How many of you slept under the stars last night? When you see the stars, you can see how awesome God is.

We are called to be ambassadors of care – taking lessons from Job in the Christian Bible.

Leadership:

Leadership is the willingness to be the first to go into the dark; to begin to discern where one is and to understand oneself and to meet God there. Then, having become light (even just a little), leadership invites others to come into (to join in) the muddled shadows and engages them in the work of finding the way

Soon, leadership gives over to these fellow travelers the work of making the way good, meaningful, glorious – and mostly safe – for the bystanders who currently sit, vulnerable, perhaps and afraid of the dark.

Then leadership heads off into further darkness, again and again…

Worldview

Book: “Religion and Ecology”

Article “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” (Lynn White Jr.): “no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.”

Why do we name our children? To direct them out of a sense of deep love.

God to Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand…” (antidote to anthropomorphism)

Questions to Job show:

• God’s ways are beyond us: unexplainable, irrefutable, and unimaginably good
• God takes pleasure in the creation which has value in and of itself (Psalm 104)
• God is interested in a unique relationship with persons

Psalm 8: O Lord, our Lord, how majestic (excellent) is your name in all the earth!

God’s hope is that we rule in such a way that He would be rightly represented.

If we are rulers, what does a Good Ruler actually do? (serve) “Good King Wenceslas” – not looking to build his empire, but rather to look out the window and taking care of those with whom he has been entrusted

Ecology and the Good Leader

• concerned for the health and well-being of everything for which they have have been entrusted
• establishes being good as preeminent over being great
• takes responsibility, shares responsibility, positions responsibility, and avoids the blame game (read “Leadership Without Easy Answers”)
• takes frequent “down-stream excursions”
  • what’s really happening out there as a result of what we are “putting into the river”?
  • what could occur down-stream if we are not careful to consider the potential long-term consequences of our actions?
• recognizes that excellent ends are linked to virtuous means
  • HOW you do is just as important as WHAT you do
  • Virtues will foster economic well-being, though not the efficcieny-bent, wealth-maximizing economy that some theorists envision… virtuous behaviour may advance some non-material aspect of the good even though that behaviour is not efficient in the economic sense.” (Bill Shaw, 19)

  crafts a new set of evaluation questions

• crafts a new set of evaluation questions (properly using natural materials, non-biodegradable wastes, commitment to the health of people, communities and places, is our purpose reductionist, does our work create independent households, does our vision acknowledge and live according to its ethical limitations?)

Leadership is to be first to go into the dark…