This summer three students and I will be reading through a
book by Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian
Leadership. Kwantlen Christian Fellowship, the club I help support, has
three executive team members, and we decided to do some reading on Christian
leadership over the summer months. I suggested this book.
Henri Nouwen was a professor of pastoral theology,
psychology, and Christian spirituality for many years at prestigious schools in
America: Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. However, he felt a spiritual calling
away from a life of the educated elites and towards a more exclusive focus on
simplicity, love, and community. He joined the L’Arche Community in Toronto, a
global network of people living together and sharing Christian life. Many of
the community members are people with disabilities.
In his new community, Henri found that his relationships to
the community members with disabilities was on a completely different level
from his relationships in his previous life. They were not impressed with his academic
credentials, his many books, and all the ‘useful’ things he was able to do.
This set him on a new footing and reminded him that the deepest form of
relationship is not built on successes and accomplishments, but on God’s
intimate relationship with his people in Jesus.
And that is what is important about Christian leadership,
and Christian life more generally, too. Nouwen writes,
“I am deeply convinced that the
Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to
stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.
That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love. The great message that we have
to carry, as ministers of God’s Word and followers of Jesus, is that God loves
us not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and
redeemed us in love and has chosen us to proclaim that love as the true source
of all human life.”
Do we as Christians, do I as a chaplain here at KPU have the
courage to be irrelevant? I confess, I fail at this all too often. Not that I ‘succeed’
at being relevant, but I worry about my lack of 'accomplishments.' But I think
the deepest Christian fruit is borne when I find my own weakness to be a source
of strength and befriend those who are also willing to share their weakness.
For Christian life, Christian leadership, and Christian community is not built
on the power of mutual exclusion or self-assuredness, but of utter weakness in
our own sin and brokenness, depending wholly on God. As a small group of us
read in the Psalms this morning:
“God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall
never be shaken” (Psalm 62:2).
