Wondering about Incarnation
I’m writing from the Pittsburgh International Airport and nursing a serious case of déjà vu.
I used to come here a lot. I served for six years on the Association of Theological Schools’ Board of Commissioners, and during those years I also participated in a number of ATS committees and subcommittees that had me back-and-forth to Pittsburgh, where the ATS’s headquarters are located, every 6–8 weeks. The travel wasn’t easy. As the old commercial mocking Mainers said, “You can’t get there from here.”
These were pre-Covid days, so whereas my ATS service involved the rare conference call, meetings were always in-person because we never considered another way. Now that I’ve traveled here again, I’m wishing we could go back to the old days, which is surprising given how the travel used to tire me out.
Why? Because I’m coming away from an event where I witnessed joy. The ATS is a professional organization that provides oversight and leadership development for graduate theological schools. Its biennial meetings bring together seminary presidents, university divinity school deans, chief academic officers, and a smattering of other theological educational administrators.
In their home contexts, these professionals become accustomed to feeling (usually rightly) that no one gets what they do all day. At the ATS biennial, we can employ shorthand and expect to feel appreciated and understood. To have gone four years since the last in-person gathering didn’t seem so bad until we were back together, realizing what we’d missed.
No longer a commissioner, I came to this biennial in-part to offer a workshop on leadership. I spent the first 15–20 minutes of my workshop coating the floor, walls, and windows with caveats. Don’t get me wrong: I think leadership workshops are essential for getting out of our contexts and heads, gaining perspective on work that can be otherwise consuming. And I didn’t think my workshop was bad. I wouldn’t let that happen, as I care about my work and these people. But the past 2+ years have called into question so much that I thought I knew about leadership, which is turning out to have been, if not wrong, laughably incomplete.
For instance, I’ve spent 20 years studying, writing, and teaching about leading change. Recent events have called on me to ask, Is change ever even led? Or is it just happening, and some leaders are able to come alongside it more effectively than others?
When it comes to ethics and values, I used to think that negotiations and compromise were good to a point, but then there was a certain line past which I’d need to take a stand by walking away.
According to Barbara Wheeler, founder of the Center for the Study of Theological Education at Auburn Seminary in New York City, The ATS is the most diverse Christian organization in the world. It boasts a huge range of theological perspectives, from fundamentalist to humanist. The event I just attended had me sitting at tables where some have no problem with abortion, and others have a big problem with evolution.
In getting together, something happens that’s beyond what can be controlled or analyzed using rational ethical frameworks. It will take me a few days, I’m sure, to come to greater clarity on how the experience of coming back together with colleagues after a long time changed me. On the one hand, the conference was surreal, in that I felt like everyone including myself was pretending Covid isn’t with us anymore — few wore masks — and no one was speaking about the past 30 months in terms of “collective trauma,” or “a great a-woke-ning.” No, we were embracing each other just like old times, even though in the old times we had no appreciation for how special our togetherness was.
I don’t feel like a joke or an impostor when I talk and write about leadership, but I’ve developed a new appreciation for that which I don’t understand. Turns out that I don’t know nearly as much as I thought about incarnation. When two or three are gathered, a joy that goes beyond what we can explain emerges. We kind of knew that before, and now we know it more.
In the workshop I led, I copied and pasted slides from presentations I’d offered elsewhere previously. Here was the only one original to yesterday’s workshop, and to meditate on it humbles me and causes me to wonder, in every sense of the word.
