If you travel you will be familiar with the HSBC ads in airports throughout the world celebrating the differences between us. I was walking onto a flight this week and several of these ads were arranged as paired images communicating how people see things so differently. One pair was about how we see pain differently. One image was of a brilliant, red pair of stiletto high heels with the word “pain” written below. The image beside it was of an equally red jalapeno pepper with same word written beneath. The ad next to this was a picture of a young man dressed in an impeccable, but casual, suit with the word “Leadership” written below. Beside it a young man leaning back, arms folded, wearing a pair of clean, but torn, jeans. The same word was placed below this image. How we see the world changes reality, the images seem to suggest.
This past weekend my wife and I were walking along the seawall close to our home just where the Capilano River empties into English Bay across from Stanley Park and downtown Vancouver. Out a little in the bay numerous small fishing boats were bobbing about in the water as salmon jumped high out of the water heading up the river in their final swim to spawn before dying. Imagine what was going on in the hearts of those fisherman as salmon after glorious salmon jumped past their boats. Just inside the river was another spectacle. A sea lion swimming leisurely around gorging on the passing fish. These two images - the fishermen and the sea lion - were reading their worlds very differently. It’s all about what we see that makes the difference.
It’s the same with leadership. I’ve just finished reading a book about Jane Jacobs a woman who saw the urban world differently from all the gurus and experts at the mid-point of the last century and that seeing made all the difference in the world. Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City is written by Anthony Flint. It focuses on a brief period in Jacob’s life telling the story of how she tackled the regnant ideologies about city building and challenged powerful people of her day like Robert Moses the famed New York building commissioner. Moses was part of the small coterie of urban gurus defining the shape of American cities. These men were the rock stars of their day; they had been to the mountain top and received a kind of special insight few mortals were privileged to see. They knew how cities ought to function - they had seen the ideal and knew what the promised land looked like. The fact that a young woman from Scranton, Pennsylvania could take on them on and change the nature of urban life is a story worth the read.
What Jacobs did has much to teach us about leaders who change our world. By the end of the 19th century cities experienced the worst effects of rapid industrialization in terms of pollution, crowded tenements, with terrible sanitary conditions, filled with poor laborers and hardly any health care. Something needed to be done. It was assumed that the dense, cluttered messiness of urban life with its twisting streets, congested sidewalks and endless little shops beneath rental units all set beside smoke-belching factories needed transforming into something better.
Into the midst of this situation came the new Platonists, the experts and urban planners of modernism, with their emphasis on simplicity, rationalized planning and nothing except function. Great swaths of cities, like New York and Philadelphia, were bulldozed to make way for sparkling high rise towers of modern living that would save industrial man. The new towers were surrounded by green spaces and separated from commerce (shopping and strip malls were built in other areas) and industry (factories were relocated) by new highways and roads because the car was now salvation. This ‘International Style’ became the new orthodoxy (soon to be applied to the emerging suburbs around small, look-alike single family dwellings with their little green ‘parks’ out front with strip malls for shopping and highways taking us to our work). These were massive transformations of North American social life. To a large extent the church and its leaders simply joined the new orthodoxy and headed out to the suburbs excited about its church planting future in the midst of the Baby Boom. Few questioned these new ‘truths’ and ‘orthodoxies’ with their promise of a bright, emerging future for all.
How did the young Jacobs come to challenge this orthodoxy? What made it possible for her to see things differently from the accepted reality shaping urban life? Her transformation began during a visit to Philadelphia on assignment to write about that city’s urban development. She was shown the sparkling new high rise towers with their green spaces then taken to an older neighborhood slated for demolition. What she saw astounded her. The older neighborhood was compact and its twisting, small streets crowded with people sitting on porch stoops or coming in and out of tiny shops. By contrast, in the new urban high rise, like the suburbs or the endless new condos and apartments in our day, there were no people to be seen anywhere. Street life had been eradicated. When Jacobs asked the urban gurus about this she only received a quizzical silent look that seemed to say: ‘How could anyone question the new orthodoxy that has brought down its beneficent future from the mountain for the benefit of all?’ But Jacobs was not convinced by what almost everyone else saw as the benefits of the new city and, later, its suburbs.
She discovered that the people (usually poor and working class) living in these new high rises after their neighborhoods were demolished didn’t want to live there, felt isolated and had never been consulted. It was assumed by the planners that the experts knew what others really needed. No one considered sitting among the ordinary people of the city long enough to attend to their narratives and understand what might be needed from their perspective. Plato triumphed! An abstract architectural ideal took precedence over ordinary, everyday life in the midst of the local.
Jane Jacobs was one of a kind. But that is not sufficient an explanation. What enabled her to see what everyone else was missing? First, a good part of it was because of her gender; she was a woman in a man’s world. She saw the world differently and didn’t just accept the established orthodoxies or new-think of the moment as gospel. She saw the world with different eyes. This is a key to good leadership in the unthinkable world. In the early part of the 20th century, women had their place and it wasn’t in the world of journalism or architecture. Jacobs was, by gender, an outsider. Outsiders often have the critical eyes to see differently from the majority and ask questions that challenge assumed orthodoxies. This was the gift of Lesslie Newbigin to the church in the last century.
Further, Jacobs was not formed by the patterned assumptions of a formal education. Because of circumstances, the Depression and being a female, she only finished high school trained as a stenographer. She didn’t go straight on to college, but New York and its neighborhoods became her ‘school.’ When she enrolled in Columbia University, it was in a series of courses that allowed her to study multiple subjects as she pleased. Finally, when she was permitted to enroll in a degree program, she saw how it was going to force her to think in certain directions and she chose not to follow this educational path. Jacobs wasn’t anti-learning. She would go on to write numbers of important books and influence significant academics, such as Lewis Mumford and Richard Florida in our own day. The point is that she did not simply take the accepted categories for granted but pushed past them to ask different questions. This, too, is a characteristic of creative leaders in the age of the unthinkable.
There is much more, but these three characteristics of Jane Jacobs seem to me to be key elements of the leadership we need in our churches today:
- the ability to see with the eyes of the outsider,
- a confidence in and readiness to be among the ordinary in the local, in the belief that these are the places where we discover and learn if we are willing to attend, and
- a spirit that doesn’t simply accept the established categories but is willing to imagine and think outside that world.
What if the established categories in which most of us as pastors were trained simply aren’t the way to think about leadership in this time? What if the accepted imaginations of the current gurus (such as moving from being internally focused to externally focused or moving from institution to organic, or leaving the traditional for the emergent) are one more round of Platonic romanticism that fail to understand what God is up to in the ordinary? Where are the Jane Jacob’s for the church just now?
Learn More about the Fuller Seminary Course: The Practice of Missional Leadership offered February 2010.
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