
to turn out in the end. But Christian hope is not only to do with desire and wish.
It is rooted in the realities of the future life to which we are called and continually
engages with the resurrected Christ.
The vicious enemy of hope is cynicism. The cynic always believes the worst about
people and situations. Cynics live in a colourless grey world of restricted light.
This is a world of little change for everything has been done or said before resulting
in failure or disaster. So there is no need for any anticipation of what can happen,
no expectation of possibilities and no creativity. Cynicism is the opposite to leadership
for it finds no reason to go in any direction. Persistently cynical leaders should
find something else to do for leadership is about anticipation of possible positive
change.
But how do you lead people towards hope particularly in a deeply cynical and ironic
world?
Solid love
When you give love you create the possibility of hope. If someone is in despair
because of their own sin or hopeless situation knowing and experiencing love can
be transformational. But this is not just love as an abstract idea or a leader standing
up and proclaiming ‘I love you all’. This is love which evidences itself in respect,
integrity, attentiveness and faithfulness towards the person who is having a difficult
time because of their own despair or difficult situation.
One of the challenges leaders face today is the depersonalisation of the people
we lead. We can respond to the people we lead as evangelistic tools, financial partners,
sermon listeners, spokes in our ecclesial wheel and consumers of our latest sparkling
ideas. In merely doing this we are responding in a profoundly secular way. To be
able to bring people into hope we have to respond to them as a lover responds to
the loved. This means resisting stereotyping, depersonalisation and anything which
assists us in treating people as less than they actually are. Technology has the
tendency to depersonalise. For all its benefits in speeding things up technology
remains a problem. For you cannot love someone fast. You have to love someone slow
if you are to love them well. Love does not come at speed but in great accumulative
strength. This is how God loves us.
If we are able to love the people we lead there will always be the possibility of
hope emerging from within them regardless of the despair they may have experienced
or the sins they have committed. Leading people into a world of love is to lead
them into a world of hope.
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Fluid community
For people to have hope they need to be in a community which experiences change
and transformation. They need to be in a context where adaptation, fresh ideas,
new relationships and God’s surprises are all anticipated as the normal. This does
not mean that everything has to be in continual convulsion or revolution. It does
mean that as communities of God’s people we understand that journey is normal, movement
desirable and that a life well lived is always in some sort of oscillation as we
seek out the future.
When this sort of fluid community is experienced people have hope. For around them
is a world of anticipated change and they are able to put their worries, sins and
disorders into the context of others changing around them. They then have examples
of how to move on from hopelessness into hope.
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Possessing the future
Hope is about the future. It is imaginative anticipation of what is ahead. Hope
is the vehicle towards the future after my loved one has died, my dreams have proved
to be illusions and my sins have been at their most powerful. So hope and vision
are closely linked. To be able to move forward it is necessary that some sort of
hopeful vision of the future begins to emerge in our lives. In this process leaders
play a crucial role.
Leadership is about being able to take the future and bring the implications of
it into the present. Leaders offer the future to people in the middle of their hopelessness
and say, ‘this is what could be ahead’. Jesus did this with the disciples. When
Jesus began to talk about leaving he promised the disciples that in his Fathers
house there was space for them. He followed up by saying that he was coming back
to take them to be with him. Martin Luther King did this in his ‘I have a dream’
speech. With words set on fire King drew the future into the present and explained
its implications.
It is worth noting a danger here. It is possible to collapse a fantasy future into
the present and make promises to people which in the end bring bitterness and disillusion.
For many people their lives will not be fine and sorted. Bodies often remain unhealed,
children still disappoint and our debt problems are not solved by becoming millionaires
through a lottery win sent from heaven. So the future which leaders offer has to
be one which God offers, nothing more and nothing less.
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Practicing Resurrection
I have stolen this phrase from Eugene Peterson. It means that we always live our
lives in the anticipation of what God is going to do next. So we live in a world
filled with resurrection possibilities. The idea is that God is going to bring about
a resurrection in one way or another and we need to be ready for it. This is critical
when it comes to leading people into hope. The activity of God is redemption and
resurrection and Christian leaders need to embrace both realities if we are going
to lead people into hope.
Resurrection has to be part of our own personal experience if we are going to lead
people into hope. Usually people do not need to see perfect or brilliant leaders
but they will need to encounter leaders who practice resurrection in their personal
lives. We all need leaders who have walked the walk of faith and are able to tell
stories of how God brought them through or sustained them through hopelessness.
To be able to do this well leaders have to learn to joyfully experience participation
with Father, Son and Spirit, adequately process our hurts, live on our own creative
edge, remain forever the child in our capacity to learn and understand freedom through
repentance.
Can there be a greater work than leading people into hope? If we love well, develop
fluid communities, bring the future into the present and practice resurrection all
the time there is great hope. In the end this sort of ministry is about engaging
the world. For if we can lead people into hope we can then see them released to
play their full part in the world.
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