Academy of Religious Leadership

I’ve just spent the weekend with the Academy of Religious Leadership. We are a young organization, primarily made up of people who teach leadership, administration and finance within theological education (although some of us, myself included, have slightly different portfolios). I was struck, again, by how much we are all struggling with similar challenges, even though we teach in widely varying contexts.

Scott Cormode, author of the “Christianleaders.org” site, writes in the Academy’s journal, that “the vocabulary that a minister plants in the congregation, the stories that she sows and the theological categories that she cultivates, bear fruit when people use those categories to make sense of the world around them” (full article here). His use of the metaphor of “gardener” for religious leadership is both fascinating and evocative, and I think yet another example of a “non-instrumental” approach that can be a constructive cultural intervention.