Patiently Kind Leadership Amidst Tyranny and the Urgent
The YMCA is full of leaders throughout our history who led in crisis and through unjust suffering strengthened by God's love for them.
Leaders are built for crisis. The higher up in the organization you lead, the more complicated and impossible are the problems you must solve.
It is obvious how the tyranny of the urgent, how fear, how exhaustion, how wounded pride can sap the capacity of leaders to be at their best everyday.
This can be true for an organization facing staff shortages, low morale and budget woes as well as for organizations caught in the middle of devastating wars, ecological disasters and tyrannical governments.
YMCA leaders have faced organizational challenges in every kind of situation around the world since 1844. We have an impressive array of men and women to look up to when we get mired in our messy bog of problems.
At some point every leader decides what kind of challenges they want to face in their life. It’s not about high up in the organization they want to go, or how much power they want to attain, but about what they can bring to the most pressing crises in their world.
Leaders also get personally challenged to the point where they get to decide: am I leading out of more fear than love? They eventually become aware of the fears that drive them, keep them awake at night, that shape their imagination about the future and lace all their memories. And they must choose a future: learn to lead with more love or succumb to leading afraid.
It’s hard to keep leading at a high capacity when you’re afraid, whether it’s of the tyranny at work around you or the urgency among you.
What’s the alternative?
Within the history of the Young Men’s Christian Association are leaders who have come to grips with the fear that has gripped their spirit and mind, and defiantly rejected that way of existing.
Where does that defiance come from? Love.
There are three intertwining yet different words for love in the New Testament: desiring love of appetites, friendship love for affection, generous sacrificial love for all.
Almost all of our love songs are about desiring love, being hungry for love, an appetite for romantic experiences of love.
Our daily lives are sustained through friendship love for affection with our family, co-workers, neighbors, fellow students, people we care about who are in proximity to us.
These two loves can be separate, sometimes they can be intertwined. The first love, though, is an appetite that is never fully satisfied; the second love becomes a source of hurt and disappointment.
The third kind of love becomes a way to redeem our self-seeking appetites and reconcile our betrayed and wounded affections. It is this third kind of love that God wants to make alive in us, it’s what we see in the life of Jesus, it’s the kind of love we aspire to in the YMCA.
Without a power greater than ourselves, our self-seeking appetites and bitter resentful affections take on a kind of tyranny and urgency in our world of which we cannot escape.
The disciple of Jesus named John writes this about leading in a world of tyranny and urgency:
“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”
[1 John 4:16b, NIV]
Imagine being a leader facing the most impossible of situations knowing and believing that God lived in you, that all of God’s love was available for you? What couldn’t you accomplish with others?
The origins of the Y.M.C.A. are with specifically young Christian businessmen from the urban industrial clothing factories of London England. They took to heart these writings of John the disciple of Jesus:
“If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.”
[1 John 4:15-16a, NIV]
We are conditioned to read this as if it’s important to believe a list of dogmatic statements in order to experience God’s love. But for George Williams, the founder of the Y, he first experienced the transformational love of God through some friends at work.
Having grown up in a church that made little sense to him, he encountered the real person of Jesus, the Son of God, and the experience led to the founding of the Young Men’s Christian Association.
It’s built into the DNA of the YMCA: we are always on the lookout for love-full leaders drawn to making a difference in people’s lives, who want to be proximate to hardship and suffering, who are willing to themselves be transformed through the mission-centered work they do each day.
Sometimes Y leaders get to experience crisis in the humdrum of running a branch or program in a community with all the typical challenges. And sometimes Y leaders find themselves caught up in oppressive tyranny, overwhelmed by disasters, or worn out by the unrelenting urgency of our work.
It is an act of defiance to lead with patient love in the face of urgency, to lead with kind forgiving love in the face of injustice and tyranny, to lead with love for all in the face of bigotry and hate.
We see this defiant love in Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Man of Sorrows, the One who suffers with us, who atones for our sins, who redeems us from our fearful self-seeking mindsets, who rescues us from our hateful resentments, who heals us from our wounded pride, who enables us to forgive those who have sinned against us that we might experience a renewed spirit of flourishing love.
There will always be tyranny in our world, our work will always be urgent, disasters and devastation come and go, and through it all is the opportunity to overcome our fears with love, to lead full of love, to lead others through great challenges fully alive in God, fully alive to love all whom we encounter each day.
God is Love. Lean into love, love Love, learn to be alive in Love, and you will find God there, loving you, loving through you, alive in and through you.
It will be a different kind of leading, maybe a defiant way of leading, but then that was the way of Jesus too.