Our Common Welfare

In his essay “Servant Leadership in Churches”, Robert Greenleaf wrote about an idea he had for creating an organization modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. Greenleaf proposed the name Seekers Anonymous for this organization. The organization would focus on “healing, in the sense of being made whole” through “work on the structural flaws in our society”.

As someone who has been fortunate to belong to a couple of twelve step groups, I have been intrigued by the power these organizations have to help the individual members to become healthier. For individuals to become healthy, requires participation in a healthy group. Typically, these groups practice some form of the Twelve Traditions that were originally written by the founding members of Alcoholics Anonymous as a way to stay healthy. The Traditions are full of servant leadership concepts and are tools that can be used to help the members of other groups to practice servant leadership and perhaps to heal the structural flaws in our society.

So here is the first of a series of posts on the Traditions.

Tradition One: Our common welfare should come first, personal progress for the greatest number depends upon unity.

This is the tradition that requires that the purpose of the group needs to come before the individual desires of the group members. Too often in our organizations, growth is prevented by perhaps well meaning individuals who dominate and stifle the input from other members. This roadblock to real productivity can come from an over bearing boss, an aggressive coworker, or any other member of the group. The First Tradition reminds us to stay focused on what the group is really about, and not to become diverted by what an individual may think is important. Private agenda’s may have a place in our personal life’s, but when we choose to participate in a group, it needs to be because we believe in the power of working together. The synergistic power of the group can accomplish exponential results as compared to one-person agendas. A clear mission and focus is required in order for this Tradition to be implemented.

Some thoughts on the power of our common welfare.

View From Cape Town

I am posting this from Cape Town, South Africa, where I am conducting research on servant leadership as ministry in some of the most impoverished settlements in the Western Cape. The religious community I am studying--and living with--feeds the hungry, prays, sings, and then prays and feeds some more. They are primarily Colored (of mixed blood) rather than Black (of tribal blood) and the distinction is important here, with prejudice going both ways. No time for a political analysis; I'd simply like to describe several people I've met.

Andre is a Muslim. He offered the use of his truck to this Protestant ministry because they are doing good works. "There is only one God," he told me. "I will do anything to help these people because tending to the poor is also a pillar of the Muslim faith."

I watched the Muslim butcher who sells lamb to the ministry for feedings as he slipped some extra food in the bags. He always does that. And, he sells at the cheapest possible price. He said it was the least he could do, and was embarrassed that I'd noticed.

Connie is a non-churchgoing man. Everyone in his community calls him "Uncle Connie" because he knows everyone and helps anyone. He has taken 2 weeks off work to help with the ministry's latest round of feedings and concerts in the townships. "I help people who do good things," he said.

Last night I spoke with a 25-year-old man who has lived with no kidneys for 4 years. When his kidney failure was complete at the age of 21, the government told him he didn't qualify for dialysis because he was not married, had no children to support and no job. (His disease had prevented him from working.) He was deemed expendable. His doctor has personally paid for the expensive treatments ever since. He's a musician and says that he has great hope for the future. Survival is about faith and music, he said, not dialysis.

Later I spoke with Frederick, a 15-year-old who immigrated here with his family from Ruwanda, barely escaping death. A month ago Frederick was baptised at the municipal pool. Soon thereafter he fell into the deep end and sank to the bottom. By the time they found him he was blue and rigid, with no pulse and blood around his nose. Lifeguards worked on him, then gave up and called an ambulance. People were crying because he was obviously dead. Meanwhile, Pastor Jerome and his gathered faithful began praying. Frederick, who had never heard of near-death experiences, was flying through a dark tunnel when he heard people praying in the far distance. He then said, "Help me, Pastor. I'm drowning," and woke up. His system had been without oxygen for 10 to 15 minutes and everyone expected brain damage, at best. But there was none. There are probably medical explanations for his survival, but Frederick credits the love of a community that prayed when all was hopeless.

Astonishing things like this happen every day here, where the space between the harshest reality and the grandest spirituality is but a scrim. Whatever the religion of these people, they all share one value--service. And they would pass Greenleaf's "Best Test" for a servant-leader with flying colors, especially the part about serving the "least privileged."

Pillars of Creation.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website reminded me of one of my favorite Greenleaf quotes that I thought I would revisit. It comes from Don Frick’s biography Robert K. Greenleaf . In it he describes an experience Greenleaf had while looking through the 100-inch mirror of a telescope at a great nebula in 1923.

“What a sight! I shook with awe and wonder at the majesty of all creation. This primitive unstructured feeling, the powerful sense of awe and wonder, is to me the source of religious feeling at its greatest depth.”

Perhaps this cloud of cosmic dust, this birthplace of stars pointed Greenleaf towards his philosophy of servant leadership.

Institutions Role in Global Warming.

Don’s recent post on Global Warming and Trevor’s recent series The Quality of Our Institutions are good leads to an essay on Global Warming from Thomas Berry’s latest book “Evening Thoughts – Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community.”

In Greenleaf’s essay The Institution as Servant, three areas jumped out at me that are related to the global warming issue.

In the section titled “The Large Business as Servant” he writes about three pressures that will force businesses to focus more on the service aspect role. One of these is, “pollution and the protection of the environment have become major issues and are a costly problem for some businesses.”

From “The Growing Edge Church” section, Greenleaf writes “Conscious religious concern is part of the gear of civilization – a means to heal humanities alienation, which our ‘civilized’ state has brought about. The word religion, at is root, means ‘to rebind’, to rebind humans to the cosmos. Primitive people may have suffered much from their environment, but they were not alienated. […]. Their total society was bound to the cosmos, and a church, a separate institution specializing in rebinding was not needed. But we are estranged (from the cosmos and environment) […].

And from the section titled “Trust and Growth: The Value of Understanding” he writes, “Someone in the church must paint the dream. For anything great to happen there must be a dream.”

Thomas Berry is someone from within the church who has painted such a dream. Berry, a Catholic priest who likes to be referred to as a “geologian” or earth scholar, continues his vision that he first laid out in his book “The Dream of the Earth” in his latest book “Evening Thoughts – Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community”.

Berry’s book addresses some of the primary reasons that Global Warming and other environmental crises are occurring and what will be needed for the human race to takes steps to address them.

Berry’s premise is that the problems that we face in the world today are in large part a result of the worldview that the western world clings to. This worldview separates humanity from the rest of creation. Some of Berry’s answers to the question “how and why did our present devastation of the Earth happen?” include:

We have lost the primary manifestation of the divine in its cosmological manifestation. […] A transcendent, personal, monotheistic creative deity […] has led us to treat the phenomenal world with something less than the reverence paid it by those cultures in which there is a sacred dimension to trees, to rivers, to the whole of creation. We have lost the primary manifestation of the divine in its cosmological manifestation.

The natural world is material; we are spiritual. As spiritual beings we become detached from the visible world.

The primacy in our belief in redemption. This belief tells us that we are not for this world.

Berry points out that the “emerging climate-change crisis arises from the simple question of whether economic profit or the integral functioning of the planet will be the normative value in guiding the human community into the future. Will the human economy be accepted as a subsystem of the Earth economy, or will the Earth economy be considered to be a subsystem of the human economy?”

In his earlier book The Dream of the Earth, Berry writes about his hope for humanity, “Presently we are returning to the primordial community of the universe, the earth and all living beings. Each has its own voice, its role, its power over the whole. But, most important, each has its own special symbolism. The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.”

I believe that Berry’s dream of the earth is one that fits well with Greenleaf’s own dream of servant leadership as a way of transforming the world.

My ramblings for the day.

The Quality of our Institutions - Governments

The fifth and final institution that Robert Greenleaf was concerned about was government. It is perhaps his most poignant judgment of all the societal institutions in which he writes. Here is what he says:

Governments rely too much on coercion and too little on persuasion, leadership, and example. Although they render indespensable services, they too often impose upon society a bureaucracy that is oppressive and corrupting. Rarely does conceptual and inspired leadership come from government. Although we wish for it, we have learned not to expect it. The doctrine of countervailing power, pitting one segment of society as an offsetting force against another, is too freely substituted for creative solutions. We are prone to adventurous and illegal wars. Confidence in the integrity of elected officials is at a low point. The total tax structure is a perversion. The treatment of prisoners is barbaric. The cost of it all is staggering.

Granulation Tissue of Hope

Last week Trevor reminded us that servant leadership is more than a lovely individual philosophy; it is a body of ideas that imply institutional evolution--not wild-eyed revolution, but pragmatic, conscious transformation that is "reasonable and possible with available resources," as Greenleaf was fond of saying.

Hey, I'm an old hippie (although a moderate one), and understand the urge to rant about mean and nasty institutions "out there," pleading for "them" to be more like some ideal or other. But one advantage of being older is understanding that I mostly preach to my own shadows.

As a flawed person, what can I do within the flawed organizations in which I participate? How can I make a tiny, humble dent and, most importantly, not lose hope?

Two images come to mind. First is the picture of non-violent confrontation staged by the "Tank Man of Tiananmen Square" in 1989. Maybe it is just as well we never learned the name of this soul who faced China's focused military might with nothing but courage that grew from an ideal. Because he was nameless, we were unable to objectify him, write him off with awards. This way, Tank Man has become a symbol for you, me, and EveryPerson facing the rollicking momentum of big institutions.

A second image that inspires me is that of granulation tissue. After a wound, various cells in the body's EMT squad show up with sirens screaming and begin cleaning up the mess. Within a few days, "granulation tissue" begins to form at the site of old capillaries. These pink collections of cells announce healing like crocuses announce spring. If the geography of the wound is large, like a burn area, they form tiny islands of hope here and there in the middle of the devastation, eventually networking through new blood vessels to link up and cover the whole distressed area with fresh skin.

What would happen if, today, servant-leaders everywhere became granulation tissue islands of hope, began to draw up strength from lifeblood sources and patiently networked with others to eventually heal the wounds of our organizations?

The Quality of our Institutions - Churches

The term 'Servant Leadership' has recently been hijacked by many churches as a way to talk about leadership within their organization. While a small minority certainly "get it", it is obvious that for many they have never even taken the time to read any of Robert Greenleaf's writings.

Greenleaf was quite concerned about the leadership within churches and seminaries. In fact, one of my favorite books, Seeker and Servant - Reflections on Religious Leadership, is dedicated entirely to this topic.

Here is what Greenleaf said about churches in 1974:

The churches, which once gave security and hope by presuming to mediate between God and human beings, continue to function this way even though many persons, including faithful church attenders, now seek their values in their own experience. As a consequence, the alienated and purposeless have multiplied to devastating proportions for want of sufficient value-shaping influence that once was the churches' major role. And the large human (and material) resources of churches seem to be groping for a way to serve.

The Quality of our Institutions - Health and Social Services

Continuing on our theme, here are Robert Greenleaf's thoughts on the quality of the health and social services institutions in the United States. I think you'll agree, not much has changed from Greenleaf's assessment over 30 years ago:

"Health and social services retain too much from the days when magic potions were administered to banish symptoms. As a consequence, the extensive knowledge we now have about how to live in better total health is effectively denied to large numbers of people, and for many the longer life expectancy made possible by curbing disease is too often an empty achievement. The skyrocketing cost of such health care as we have is proof of the inadequacy of our system of health-care delivery."

The Quality of our Institutions - The Contemporary Univeristy

Today's let's take a look at Greenleaf's thoughts on the contemporary university. Is this your experience of the university system?

"The contemporary university is the lineal descendant of the medieval one - a design that is now widely admitted to be suitable for a very small percentage of the population. What once was the goal of education, to provide continuity for a culture in which freedom and rationality would prevail, has given way to preparation for narrow professional careers. For many young people what should be a great creative experience is instead a literal incarceration in rigid, stereotyped academic programs for which they have little aptitude and less interest. The result is enormous institutions that are an impossible meld of elitist tradition and mass education, and which cannot withstand the shattering value changes that other forces are bringing on society. Colleges and universities now enroll about 50 percent of our young people (Note: In October, 2005 - the most recent stats I could find - 68.6 percent of high school graduates were enrolled in colleges or universities). They should be a major civilizing force, but instead they stand among contemporary institutions as the most troubled, the most fragile, and the least certain of their goals as institutions."

The Quality of our Institutions - Business Practice

As mentioned in my last post, I would like to spend some time looking at Greenleaf's assessment of major institutions in our country. Let's start with his views of buisness practice. Again, remember that this was written in 1973!

Here is what Robert Greenleaf says about the quality of business practice:

"Business practice, while more enlightened than it once was, still follows too much the way of the huckster-traders of centuries past. They were only a minor force in their day, but the vast modern business structure has taken on their functions and is shaping our culture and setting its values. Economic performance is cyclical, and the penalties are usually borne by the powerless. Too many firms are manipulated as financial pawns for short-term gain with little regard for social consequences or even for the long-term good of the firm. The sense of business responsibility is inadequate for the influence that business wields. Despite phenomenal production of goods and services, the total social impact of businesses is far below what a late twentieth-century "advanced" society should tolerate. To sum it up, one might say, as in the case of government, that our reasonable expectations of the private sector too far exceed its performance.

The Quality of our Institutions - An Introduction

I want to spend some time this week looking at one of Greenleaf's best, but often overlooked, essays: The Institution as Servant. Written around 1973, shortly after he wrote his most famous essay, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf lays out some of the criticism geared towards institutions. He then goes on to offer some solutions. But for this week we'll focus on the criticisms. As you read these posts this week it will be important to remember that this was written over 30 years ago!

Here is how Greenleaf begins the conversation:

Why do the best of our institutions fall short of performing at the level of what is reasonable and possible with available resources? Possibly because these institutions are seen by too many of us, even some of us who are trustees, as impersonal entities to be used and exploited. Most people do not give to institutions the human caring and serving that they give to other persons.

If we are to have a more moral society, then moral humanity must also care for institutions. We tend to criticize the impersonal system, but it is our attitude and our level of caring, not the "system," that need criticism and improvement.