I’ve been reading the Margaret Wheatley book again for our staff meeting. Whenever I read it, I’m reminded of the fact that she wouldn’t come to the Leadership Event this year because we couldn’t meet her price tag. Ah well, she’s an internationally-known speaker who does a lot of charity appearances abroad. I guess somebody has to pay her.

Once I get past that, though, I am again and again inspired and challenged by what she has to say in Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. The chapter I read today was about supporting and nourishing pioneering leaders in a system that often, in attempting to maintain the status quo, discourages them. What struck me today is how what she said in many ways reflected you all.

Have any of you ever heard the term “paradigm shift?” I seem to remember some classes shoving it down our throats at Whitworth. But the basic term, as today’s reading reminded me, comes from the mid-20th century work of Thomas Kuhn in science. He studied the reactions of scientists when they were presented with unexpected data from experiments, data that didn’t fit the framework of how they understood a particular process. Kuhn found that these scientists would often unconsciously throw out or reinterpret data to make the results fit their parameters. Sometimes, they literally couldn’t see the new data, their preconceptions were so strong.

Wheatley relates Kuhn’s work on paradigms to leadership theory, arguing that the data is moving us toward new systems of leadership and collaboration that defy the old way of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Though our larger culture often ridicules and ignores innovate problem-solving and leadership, such leaders are working to create new and better systems to replace the failing ones.

As I was reading, NNPCW came to my mind quite a bit. We are a small ministry, one born from the work of visionary leaders in response to a system that is faltering (the church losing young people, especially young women). We operate on alternative leadership and decision-making models that are often criticized by the mainstream. We certainly work with limited resources.

And yet, I’ve always felt like you all are blazing a new path for the church. It isn’t because you are going to do what some in the older generations might like—become good pew warmers who bring the donuts for fellowship hour. But I think this generation is beginning to challenge our religious systems to rethink the old ways of doing business and become open to the new.

This isn’t an attack on what the church stands for at all—the loving mercy of God expressed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Rather, NNPCW members are the pioneering leaders who question the hierarchies and power structures of the religious institution. You are creating, in your campus women’s groups and your grassroots networking, those alternative spaces where the church can grow.

Wheatley comments that such new ideas often begin in isolation, with people like you out there thinking that you’re working all alone. But great changes happen when we discover we’re not isolated. Even events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, which seemed to be sudden and huge, were the work of isolated, seemingly insignificant pockets of action that, when joined together, found their strength to create large-scale change.

I hope that NNPCW has helped you realize that you’re not alone—in the church or in society. Many others like you are out there, thinking of new ways to serve Christ and serve humanity that break out of the old paradigms of power, violence, and control. And by the grace of God, together you will find new ways to carry God’s love to the whole world.

“He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’” --Matthew 13:33

Kelsey

Great reading this