This is a book about the soul—your soul, my soul and the soul of our leadership.
When I refer to the soul1, I am not talking about some ill-defined, amorphous, soft-around-the-edges sort of thing. I am talking about the part of you that is most real—the very essence of you that God knew before he brought you forth in physical form, the part that will exist after your body goes into the ground. This is the “you” that exists beyond any role you play, any job you perform, any relationship that seems to define you, or any notoriety or success you may have achieved. It is the part of you that longs for more of God than you have right now, the part that may, even now, be aware of “missing” God amid the challenges of life in ministry.
Jesus indicates that it is possible to gain the whole world but lose your own soul. If he were talking to us as Christian leaders today, he might point out that it is possible to gain the world of ministry success and lose your own soul in the midst of it all. He might remind us that it is possible to find your soul, after so much seeking, only to lose it again.
If Jesus were speaking to us today, he might also point out that when leaders lose their souls, so do the churches and organizations they lead. “Soul slips away easily2 from a church or an institution,” Gordon Cosby, founding pastor of Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., points out. “You may go to any of these places and find that the Spirit has departed and the Shekinah is gone. . . . When a local church loses its soul it begins to slip into mediocrity and is unable to give life. The average person doesn’t even know when a church begins to lose its soul. It takes unusual deeper wisdom to see it, and then when we see it, it is costly beyond words to retrieve it.”
Losing your soul is sort of like losing a credit card. You think it’s in your wallet so you don’t give it much thought until one day you reach for it and can’t find it. The minute you realize it’s gone, you start scrambling to find it, trying to remember when you last used it or at least had it in your possession. No matter what is going on in your life, you stop and look for it, because otherwise major damage could be done. Oh, that we would feel the same sense of urgency when we become aware that we have lost our souls!
THE BEST THING WE BRING TO LEADERSHIP
I have been in leadership roles all of my life—everything from serving in lay leadership positions in small churches to being on the pastoral staff of larger churches to my current responsibilities as cofounder and president of a not-for-profit ministry organization. I know what it is to serve under someone else’s leadership and I know what it is to be the-buck-stops-here person and bear the weight of responsibility for carrying out a vision that has been given by God. Beyond my own experiences, I have spent years providing spiritual direction to individuals and groups of leaders on retreat and in their own settings, listening to their soul cries which are so similar to my own. These cries are gut-wrenching and consistent:there has to be more to life in leadership than many of us are experiencing.
In all this listening to my own life and to the lives of others, I have become convinced that the More that we are looking for is the transformation of our souls in the presence of God. It is what we want for ourselves and it is what we want for those we are leading. And that is exactly what this book is about. It is about the presence of God in the middle of a person’s leadership. It is an exploration of the relationship between a person’s private encounters with God in solitude and the call to leadership in the public arena. What difference does solitude and spiritual seeking make in the life of a leader—really? Is it a self-indulgent luxur
