First Presbyterian Church
Leading from the Middle
Sermon for July 15, 2007
by Mike Ferguson, Guest Speaker

As you can see in your bulletin, the name of today's sermon is “Leading from the Middle.” Most of the ideas you'll hear this morning are taken from a book called “Leading People from the Middle,” written by our keynote speaker at summer conference last month, Bill Robinson.

Bill is president of Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash. – not Whitman College in Walla Walla, the place that Ally is going beginning next month, but a very good school nonetheless. What Bill taught us about leadership astounded me – not because he gave us some grand unifying theory with an overarching metaphor and three examples to perfectly explain every assertion he made.

No, it was more because what Bill said is so simple that everybody in leadership – in business, academia, government, and, yes, in churches – should lead the way Bill says has worked best for him. Bill is the kind of person you want to spend time with. He smiles and laughs easily, and he's a wonderful story-teller. He's very approachable. When you ask him a good question, he tells you it's a good question and even admits, “I never thought of that” when your question makes him think a bit before he answers. That is a good way to make us students feel better about ourselves. It's also good leadership.

Like you might have guessed when you saw this sermon title, Bill wants leaders to do their work from the middle. He says that the companies and organizations and denominations and congregations that do the best work today are decentralized. “Federated” is his term. By relying less on a powerful and top-down central office, they empower the people closest to the customer to take care of them. They've found that people leading others from the middle, and not relying on some far-off central office, are much more effective leaders.

All week while Bill was talking I kept thinking that one person who also led from the middle was Jesus. He took up the life of his disciples and his friends, accepting their hospitality, listening to and sympathizing with people and healing those people whose stories are recorded in the four gospels and probably more people than that.

Jesus also spent a fair amount of time listening to his closest friends, the disciples, argue about which ones were the closest to doing God's will, even while Jesus himself was demonstrating God's will for their lives in his own words and deeds. Jesus must have been a very patient leader, because the gospels record one episode after another describing how stupid the disciples were and how Jesus stuck with them anyway.

One of my favorite stories – one that shows better than most others the degree to which the disciples did not understand this teacher they'd been working with for a long time - is today's Scripture lesson. It's found in Mark Chapter 10, verses 35 to 45. You'll find it on page . As Jamie and I read this story together, try to listen for the way in which Jesus wants his disciples to reorder their priorities. The word of God as it's found in Mark's gospel:

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?   And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory. But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant,but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.

When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life for the ransom for many .

This ends today's reading from God's holy word. Let us pray …

We're all leaders in something we do. If we don't lead at work, then we lead a volunteer organization, or a Little League or soccer team, or a group of students or neighborhood kids, or at least we try to lead others by example and hope somebody is watching when we're setting that good example.

It's amazing to me that these two disciples – one of whom, John, keeps calling himself in his own gospel narrative “the disciple whom Jesus loved” – would, when they finally earned their heavenly reward, toss out the example that Jesus set every day. That example was Jesus' orientation to lead from the middle, from the heart and center of the organization, down in the trenches. Instead, James and John seek special seats at either side of their Lord in the heavenly realm.

So typical, isn't it? Like these two disciples, we, too, often feel like we've paid our dues in this life, and we want to make sure that in the next life, someone else will do the heavy lifting. We've earned our rest and our good seats, after all. And, we figure, even if Saint Peter doesn't offer us a luxury suite in the heavenly stadium, we're entitled at least to box seats, and not something we probably deserve, somewhere in the upper deck in right field.

Jesus turns our expectations and those of his friends, the disciples, upside down. If we want to be first later, we must be content with being last for now. We must serve if we want to be served. In other words, even in situations when we're called to lead, it has to be from the middle.

Bill, our summer conference speaker, tells this story about a friend of his whose attitude reflected Jesus' words of challenge to his disciples:

“Anne Martindale Williams, principal cellist of the Pittsburgh Symphony for the past 25 years, is my favorite cellist in all the world. … She, her husband Joe and my wife Bonnie would do chamber music programs, so we became very good friends.

During Advent of 1979, I invited a bunch of my crazy, tone-deaf friends to come over to the house for a Christmas carol party. For this crew, the operative word in the invitation was ‘party.' I had somehow conned Bonnie into accompanying our ‘chorus' and almost facetiously invited Anne and Joe to come over. ‘Sure,' Anne replied, ‘should we bring our instruments?'

This woman, who spent her Friday nights four feet to the right of conductor Andre Previn, who paid three times more for her cello than for their house, was offering to cast her musical pearls before my musically sub-swine friends. As I sat in our tiny living room watching her roar with laughter and play with a virtuosity that not ten other living cellists could match, I realized that she was every bit as comfortable in the middle of regular people as in the front of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

“Such security just magnified the power of her selflessness. When Anne was in the middle, she cared nothing of image, nothing of impressing others, nothing of anything than giving a gift to her friends.” 1

That night during Advent Bill had an epiphany. Anne taught Bill something about leading from the middle, and he's used it ever since he became a college president at age 36. He loves to mix it up with students, faculty, and his cabinet, but he also knows his unique role as the leader of one of the best universities in the West.

Bill is quite clear that in his role as Whitworth president that there are some things only he, the head of the university, can do. Here's a good example of what only Bill can do: at Whitworth, only Bill can be a college president who helps students move their gear into their dorms every September.

He says, “The staff can draft a perfunctory acknowledgement from the president, but only I can help a student carry suitcases into the dorm and have her call home to say, ‘Guess who helped me move in?'” 2

Bill told us at summer conference that when he walks on his campus and he overhears a student talking on his cell phone to his parents, he'll sometimes fall in step with the student and ask for the cell phone. It's a small enough school that Robinson gets to know his students fairly quickly.

“This is President Bill Robinson,” he tells the startled parent. “I just want you to know your son is doing good work here. In fact, right now he's walking back to his dorm after spending all afternoon studying in the library.” 3

With that, President Bill hands the phone back to the student and goes his way.

That's leading from the middle. So is spending time with students and noticing what they need and when they need it. Bill has learned that each year students need their president to be visible around campus in early November, when students are often down after mid-terms but still a few weeks away from Thanksgiving break. They need his reassuring presence less in late September, when, he says, “student life is so good, they don't even know I exist.” 4

When students need their president to take an interest in them - say, in early November – Robinson often joins them for a meal in the dining hall. When student life is good, he eats at his desk or in the faculty dining room.

So part of leading people from the middle is knowing your people – what they need, when they need it, and how what they need should be delivered. Sometimes we need a kick. Other times we need an arm around our shoulder.

One of Bill's friends is Tom Cronin, one of the nation's foremost scholars of the American presidency and a guy I read as a college student. Cronin pointed out paradoxes that describe our expectations of our president and, by extension, our other leaders:

•  We want a powerful and popular leader, but we're suspicious of strong, centralized leadership

•  We yearn for a commoner to lead us – a commoner with a heroic, visionary performance

•  We want a just, compassionate leader, but we also admire cunning and at times ruthless leadership

•  We want powerful, self-confident leadership, but we're suspicious of leaders who are arrogant and above criticism

•  We expect our leaders to be visionary, but not unrealistic 5

You've probably heard the argument that the people weren't ready for the kind of leader that Jesus was. They expected a political leader with the strength to throw off the oppression of the occupying Romans and deliver God's people; instead they got the inner strength of a man who understood that status and wealth and position and power weren't his to offer, even to his closest friends, the disciples.

But here's a key that for me identifies a leadership quality that makes Jesus our role model even today: he saw qualities and potential in his 12 disciples and others close to him, including Mary, Martha and Lazarus, and he helped them develop strengths they already had.

Here's how Robinson describes that process: “Leaders do not bring vision to an organization; rather, they extract a vision from it. Successful leaders dig into their organizations, mine the gold, and then figure out how and where to sell it.” 6

At the heart of our own church's mission statement – the part that's printed in bold each month in the newsletter – are a bunch of verbs: witness, welcome, nurture and sustain, reach out and serve, support, unite, and invite and welcome. Those verbs spell out what our church believes is important for carrying out ministry in the 21 st Century.

They're action verbs. They are the “given” for our church, the things that we can all agree on. Given the talents, energy, treasure and vision that God has given us, we're saying, here is how we are going to do what God will have us do at this time, in this community,.

We're called to do nothing less for God, and we're called to take on our mission working side by side with each other and with people of other religious stripes, too.

There's a story – Robinson calls it a fable – about one of poet Carl Sandburg's final public appearances, in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois. He finished his speech for which he received deafening applause. People were calling for an encore, so he shuffled back on the stage.

The hall grew quiet. Sandburg, one of our wisest literary leaders, offered this piece of advice for an encore: “Everybody is smarter than anybody.”

That's the mission statement for leaders who do their work from the middle. Working together and listening to each other, we're stronger than we are depending on someone to save us from all our problems. Or arguing with each other about which of us gets the good seats.

All together, we're smart and powerful we can do anything. Divided we're ineffective and not the people we're called to be. To lead from the middle, we must find God's middle and get to work. Amen.

1 Bill Robinson, “Leading People from the Middle,” Executive Excellence Publishing, p. 55.

2 Ibid, p. 108.

3 Keynote address, Cascades Summer Conference, June 25-29, Reed College, Portland, OR.

4 Op. cit., p.86.

5 Ibid, pp. 37-44.

6 Ibid, p.44.