LEAD, FOLLOW OR GET OUT OF THE WAY

A UUA district exec contacted me unexpectedly and asked me about Leadership School. Little did he know what he was tapping into. I will spare you the most of it, partly because of discretion and partly because of not wanting to scare any horses. I didn’t even mention “Bronze Inside and Out,” which is the solid decade of extreme experience here on the Blackfeet Reservation that made me into a person who can understand Tim Barrus a lot easier than I can understand a District Exec even after seminary. It also made such phenomena as leadership school, seminary, and clinical pastoral education entirely different for me than they were for the twenty-something middle-class young men for whom they were designed. If that sounds patronizing -- well, okay. That District Exec sounded patronizing to me. He always has since he was an upperclass student at my seminary, part of the group who invited my class over in pairs (there were only six of us) and let us know we were entirely deficient. I vividly remember the cockroaches roaming the walls of the seminary housing.

Anyway, this is about UU leadership school and has nothing at all to do with seminary except that it’s what got me so excited about the ministry in the first place. It was 1975, I was two years away from Montana, newly promoted to Education Coordinator of Multnomah County Animal Control, working on a degree in clinical psychology at Portland State University (having serious doubts, since I wanted to prepare for psychotherapy and they thought they were creating social workers), and thinking I should find a church. I found First Unitarian in Portland. Pretty soon I was becoming active and was asked if I’d like to go to Leadership School. I had no idea what it was.

Unknown to me at the time, the ministry had sort of drifted into being landed gentry, patriarchs who were expected to control and provide everything. The rest of us just organized tea parties and fed the animals. Peter Raible, minister in Seattle; Rod Stewart, Pacific Northwest District Exec; and Ord Elliott, Organizational Development guy working with corporations; plus a bit of help from the Alban Institute, which tries to keep churches keep their heads on straight, came up with the idea of this Leadership School. The principle was to empower laypeople to take some control and do some renewing. Too many thought, as I did, that belonging to a church meant showing up on Sunday morning to occupy a pew. It was sort of church Headstart.

You didn’t sign up on your own. Your church had to send you. First of all, you had to be a serious congregation member -- not some fad cruiser -- and second, you had to be sturdy enough to withstand the emotional pressures, though they didn’t tell us that. Myself, I was terrified. But then, so was the veteran and sturdy woman who drove us up to Fort Worden, an ascetic but glorious conference center in old barracks from WWII, overlooking the mouth of Puget Sound.

When I was a kid, I never went to camp. Our family did everything as a group, including tent-camping across the country. My primary school experience was bad: I wasn’t just ostracized, I was persecuted by my classmates. No idea why. My teachers wrote on my grade cards, “Mary cries too much.” By high school I’d learned to be a little crazy and never to get straight A’s. In college I’d attached myself to a little group. Etc. I didn’t know what kind of strategy to use at Leadership School. I decided to just go with “what you see is what you get.”

I’ve written about the Ingathering service on 10/4/08. That helped quite a lot. Also a kind older couple took me under their wing, though I was 36 and working the streets of Portland. Later on, when we were playing the game called “Win As Much as You Can” and I was partnered with these gentle people who so believed in cooperatives (they were Canadian), which meant that things were safe but a little boring, I turned provocateur and double-crossed them for the sake of the “profit.” Not only were they as reproachful and sad as though I’d just stolen their car, everyone else shunned me for the rest of the day! That day I ate in solitary but defiant splendor.

In another game, where everyone was standing in a big room and asked to choose partners, a woman crashed in tears because no one chose her. Evidently this was the story of her life. The facilitator of the exercise, a therapist as well as a minister, had everyone stand where they were while he gently worked us all through this emotional event. How was EACH of us feeling? What ARE the dynamics that cause some to be chosen and not others? And then the bottom line was empowering this woman. “You don’t have to wait to be chosen. YOU choose. Go choose someone right now! I’ll take the person who’s left over.” Then she wanted to choose HIM, because he was safe and sympathetic, which he pointed out.

It was like that. There was a game. Sometimes it was just a game and sometimes it blew up -- then we learned more.

At the heart of the structure of the experience were "strands." Also, a principle: learn by doing. For the most part, experts didn't lecture. Small groups of participants mastered one point and then DEMONSTRATED it to the others.

1. One strand was worship. Each day began with worship and each group was assigned a different "style": traditional, experimental, etc. An outside circle of women had been asked to organized an "ingathering" service on the first evening after supper, and an internal group (which turned out to be women) also organized a "home going" service at the end.

2. One strand was the history of the denomination. This was NOT small groups: just a short lecture every afternoon.

3. One strand (really the central one) was organizational design principles. How to keep process going, how to resolve conflict, how to define a goal and a strategy. We used formidable amounts of felt-tip and newsprint.

4. One strand was journal-keeping last thing before bedtime in which participants processed what they had felt during the day, what they had learned, what scared them, what empowered them, etc. Also a bit of credo writing.

It’s noon as I write and the temp is below zero f. My notes for Leadership School (I kept ‘em all!) are out in the garage so I won’t go searching for them today. But expect more comment in the future as things warm up.