In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership

Nouwen's writing is so powerful! Humility just drips from every word. He desires, more than anything, that Jesus would be more so he could become less. I was so impressed with this little book on leadership.

He challenges the reader:

1. Do you want to be relevant? Pray more.

The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God's love. (30)

2. Do you want to be popular? Minister more.

It is Jesus who heals, not I; Jesus who speaks words of truth, not I; Jesus who is Lord, not I. (60)

3. Do you want to lead? Be led more.

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. (77)

This will be a book I come back to year after year to remind myself as a leader that I need to be led.

Everything you’d expect if you’ve read Nouwen before. And in just that way, it is fresh and vibrant with the Spirit of God.

Reflections on Church Leadership: In the Name of Jesus by Henri J.M Nouwen is an excellent work on the future of Christian Leadership. Nouwen brilliantly explains the three attributes an individual hoping to succeed in the ministry should wish to have. He explains that the minister of Christ should seek a life of prayer over a life of relevance, a life of ministry over a life of popularity and that they should seek to be led instead of always hoping to lead. To ground this in the scriptures he looks at the temptation of Christ in Matthew's gospel. Using the three temptations Satan offers to Christ as a template for what the future leader should hope to avoid. The image Nouwen presents as the ideal leader of the future is one who is a praying, vulnerable, and trusting leader

Nouwen leaves readers with this “the image of the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility. It is the image of the praying leader, the vulnerable leader, and the trusting leader. May that image fill your hearts with hope, courage, and confidence as you anticipate the new century”. This reminder that a leader should be someone who is always decreasing brings to mind the words of John the Baptist upon the arrival of Christ “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3:30). And so must the Leader of the future. Decrease so that Christ may increase.

In just 100 pages, I think Nouwen leads readers closer to the heart of God than many others do with books twice as long. His reflections on Christian leadership stem from his experience living with mentally handicapped people. He argues that what plagues much of Christian leadership is the desire to be relevant, popular, and powerful as he explores the temptation of Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11) and Peter’s call to ministry (John 21:15-19).

I found myself taking pictures of many pages to save for later and re-reading passages—not because I didn’t understand them but solely to re-experience the beauty of the truth they offered.

I firmly believe that anyone who picks up this book will walk away more in love with Jesus than they were before they started.

After reading Henri Nouwen's The Way of the Heart recently during some times of fasting, I decided to move on to another book by Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus. I liked it perhaps even more than The Way of the Heart. The book is a version of an address Nouwen gave to an event in Washington, D.C., sometime in the 1980s. It's written specifically to Christian leaders, but the content is relevant to any Christian.

Nouwen gazes into the future and imagines what will be most significant for Christian leaders in the 21st century. In answer, he contemplates three shifts in focus for Christ-centered leadership: from relevance to prayer; from popularity to ministry; and from leading to being led. Along the way, Nouwen considers his own life, and especially the big change from teaching at Harvard to caring for the mentally ill at L'Arche. He also wrestles with simply getting older, and wondering if he has become the person he thinks he should be:

After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues. Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. . . . In the midst of this I kept praying, "Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it!" (20, 22)

Any book that opens with something like that is going to make me take notice, since that's basically how I feel these days myself.

In the first section, "From Relevance to Prayer," Nouwen expresses his frustration that seeing the needs of the world is never enough. Of course there are people who need to be fed, but it's not possible for me to do it all! He relates this to the devil's temptation of Jesus to turn stones to bread. Our temptation is to do market research to identify exactly what people need, and then make it happen—thus making ourselves, our ministry, "relevant" by meeting people exactly where they are. Nouwen proposes instead that Jesus's first question was not "Have you solved all the world's problems today?" but "Do you love me?" Our goal, then, isn't figuring everything out and fixing it, but seeking "union with God in prayer" (the original meaning of the word "theology"). The challenge for Christians is to reaffirm through contemplative prayer, again and again, the answer to Jesus's question: Yes, Lord, I love you. We move ourselves away from dogmatic, political, us-vs.-them rhetoric, and toward simple love and devotion and real conversation—as Nouwen says, "a movement from the moral to the mystical" (47).

Writing about "From Popularity to Ministry," Nouwen looks at the second temptation of Jesus, to throw himself down from the top of the temple and be rescued by angels. For Christians today, that is the temptation to be spectacular, to be a superstar. This isolates us, removing us from situations in which we might satisfy our ever-present need to share confession and forgiveness with others. It's true that Jesus then told Peter to "Feed my lambs"—but he sent the disciples out in pairs, not alone.

The final section of the book, "From Leading to Being Led," is about giving up control. Nouwen says he became "aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds" (74). He continues,

One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave in to the temptation of power—political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power—even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are. . . . Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the church . . . we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus. (76-77)

The answer is leadership guided more by theological reflection than by psychology. "Theological reflection is reflecting on the painful and joyful realities of every day with the mind of Jesus and thereby raising human consciousness to the knowledge of God's gentle guidance" (88).

This is a wonderful book, which I'm sure I'll return to, and hopeful that I will incorporate into my actual life. I need it. I respect Nouwen a lot. There aren't many people in the world I respect so highly, and most of them, like Nouwen, are dead. Which would be even more disappointing if some of those people hadn't left traces of their thoughts through words on the page. I'm grateful for those pages and those thoughts.

Every Christian leader should read. Short and powerful. Epilogue may have made me tear up

This is a tiny and timely book. Written over 30 years ago as a series of talks on the future of Christian leader ship - We are now in the future; and we can see that Nouwen was right on the challenges we would face.

In brief, he opens up the Temptations of Jesus faced in the wilderness and applies them to Christian ministry. That is, the temptation to be relevant ; the temptation to be spectacular; and the temptation to be powerful.

brb, crying at the love of Jesus.