Worship Weblog
Monday, January 22, 2007
Alban Weekly on “Living Your Story”
From Alban Weekly: Diana Butler Bass on leadership:
For three years, I researched vital mainline Protestant congregations. Armed with a grant from the Lilly Endowment, I studied fifty churches to determine if there existed a common pattern of spiritual vibrancy and shared practices that strengthened communal life. Sifting through thousands of pages of data, my team pieced together both an overall pattern and leading practices in the study group, thus developing a picture of religious change, emerging vitality, and potential futures for mainline Protestantism. ...
My research team did not directly study leadership in vital congregations—we hoped to make that the topic of a later grant. Early on, I actually tried to avoid questions of leadership, feeling vaguely inadequate to address the topic and having no specific data to share. I worry that leadership is difficult to discuss and prone to “magic bullet” solutions of quick-fix gurus. The questions kept coming, however, and although I had no hard data, I realized that I had observed good leadership in the participating congregations. In The Practicing Congregation, the first book published about the project, I identified an emerging style of “narrative leadership” for congregational renewal.
Narrative leadership is a deceptively simple principle: know your story and live it. Some people know stories and tell them well but live without intentional connection to those stories; others simply experience quotidian life with no reflection on larger stories of meaning. In vital mainline churches, leaders knew their stories and lived them—thus turning the power of narrative into a source of and resource for change.
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