“I am not a churchgoer, but I have been so impressed with the attitudes, courtesy and presence of the students interviewed by the news media that I just sent a check to the disaster relief fund. All best of luck to you all.”

Larry, Avon, CT

The kind of character to which Larry from CT took notice isn’t anything those Union U students could fake. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, “Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is….”

An encounter I had recently while staying in Pennsylvania reminded me how true this really is. I had been doing dissertation research in PA earlier this month, as well as a bit of recruitment for IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net), and on this particular day had scheduled a lunch meeting with a headmaster of a Christian school in the area who sent us one of their graduates this academic year. We enjoyed sharing our life stories, dreams and plans for the future–mostly in terms of our careers. It became clear to me very quickly that he is a respected visionary leader in his school, church and home. When the topic of conversation turned to family towards the end of the meal, he said to me “Well, my wife and I are actually going through a pretty tough time right now.” He went on to explain the good news of his wife being pregnant with their third child, and how they had already been blessed with two strong and healthy boys. “Even though she hasn’t been born yet, we’re naming our little girl Victoria Grace,” he explained. “We want people to know her name before she’s born.”

“Why’s that?” I queried.

“Well, you see, several months ago our daughter was diagnosed with anencephalitis…..”

Although he kept talking, I didn’t hear much after he used that medical jargon, which is one of the few medical terms I actually know–only from doing case studies in medical ethics during my time in graduate school as well as my own experience in teaching bioethics to seminarians and undergraduates. For a second I was frozen in a state of utter shock. Anencephalitis is a brain condition in a small percentage of in-utero babies, and it is 100% fatal once the child no longer has the benefit of being inside the mother as a life-support system. I knew immediately where he was going with this.

“The doctor tells us that Victoria Grace will live for a few hours at most as soon as the baby is born, perhaps as little as a few minutes.” he went on to say, mournfully. “My wife is due any day now.”

“Dear God,” I prayed, “why?”

My new friend kept talking. “You know,” he explained “I won’t tell you that my wife and I don’t have our bad days when we tell God we don’t understand. And we do plead with Him for the life of this child we already love so much. But we know that His grace is sufficient for us, and we thank him for the time we will have with her and have already had as she has grown inside her mother. We just wouldn’t be able to make any sense of this if we didn’t have Christ, knowing that this is all somehow for His glory and our good” (Rom 8:28). “I can’t wait to see her in Heaven,” he concluded. He beamed with a kind of intense joy and inner peace that I’d rarely seen in a Christ-follower before.

This man, three years my junior, in many ways is so much mature than I am. I have no idea what it would be like to experience the joy of finding out that I’m going to be a father again, only to discover soon thereafter that the kiss I would give to my daughter welcoming her into the world would also be a kiss goodbye. And yet, I see through my new friend’s testimony and faith in God’s plan that with Him all things are possible (Mt. 19:26), even finding new joy through the struggle of such searing pain.

My leadership mentor, a management consultant at the CfA home office in Atlanta for over 25 years, recently put me onto a book that addresses one of the key ingredients of a high performance team, namely the ingredient of team learning. Peter Senge, author of the book, points out that many organizations have character-related ”learning disabilities” that contribute to a state of perpetual status quo.  Why are they character-related?  Because these learning disabilities turn out to be the natural consequence of fear and avoidance of personal embarrassment rather than true disabilities of intelligence or competence.  He puts it this way:

“All too often, teams in business tend to spend their time fighting for turf, avoiding anything that will make them look bad personally, and pretending that everyone is behind the team’s collective strategy–maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team.  To keep up the image, they seek to squelch disagreement; people with serious reservations avoid stating them publicly, and joint decisions are watered-down compromises reflecting what everyone can live with, or else reflecting one person’s view foisted on the group.  If there is disagreement, it’s usually expressed in a manner that lays blame, polarizes opinion, and fails to reveal the underlying differences in assumptions adn experience in a way that the team as whole could learn from….School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues (When was the last time someone was rewarded in your organization for raising difficult questions about the company’s current policies rather than solving urgent problems?)  Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant.”*

*Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline:  The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Revised Edition (New York:  Doubleday, 2006):  24-25. 

The second challenge is what’s called politicization, where politics is the be all and end of all.  And the Christian Right is part of that.  It has trusted politics to do what politics alone can’t do.  You know the great line by Richard Neuhaus, “The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.”  So politics is downstream.  The real damage in America is not done by politicians.  They’re downstream.  They’re picking up the dead bodies flowing down.  Upstream is the center of ideas, the universities.  Upstream are the centers of entertainment and culture and the media like Hollywood.  And we need to engage with those worlds which are shaping America.  And certainly we need people in politics.  But politics cannot do it by itself.  And Christians getting into politics by itself and being politicized, have lost their independence.  We’ve become the court chaplain to the Republican Party, but it would be equally bad to go to the Democrat Party.

The third problem is more the emergent churches.  And the younger generation says again and again, “We’re not politically active.  We’re social activists.”  Well that’s partly good.  I love the social activism, much of the idealism, passions of the ‘60s.  But we cannot desert politics.  We should be politically engaged, particularly in a democratic republic where each of us has a voice that counts.  So we’ve got a trio of big problems, and we need to get over it.  My hero is [William] Wilberforce , who was a close friend of my great, great grandfather, who founded the Guinness brewery.  Now Wilberforce was a Tory, which in today’s terms is conservative, but he always voted principle, not the party.  And he would vote against his own best friend, the prime minister, if he voted on conscience and he thought the prime minister was wrong.  And we’ve got to have that sort of independence again.

Wilberforce and his group, the Clapham Circle…became the conscience of England by being people of principle, not party.  And we need evangelicals to be that today.

“To secure able men to the Christian ministry is an object of transcendent, urgent, and worldwide concern.  It involves the life, the growth, the extension of the Church–the future of Christianity itself.  The Church is a divine institution, founded by Christ and the Apostles.  It has done more to purify, enrich, and strengthen mankind than have all other movements.  It is still the most powerful and beneficent agency for promoting the cause of morality and religion.  It has ever been adn yet is not only an ameliorating force that makes life tolerable, but an inspiring force that makes life progressive.  Take the Christian Church out of society and it collapses.  The Church furnishes the springs of life and power for all other beneficent institutions and movements.  It is the root; they are the branches.  Its work is the most enduring; it deals with the indestructible part of man.

It is evident that no society of men can hold together and can realize great objects without thoroughly qualified leaders.  The Church of Christ is no exception.  Wherever the Church has proved inadequate it has been due to inadequate leadership.  If the Church is to grow, so as to meet the growing needs of the age, it must have able men in its ministry.  Without such leadership there is danger that it will ultimately be reduced to a negligible force.  The failure to raise up a competent ministry would be a far greater failure than not to win converts to the Christian faith, because the enlarging of the Kingdom ever waits for leaders of power.  What problem of the Church is there to-day which cannot be best solved by enlisting for this calling more men of the highest qualifications?  What calamity, next to the withdrawal of Christ’s presence, should be more dreaded than to have young men of genius and of large equipment withhold themselves from responding to the call of the Christian ministry?  And yet this is the calamity which is impending.”*

*John R. Mott, The Future Leadership of the Church (New York:  YMCA, 1908):  pp. 3-4. 

The old educational triad–head, heart, hands–comes home to roost here.  For IMPACT 360, we use “Know, Be, Live.”  Ok, great.  Many teachers affirm the value of educating holistically, but in my experience, most of them seek to educate the head only.  That’s where their comfort zone is.  That is what their laser-focused Ph.D. programs taught them to do.  Now, don’t misunderstand…I’m all for specialization where that is appropriate.  What I’m against is the kind of two-spheres philosophy of teaching that says “Ph.D.’s are to teach course content.  Character issues and spiritual life?  Oh, well that’s what the student life folks and the campus minister are paid to do.”  No, let’s try something a bit different.  In fact let’s try something that American higher education abandoned during the years 1880-1930 when the research university was born in this country.  Namely, let’s consider the possibility that teaching is mentoring. 

To my way of thinking, one thing that puts daylight between the good teachers and the truly great teachers like Moreland is a willingness to help an 18 year-old student connect the course content with his fallen and self-absorbed character in the effort to help him flourish–to live life well.  As Moreland pointed out during his time at IMPACT 360, done properly such teaching helps us to live life as Jesus himself lived it during his 33 years on this earth.

So to answer the “what” question, consider this example.  The first day he was with us, Moreland showed the students how we are all products of the fall in a very specific way, namely that we all construct some sort of false self that we show to the world but in reality is a coping mechanism to cover up our own insecurities.  “What did Adam and Eve do after they sinned?” he asked us.  “They covered themselves up and they sought to hide from God.  We do the exact same thing.  As we grow up and become teenagers, we learn to construct a false self that will be accepted by our peer group.  For many of us, this continues well into our twenties and thirties to the point that our main purpose in living is to feed and satisfy the false self we have constructed in the attempt to hide ourselves from the One who created us for relationship with Him.”  Oh, man, here it comes.  “Is it really any mystery then, that so many of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus end up wondering why we struggle our whole lives with insecurities and addictions that cripple us, as well as ambitions that miss the calling that He has for us?”

To be sure, that same day he launched into some pretty heavy philosophy that related specifically to building a biblical worldview, and he connected that heavy academic content with what he had introduced earlier that addressed their characters and the importance of virtue–something that teachers used to do in the old-time college in the 19th century.  The point is simply this:  connecting head, heart and hands–that is, tying together the KNOW, BE and LIVE–is the essence of a truly holistic education, and Moreland gets it.  He not only gets it, he demonstrates it in the way he mentors his students.  I was one of the beneficiaries of that kind of mentoring, and for that I am forever grateful. 

How about trying this way instead:  Jim Collins’ (author of Good to Great) principle of “First who, then what.”  Collins points out that the CEOs of top companies will hire quality people even at times when they don’t have an already carved out spot for them.  These leaders discovered long ago that their success rises and falls on the quality of their people, NOT an organizational chart that results from the latest and greatest strategic plan.  Obviously organizations must post positions that need to be filled, but when they do, why not be proactive in hiring process?  Don’t just sit back and “see who comes our way,” get on the phone, email, and start working the networks to find out who can be persuaded to consider the position. 

Having done a bit of hiring myself, and having conducted job searches both ways, I much prefer the latter strategy.  The quality of the applicant pool is higher, and they are better workers from the word “go.”  Our organization is experiencing this right now.  We just hired two new student life staff members, and although I had little to do in actually finding them, there is no question that we found them as a result of team members being proactive in the search process.  We got the right two folks for sure.

The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character.  This, above all, has to be symbolized is management’s “people” decisions.  For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated.  Character is not something one can fool people about.  The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not.  They may forgive a person for a great deal; incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners.  But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person.  Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.*

Peter Drucker, The Daily Drucker:  366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

The quote comes from a sermon Witherspoon preached on campus on May 17, 1776, and its title is “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.” Chief on his mind at this time in the nation’s history was the Revolution, and as president of the college of New Jersey he felt obligated to exhort the student body with respect to the role of the Christian religion in their lives and its value in sustaining the American republic:

 Suffer me to recommend to you an attention to the public interest of religion, or in other words, zeal for the glory of God and the good of others.  I have already endeavored to exhort sinners to repentance; what I have here in view is to point out to you the concern which every good man out to take in the national character and manners, and the means which he ought to use for promoting public virtue, and bearing down impiety and vice.  This is a matter of the utmost moment, and which ought to be well understood, both in its nature and principles.  Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction.  A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time; but beyond certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual and slavery must ensue.  On the other hand, when the manners of a nation are pure, when true religion and internal principles maintain their vigor, the attempts of the most powerful enemies to oppress them are commonly baffled and disappointed.  This will be found equally certain, whether we consider the great principles of God’s moral government, or the operation and influence of natural causes.  What follows from this?  That he is the best friend to American liberty, who is the most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind.

John Witherspoon, “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men.”  A sermon delivered at the College of New Jersey at Princeton; May 17, 1776.  In Matthew Rose and Alan R. Crippen, II (eds.), John Witherspoon:  An American Leader (Washington, D.C.:  Family Research Council, 1999):  72. 

S: See and Envision the Future

E: Engage and Develop Others

R: Re-invent Continuously

V: Value Results and Relationships

E: Embody the Values

I must say, ever since I’ve come on board with IMPACT 360 and its parent foundation, Lifeshape, Inc.,  I’ve been more and more impressed with this business.  The Lifeshape foundation founders, John and Trudy Cathy White (son-in-law and daughter of Truett Cathy, CFA founder) and the entire CfA culture embody a biblical model of servant leadership, and it shows up in every facet of the business. You won’t find self-serving corporate climbers here.  Motivated?  Absolutely.  Excellence-driven?  No question.  You can’t build a 2-billion dollar a year business without those qualities.  What’s most obvious, however, is that this company has team players who are people of character and integrity.  Character and integrity are the sine qua non of revolutionary leadership.  This is just part of the DNA of the company.  And what distinguishes this DNA from other for-profit companies?  The fact that it recognizes a transcendent God upon whom we must rely for our success in this world, indeed our very existence.  For it is only through Him that ”we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  The corporate mission statement, which is positioned at the entrance to the building for all to see, says, “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us and to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”