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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari (00:00):
What can spiritual entrepreneurship teach us about what God is doing in the world? In today's interview, we take a serious look at the example of Moses to better understand how culture and empire have shaped the ways we think about leadership and power, especially in congregations. Kathleen McShane is ordained in the United Methodist Church and is the co-founder of The Changemaker Initiative, a multi-denominational network empowering ordinary people through social entrepreneurship. Elan Babchuck is a rabbi serving as the Executive Vice President at the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. He founded and directs GLEAN Network, an incubator and network for faith-based entrepreneurs. Together they've written a new book titled Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. So I am so curious to hear from each of you about your journeys towards spiritual entrepreneurship. What started you on this journey? What led you down this path? And if you could also just say why this is so important right now. That would be a great way to start.
Elan (01:11):
Actually. I remember I had a gathering where I was bringing together some other kind of deep thinking faith leaders who were trying to become spiritual entrepreneurs. And there was this friend of ours who's an academic in the room, and I think he got so annoyed by the conversation because we were living in the esoteric, and he said, “But we need a definition before we can do anything about this.” And anyhow, my path towards it was not just that I put the two words together, but it was really about bringing two worlds together. And the reason why I think it's so important is because in a lot of entrepreneurship and circles, the concept of faith is nonsensical. And in a lot of faith circles, the concept of entrepreneurship is heretical. And I do believe that both wisdom traditions have what to teach one another. And yes, I think it's incredibly important here in the faith world for us to think entrepreneurially, how can we solve bigger problems in ways that are faithful, that are authentic to where we came from with a real clear vision of where we want to go in this next iteration of religious life here in America?
Elan (02:27):
And I want to go beyond that. Why is this work so important right now? Because just as so many faith leaders have said, “Oh, entrepreneurship is heretical,” and so many entrepreneurship folks have said, “Oh, faith was a nice thing, but it's over,” there are so many folks that are living in silos just like that, and those silos are growing further and further apart. And the more that our world spins off its axis, the centrifugal force alone is pushing everyone to the poles. I think to bring together two fields like this that just don't seem like they should be in conversation, but to do so in a way with deep respect for both wisdom traditions and a real clear sense of the kind of world we're trying to build, well maybe that's a model for the sort of, the polarities that we live in in every setting, political and beyond. And that's why I think it's so important today that we can bring these two worlds together because there are so many worlds just waiting to be brought together. And if faith can't be the leader of building a model for that to happen, then gosh, I don't know who can.
Shari (03:38):
Yeah, thank you for that. How about for you, Kathi?
Kathi (03:42):
Well, I love Elan's story, and when I began The Changemaker Initiative that launched this entry into social entrepreneurship for me, it was, I was the pastor of a church in Silicon Valley, California, and we partnered in that initiative with Ashoka, the social entrepreneurship organization, which began with the idea that you could identify innovators for the common good, really by the time they were 15, that they would've already…
Shari (4:17):
Wow.
Kathi (4:18):
…demonstrated the capacity and the way of thinking that led them to this life of social entrepreneurship. That's what I always hear in Elan's story. That was not me. I was not that. I think of myself more as an intrapreneur than an entrepreneur, meaning that I have always done my work from a more well-trod path, really inside organizations. But I realize now in retrospect that in the organizations that I have been part of and often led both inside the church and in the parts of my career that were around a seminary, and even before that practicing law, I was really always kind of an edge person. I was always that person who was thinking, I don't think we have to do it this way. We could do things differently. And so that's really the personal orientation, I think, out of which this kind of work began to feel like mine. I was always trying to improve in sometimes kind of radical ways on the ways we were doing things before.
Shari (05:35):
Yeah, thanks. I sense in both of you that neither of you mind pushing the boundaries a little bit, whether it's from within an organization or disciplines that don't find themselves friendly with each other, you're not sad about disrupting the status quo is what I hear.
Elan (05:53):
For sure.
Kathi (05:54):
That is definitely true.
Shari (05:56):
So thank you for that. Elan, I want to pick up on a thread of what you said at the beginning. You said you didn't have a Genesis story, but there is a note in the book where you, as you're turning to consider leadership, where you talk about the word “let” and how that's somewhat different from creating, which of course has to do with the Genesis story in the book of Genesis. And I'm curious if there's anything there for you.
Elan (06:24):
Yes, absolutely. There's kind of two theories in entrepreneurship about how change gets made, and one of the theories is, one of the theories is more I think, adherent to the concepts of process theology. The first theory is that the world already has things going in motion and it's the great entrepreneurs, and here I'm going to sort of privilege the spiritual entrepreneurs because perhaps there's a greater sense of attunement to what's going on in the world, but the world is already in constant motion and it's the work of the spiritual entrepreneur to notice that which is already in motion. And it's sort of the distinction between the creation ex nihilo, it came out of nothing, to actually, God's work was sort of separating things, naming things, putting things into the right place and setting up the world for success. And the second sort of model of entrepreneurship is the entrepreneur who has the sort of light bulb idea and then creates it all from scratch.
Elan (07:36):
So there's one vision of, there was already an idea of a pocket-sized computer. It's Steve Jobs. What he noticed was that there were enough things in motion that he could see that world coming to be, and he turned it into the iPhone. And then the other model is, nope, Steve Jobs worked in the garage, thought to himself what would be wonderful, and he created it. And so I think in this work, and this to some extent is what God asked of Moses, is what can we notice out in the world? The Genesis story doesn't have to mean that we play God, but rather to notice, come alongside, to lift up as a leader, as a spiritual entrepreneur, to lift up the gifts that others have already set into motion, but perhaps which they themselves undervalue or the market yet hasn't shone a light on, to come alongside those powers that are already moving the momentum that the world has already set forth into motion.
Elan (08:43):
That might be the greatest gift that we can give to the world, not necessarily to invent something brand new or to put our stamp or plant a flag, but actually, and this I think is where leadership of an organization, especially in ministry contexts, so important, is we are surrounded by people with tremendous God-given gifts. And what Kathi and I found in so many of our conversations with the leaders who we write about in this book is that some of their greatest successes have been building an organizational culture and an organizational system and infrastructure that was geared towards identifying and elevating the gifts that were already there, that were already in motion, that were waiting to be unlocked and unleashed and brought out into the world. And that's where we've seen some of the greatest stories and bright spots emerge in our research.
Shari (09:46):
Yeah, thank you. That's a different model of leadership than the one person, the one creative genius who is bringing something into being. Thank you for that. You mentioned Moses, and I'd love to, we'll ask for some other stories, I'll ask you for that in just a minute. But Moses is someone who you identify as a central leadership figure, but not for the “typical” reasons we always think of about leadership. So what is it about Moses and Moses's story that sparks your imagination?
Kathi (10:23):
You know, we did not start the book or our thinking about the writing of this book with Moses as a figure in mind. We had this model of, this alternative model of leadership we wanted to explore more, but Moses made an entry into our thinking, I think sort of secondarily, but it turned out then to be his story that led the rest of the work. And I think for me, it started with something Elan said just in one of our conversations about the fact that Moses didn't really become the leader that he is remembered for being and that no doubt God intended for him to be all along until his very last sermon. And when he said to the people, “You choose life or death,” and it was then when he recognized them not as subjects to his, of his leadership, but as partners in this venture of entering the Promised Land, that he really reached the fullness of his leadership.
Kathi (11:41):
As so as we sort of traced our way back from that in the Moses story, it became increasingly clear to us that even though Moses is remembered as the greatest leader of all time and that he was appointed to that, in fact, Moses's journey of leadership was full of stumbles…
Shari (12:03):
Oh yeah.
Kathi (12:04):
…that he was being shaped and formed by those years in the wilderness just like the people of Israel were. And he was learning along the way. And really, I think certainly for me, I think for both of us, that was a reflection of my own journey to leadership, that I, that over my years of leading congregations particularly, I learned through the mistakes I made, and I'm still learning. I look back on the work we've done in this book and I'm more self-conscious than I have ever been before about all the ways in which my leadership did not reflect the model that we're proposing here.
Kathi (12:55):
I wish I could go back and do all of that again. But we ended up in the book kind of coming to a climactic moment when Moses comes down from the top of Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments on stone tablets, and he realizes really that the people are not with him. And it is this shocking eye-opening moment for him that all the things he had assumed were true about his leadership, that if his faith was strong enough, if he understood the vision of God for himself and for his people, it would be enough. And it wasn't. Suddenly he just was confronted with the fact that he had demonstrated this great faith and the people weren't following him. And his response to that was he was the one who smashed the word of God onto the ground. He was the one who threw those stone tablets and he had to live with that for the rest of his ministry, that great failure. And that moment became not only a moment of turning for the people, but for him personally as a leader. So there was a lot to work with then, once we sort of reached this new for us, different telling of the Moses story.
Shari (14:34):
You land in a place presenting a different model of leadership that you call Mosaic leadership. Can you say a little bit more about how the Moses story ties into that and what that means to you?
Elan (14:49):
Yeah. The book is titled Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire, and even to create, even to use the word “after” is somewhat of a misnomer because what we believe is actually leadership is cyclical, and Mosaic leadership especially goes in cycles. So in the Jewish community, we read our scripture, we read the Torah in a cycle throughout the year. And as soon as we get to the end of that last speech from Moses and Moses passes on, we start right back again at Genesis and we literally don't skip a beat. We have a holiday in which we do the last verse and the first verse and we connect them directly.
Elan (15:36):
And so the notion of “after empire” means that there's also leadership before empire, and we're always going to go back in some ways because perhaps it's human nature, but we will always go back in some ways to that empire moment. And the way we've kind of drawn it out is that the work of building a Mosaic form of leadership is just like an artist putting together a tile mosaic, meaning that there are these tiny little pieces, and it's the work of every leader to pull those gifts, those shards of where we've come from, to create a new mosaic time and time and time again. And similarly, just like Moses's story, we've kind of broken it up into these three stages. The first is disturbing. The first is breaking away from the empire. Moses only becomes a leader in that rupture moment before the Exodus begins. For him, it's a complete breaking from the identity from his history, from where he came from, but he doesn't leave everything behind.
Elan (16:47):
There are still some of his own inclinations towards hierarchical, coercive, authoritative kinds of leadership because that's what he grew up in. That was the culture. So we can't create Mosaic leaders here in America for sure without in some ways recognizing that we are shaped within that empire culture. Then he moves through the wilderness and that's when he begins to distance him himself from where he came from. And it's in that distance, it's in that wandering in the desert that his formation begins to take shape, that the formation of the entire nation begins to take shape and that he himself begins to really find God, and I don't just mean find God, but really find God. And then it's only once they've gotten away from the shadows of those pyramids which stretched so much farther than they could have ever imagined, that he can begin to dream, that he can begin to instill in the Israelites the ability to dream about what that Promised Land will look like and taste like, the milk and honey, what it will feel like to be free and what it will mean to find their home time and time and time again, which they have done.
Elan (18:09):
And so that's where we came upon the notion of Mosaic leadership, recognizing that, by the way, as soon as we get to dreaming, more often than not, pretty quickly, we're going to end up right back in to something from which we have to break free.
Shari (18:24):
What you're proposing has everything to do, not just with leadership, but also with folks who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves to be the “leaders.” So why have you identified this as being so important too, that other people also have a say? This sounds like a bit of a democratic impulse here, but I'd love for you to say more about that. What about the other people in the organization?
Kathi (18:47):
Yeah, my observation particularly around the changemaker work has been how people are enlivened and their faith is deepened and enlivened when they are lifted up out of or invited to be lifted out of their passivity. So much of, I think what we do in the church, particularly with our congregations, our volunteers, our people whose lives we are hoping might be transformed, is passive. They're the recipients of what we do and they have the spirit of movement, God's movement, in their lives and the impulse to follow their faith into making change just as much as we leaders do. So that comes out of my lived experience as a pastor, watching people who I had never experienced before as anything other than sort of slumping on the edge of church, watching their faith be activated by someone's sort of empowering invitation to them to become actors rather than, full actors, rather than sort of partial and partially invited participants.
Kathi (20:18):
So definitely my lived experience, but then also the story of Moses. There's so many stories in the Exodus that if you read them through that lens, I think facilitate this point of view. I think about Nahshon, the Israelite who really, from everything we know, he stood at the edge of that crowd as they were at the Red Sea and waiting for the waters to recede. And the midrash story says out of nowhere, he moved forward and said, well, I'll go in, right? And he went first. And he was someone who had not been in a position of leadership at all before, and yet he had this critical role to play in the crossing of the Red Sea. Late in the story of Moses, just as they, or the story of the Exodus, just as they are on the verge of entering the Promised Land, the leaders of the tribes of Reuben and Gad come to Moses, and they're kind of naysayers.
Kathi (21:24):
There're people who, they're like my colleagues in that meeting who said, “No, I don't want to do that, whatever you say.” And they came to Moses and said, they said, “We're staying here. We're quite happy on this side of the Jordan River. We're not going with you into the Promised Land.” And at least in our retelling, that became one of the moments that fully formed Moses into that leader who then could invite the whole company of Israelites into their own empowerment as they stood ready to enter the Promised Land. So I think there are stories in our tradition that also are about empowering other people. And if we look at the biblical narrative as a whole, we see often God's invitation to people who were not privileged into leadership to be God's partners in bringing about something new.
Shari (22:31):
One of the other biblical stories that came to mind as you were talking is when the people of Israel asked for a king and really demand a king, because there's something about having that central leadership figure that, the nations around us have that and we long to be led in that way. And yet there is something else in the absence of that pyramid structure of leadership, there's, there's a different gift in the absence of that that really strikes me. When you think of this kind of Mosaic leadership that you're talking about, are there practices or ways of being that invite those, I love that you said “slump around the edges,” that was so visceral for me to hear, but for either of you, are there some practices that you can identify that help invite folks into more active engagement who might not consider themselves “leaders” or kind of central?
Elan (23:31):
Absolutely. You know what leaders are not good at is being a follower.
Shari (23:37):
Yup.
Elan (23:38):
And I actually think we use the word leadership, I don't know, a hundred times in the book, and I understand it's such an important framework through which we think about how our institutions can move forward. And I want to propose that actually maybe we think a touch less about leadership and a touch more about followership. We live in a moment culturally in which the people you follow, who influence you, will essentially create your world, right? By…
Shari (24:11):
Yep.
Elan (24:11):
…choosing who you follow on social media, you are deciding how you will be influenced and by whom. And it is the willingness to use critical thinking, to use discernment, deep discernment, about who you follow and how and where and why that actually creates your reality and enables you to invite others into that same reality. And in this moment, when I think about what some of our colleagues perhaps are struggling with most is, who do I follow?
Elan (24:49):
If what you're telling me is to break down the pyramid and to create a more horizontal, less hierarchical kind of organization with a more generous form of leadership, how do I know who it is that I want to invite into leadership roles? In other words, how do I know who it is that I want to follow? And here's where I think the rubber meets the road as it pertains to this form of Mosaic leadership. The answer is everybody, right? The answer is from the still small voice of the person who quietly sneaks out the back of the sanctuary and you don't hear from them again to the loud one who storms in and says, “This is how you have to be.” That there are a myriad reasons why folks are getting louder or getting quieter. And I think we need to become deeply attuned to all of them and to become discerners, to become followers, to become disciples of their lived experiences.
Elan (25:52):
The more that we as “leaders” can follow others into their worlds and study them and build empathy and work with them, come alongside them, to make their lives our liturgy, to make their stories our scripture, that's when real leadership will emerge because we have chosen who and how we will follow as leaders of the institution. And that's how we create a really beautiful, we've used the term mosaic, but think about it like a quilt where everybody has a unique story that is represented, but all of those stories are woven together. And the story of this one person who's so angry about something is literally tied to, it's bound to the story of somebody who is delighted about something we're doing or greatly hopeful about where we're going. And by doing so, we become weavers of something far greater than what we might if we only saw ourselves as the leader and did our very best to just make sure everyone else would start following us. But I think in this moment, especially in this moment in which “influencers” have such power, we need to be really, really careful about who we follow and how and begin to expand our own understanding that leadership actually in this moment might just demand a much better model of followership.
Shari (27:26):
You've talked a lot about relationships between “leaders” and “followers,” but I'm curious to hear also about how this form of leadership could bring us closer to God.
Elan (27:43):
It is so hard to hold multiple truths together that when we are in the day-to-day work of leading our organizations or of whatever model or form our ministry has taken, and we're worried about crunching numbers and balancing budgets and supervising and managing and all of these skills that are in that, the first world I talked about, the world of entrepreneurship or business or management, that we oftentimes sort of divorce that one world from the other one, the world of our spiritual self where our soul dwells or where it yearns to dwell. And I think this question of how we relate to God and how this work perhaps can bring us closer to God, I think is a critical one. And I'm going to share it with a very personal reflection here, I wasn't planning on reflecting on this, but Moses perhaps gets closest to God as he nears death.
Elan (28:47):
The beginning of Deuteronomy opens and Moses knows he has five weeks left to live. And it is only in that, from that perspective, especially when he climbs the mountain and can see the horizon, he can see the Promised Land just ahead. He can see all the steps he had taken for 40 years, the footsteps they had walked in through the desert. And it's as he nears his own passing that he becomes closest to God and that he has this revelation moment. We think of revelation as what happened on Sinai, but I think his revelation came much later. And I think of my father who, he was diagnosed with cancer when I was 17, and he had a crisis of faith, a deep crisis of faith. He was very mad with God. And after his initial treatment, he went into remission and it looked like his horizon had just stretched by years, if not decades.
Elan (29:51):
And his relationship to God hadn't quite repaired during that period of time. He was so focused on living as fully as he could, as being as fully present with each of us, his three children and my mom, his wife, as he could. And then he came out of remission very suddenly. And it was during that experience, when he could see that his horizon had shortened, when he could see that there was an end to his journey through this wilderness called life, that he reconnected with God and he made peace with God, and he felt closer to God than he ever had before.
Elan (30:33):
And I think a lot about what the experience has been like for faith leaders over these last, let's just call it 10 years, when everybody from sociologists to prognosticators to prophets has declared that American religion is dying. You can't have 10,000 churches close every year in America and not expect to see the finish line soon. And with all of that talk about death and all of that talk about demise, it becomes perhaps increasingly difficult to find God in the scramble of leading our institutions through what feels like a really painful moment. The hope that Mosaic leadership gave me is a recognition that Moses's death is not the end of the story. It's actually the beginning of another cycle of that same story, that the end of the dream is actually beginning, of the invitation to disrupt again and then to travel through the wilderness again.
Elan (31:34):
And I, recently, my daughter, 8-year-old daughter Nessa, has done a research project, and back when she was three, we took her to a butterfly sanctuary and she held a monarch butterfly in her hand. It actually just landed in her hand. And I remember the look on her face was like, I can't believe that living things can be so beautiful as this and that I can behold them. And since then, she's loved butterflies. Of course read, everything we know about butterflies came from Eric Carle of blessed memory, the hungry caterpillar. So she did a little research by, she wanted to learn more about them. And I want to just share an amazing thing about butterflies…
Shari (32:19):
Yes! Yes!
Elan (32:20):
…which is that, of course, they come from caterpillars. And for the entire week or however long it is that caterpillars live as caterpillars, they're just eating voraciously. Their job is to survive.
Elan (32:31):
Their job is to grow as much as possible for all the sausages and lollipops and cake that they eat. Eventually, they get the stomachache, but their job is to survive and grow. And that's really the first stage. And then they go into this pupa stage. They're in the cocoon and in my mind, because Eric Carle only gives us a half a page when this hungry caterpillar's in the cocoon, you just flip the page and they turn into a butterfly. So you kind of think like, oh, maybe it's just a caterpillar hanging out there and then growing wings, and then they become a beautiful butterfly. But here's the amazing thing. When they're in the cocoon, every single cell of the caterpillar breaks down. The caterpillar stage looks a lot like death. Metamorphosis doesn't, it's not a beautiful transformation. That caterpillar turns to goo inside of the cocoon. And if you just looked at it just in that particular moment, you would say, oh, this is the end of this thing. This thing is dying. And yet you blink and you miss it, because soon thereafter, it turns into this amazingly beautiful butterfly. But the most stunning thing that I learned from my daughter is that butterflies, after every single cell has gone through the metamorphosis process, after every single cell broke down and turned into goo, butterflies retain their memory of their life as a caterpillar.
Elan (34:22):
And you want to know for me what it feels like to become closer to God in this leadership moment? It’s even while we feel like this thing around us is dying, or maybe the most hopeful of us know that there is some kind of metamorphosis taking place, it doesn't mean it's not messy, like Kathi said before, it doesn't mean it's not painful. But to know, to have faith, that there's going to be a butterfly coming, and that butterfly is going to remember everything we did leading up to that metamorphosis moment, and all of that wisdom is going to help the butterfly fly higher and reach broader moral horizons than we could have ever imagined in our generation of leadership. But we have to be really, really patient. And that's what it's going to mean to get closer to God in this moment while we are in that messy metamorphosis stage.
Shari (35:23):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.