Wisdom in the Room

I was invited to lead a “clergy day” for the clergy of the Danville District of the United Methodist Church in Virginia. They asked me to come and talk with them about preaching from the heart of our shared tradition.

As I prepared for our time together, I kept remembering all of the painful “clergy days” I had experienced when I was a parish pastor. In almost every one of those continuing education events, someone had been invited to be the “expert” who would change our practice of ministry and save us from ourselves. And I left every one of those events demoralized because what I learned was that there were ten more things that I should be doing or, perhaps worse, the ten things I was doing were the wrong ones to be doing. The flashbacks of those experiences, in and of themselves, were painful reminders of how deficient I was.

Much of education in America, certainly continuing education in America, is built around a model which underscores the deficiency of the participants and the expertise of the leader / teacher / facilitator. One of the most important learnings I have had in my time at Leadership Education, particularly through my work with Janice Virtue and the Center for Courage & Renewal, is to honor the wisdom of the participants in the room, to trust that they don’t need to be told what is true but given the opportunity to name what they already know to be true. Sure, there are occasions when people need to hear again that the Nicene Creed was written in 325 or that John Wesley didn’t say that there were three types of grace or that we can’t refer to the “parts of the Trinity,” but mostly, we just need a catalyst – an excuse, in some ways – to claim what our experiences have already taught us.

So, I stood before that group of clergy and I said to them that I have two assumptions about our time together. First, that there was wisdom in the room, that I was no expert come to tell them how to preach but that I had come to help them harvest their own learnings. The second assumption was just as vital, though. I told them that I believed that all of us can be better tomorrow than we were yesterday, can preach better next Sunday than we did last. When we pay attention to the lessons of our lives, we teach ourselves how to be better; of this, I am sure.

 Part of the reason I have been so slow to start any kind of blog is because I object to the inherent narcissism involved; it is its own permutation of an “expert” culture. Yet, by titling my blog, “Wisdom in the Room,” I am reminding myself that sometimes we need excuses to hear our own wisdom and that writing itself can be the catalyst that leads to hearing and speaking truth to one another … and to ourselves.