Franklin´s Choice, March edition

After a one-month hiatus, we´ll be resuming our ponderance of Franklin´s question-of-the-month, my monthly prompt from Chicago´s own example of pure thought thinking itself. This month´s theme: leadership in a cross-cultural context.

The word on the street these days is “leadership.” In the past month, it has come up in scholarship applications, discussions with other volunteers, congregational development projects, and even in my newsletter prompt for the month. It´s a huge theme – really, how does one condense the idea of leadership, even in the specific context of a cross-cultural environment, into a congregation-friendly newsletter essay?

If you´re me, the answer is to talk about work. One of my assorted jobs this year has been assisting, and over the past few months, leading, the Wednesday evening Old Testament Bible Study at the church. I´ve no doubt mentioned the Bible Study, and its distinct tendency towards the less-than-normal, before – this, after all, is the only Bible Study in which I´ve participated that has involved questions about the color of the Holy Spirit, as well as whether or not the creation story in Genesis discusses the seven chakras. As Wilma has said to me on at least one occasion, it doesn´t matter that I haven´t been to seminary when it comes to this Bible study – they just don´t teach classes that prepare you for answering, with a straight face, an honest inquiry as to whether or not the Holy Spirit is a white light or a purple light.

It is, in some ways, impossible to prepare for the study. There is no telling what the participants will bring to the table or, for that matter, who the participants will be. Apart from choosing the text (helped by a guide through the Old Testament) and familiarizing myself with its contents, context, and themes, I can only go in on the proverbial wing and a prayer, ready to be surprised. And I´m the LEADER.

I am finding that the only way to lead a Bible study, and perhaps lead in general, is to engage in dialogue. Without conversation, there is nothing – no safe space is created, nobody shares, nobody grows. It would turn into a monologue as I pour out four years of theological and historical education, and no matter how interesting a monologue it might be, it would nonetheless be just a lecture, a top-down, unilateral exchange of information - Kevin Baker, the learned biblical expert, sharing his knowledge of the Holy Writ. No matter how much I know, I can never know enough to warrant placing myself in that position, especially when it comes to a matter of spirituality. If I were to place myself as the learned master pouring out from the deep well of knowledge for the benefit, then I would do no good to anyone or anything except for my ego.

In my very first month as a student at TLU, I was required to read a selection from Paolo Freire´s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire was a Brazilian educator and champion of social justice who devoted much of his life and work to teaching illiterate adults how to read. He identified two models for teaching, learning, and (I´ll make the extension) leadership – the banking model and the dialogical model. In the former, one person gives knowledge, the other receives, and that´s that. Think about your worst class in high school; chances are, the teacher presented material this way. It had nothing to do with your context, interests, or needs; it was just information to be crammed into your head. The dialogical model takes the opposite approach – the teacher is a part of a circle rather than the exalted master, the community takes an active role in its own learning through questions, contextualization, and…dialogue. It is in the talking about what´s being learned – how it relates to people´s lives and needs, what´s easy and what´s hard about it, why they´re learning and wanting to learn – that the true learning takes place…and learning is, after all, transformation.

It´s transformative for the teacher, too. I´m not so arrogant as to view myself as a fabulous example of dialogical leadership, but it´s something I value and strive toward, and I have yet to leave a Bible study here without coming away with new insights and new questions. In fact, I will go on record and say that this is the first Bible study in which I´ve participated in (in the sense of studies with a group, regular meeting time, etc. outside of the confines of an official classroom) which I have not been bored, felt unchallenged, and been attending for strictly social reasons. And it´s all in the conversation.

So, in Bible study, we talk. We talk about how the cleansing of Naaman the leper relates to social class in 21st century Uruguay; we talk about how Elisha and the widow´s oil gives all of us at Nuestro Salvador a model for ministry; we talk about how the sufferings of the Messiah in Isaiah 53 are repeated every day in acts of domestic violence. As we share, we all grow and learn. I can bring to the table what I know from class, other people bring what they know from their own training and work, and we all bring our life experiences. After an hour or better of talking – about history and geography, theology and psychology, last week´s rough times at work and this week´s concerns about sick friends and family, how we´ve seen God in suffering and how we´ve seen God in life´s blessings – we´ve done something far more important than learn about the layers of symbolism in Hosea´s account of his adulterous wife. We´ve formed a community.

I shy away from calling myself the leader of this group. I am a leader in the sense that I do the official planning, but once we all sit down and start reading, I´m just another person in the circle. Maybe this form of leadership hasn´t built empires or Fortune 500 companies, but it´s built faith, and it´s built relationships. At the end of the day, I´ll take faith, relationships, and the little blessings of life over the empires and stock portfolios and never once think twice about the choice.