Spiritual life in North America is in a state of dramatic change that spiritual leaders must address. A key competency needed to effectively deal with such change is conscious use of self. It is core to meeting the challenges of the changes that are thrust upon us, then turning those challenges into opportunities to create change that will sustainably serve the spiritual needs of those we serve.
A recent study by Faith Communities Today charted a decline in the average attendance of U.S. congregations from 137 in 2000 to 65 just 20 years later. Mainline Protestant Christian and medium and smaller congregations have disproportionately suffered those losses.
Many surveys have confirmed that the fastest growing religious group in the United States is “None of the Above,” the religiously unaffiliated. This includes as much as one-third of the members of “Gen Z,” those born approximately between 1995 and 2010.
This spiritual landscape leaves many existing congregations and their leaders with great uncertainty. The stress of uncertainty often pushes us to be driven by the automatic responses of our socializations, past experiences, and egos. On automatic, our responses can be ineffectual and even aggravate the situations we which to improve.
Conscious use of self allows us to be deliberate and intentional in how we use of our energies, our beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to both respond effectively to change thrust upon us and to create the changes we desire.
Conscious use of self allows us to recognize our automatic tendencies and replace them with behaviors more precise for effecting change through love and compassion. Love and compassion that can be vigorous and challenging as well as calming and still.
Let’s further explore spiritual leadership and conscious use of self through four topics:
- Intention and Impact
- Connectedness
- Ego
- Structure vs Spirit
Intention and Impact
Conscious use of self involves being aware of how effective our actions, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs are toward accomplishing whatever goals we might have. It includes acknowledgment of our responsibility for our behaviors, mental processes, and the consequences they produce.
Awareness it where it starts. Spiritual leaders and their congregations must consciously choose behaviors and related mental processes whose consequences move us toward our goals. Such self-awareness, conscious choice, and conscious action contrasts with reacting automatically in ways that may not produce the results we want. This is essential in challenging situations that are important to us and that we want to go well.
A spiritual leader might want to promote a sense of peace and comfort. A relaxed, open-hearted, pleasant smile may be all we need to offer. At other times, a spiritual leader must be passionate and exhortative if they are to further their spiritual goals and objectives in the face of apathy or ennui. However, spiritual leaders with singular styles may miss their mark if stuck in a pastorally passive mode or a fire and brimstone mode. Neither is likely to have the desired impact in situations needing a different approach.
In the same way, congregations may long to reach their community with words and actions of love, compassion, and social justice, or assist others with spiritual growth, connection with that which is divine, passionate, complete, and ineffable. Yet, their organizational behavior betrays that intention by focusing on institutional needs of finances and facilities, or a nostalgia for a time when they were more prosperous and influential.
Such leaders and congregations are simply on automatic about how to achieve their desired impact. The histories of Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and Gautama Buddha show a full range of behavioral flexibility to ensure eliciting their intended impact.
Connectedness
Connecting with those we wish to impact is a primary task of a leader, spiritual or otherwise, as well as for a congregation. Connecting with someone involves the other person or people experiencing that they are understood, that you “get” them, that you are engaged with them. Many church leaders and congregations today seem only engaged with their current, dwindling institutions.
Church leaders, habituated from centuries of socially prescribed church attendance, have lost sight of the need to connect and engage with…
- The entirety of their congregation, of which individuals from lack of engagement will fade away with their absence hardly noticed.
- The children of their congregations have not felt socially compelled to attend church given the greater latitude of choice allowed today.
- The communities beyond their congregations.
Connectedness is the very essence of spirituality. It is also a fundamental aspect of human experience. Diminished and diminishing faith communities speak directly to church leaders and congregations having lost connection with those who might wish a deeper sense of belonging, of engagement, of connection.
Ego Management
Ego is our sense of personal and group identity and self-esteem. Ego can provide the clarity of identity, autonomy, and agency that is essential to mental health in the western world.
A weak ego, however, can lead to excessive self-diminishment and lack of agency. Alternatively, weak egos need to prop themselves up when imagined threats to their sense of esteem. This creates a sense of separation, fear, and an unhealthy attachment to externally oriented desires.
Spiritual leaders and their congregants prone to weak egos are at risk of self-aggrandizement, wrapping themselves in the trapping of religion or suffering from risk aversion, replacing agency, and prohibiting needed actions.
Both instances of weak ego are self-centered and hinder the sense of connectedness and compassion that are part and parcel of spiritual leadership and inhibit the congregation from achieving its desired impacts.
When our egos are frail, conscious use of self allows us over and over to recognize the threat to our personal spirituality, as well as our intended congregational impact. Only then can we manage our egos, rather than be managed by them.
Conscious use of self allows us to befriend our ego’s weak aspects, which actualizes its more useful aspects. Our strong ego cultivates qualities such as humility, surrender, detachment, and compassion and chuckles at the pride it takes in doing so.
Structure and Spirit
The relationship between structure and the spiritual is important and often mismanaged. Spiritual leaders and their congregations need structure to provide a framework and support for spiritual practice and development. They must challenge and transcend structures that have become confining and divisive rather than welcoming.
Too easily the institutional structure of a religious congregation replaces the spiritual space it was meant to support. Dogma and insistence on “correct” practice too often have overwhelmed spiritual practices.
The experience of spirit often includes a strong sense of Rightness and Truth that our egos structure into static belief systems. Static beliefs become automatic, dogmatic, and are too easily used for oppression of those who are perceived to be “other.”
Still, religious communities provide structures that can provide a sense of meaning and purpose that serve as a guide for ethical behavior and decision-making framework. We also need structure to remind us, in illo tempore, of our experience of spirit. On automatic, structures can become devoid of spirituality.
With conscious use of self, we can intentionally and deliberately keep track of when our structures and belief systems have ceased to be effective. This enables us to alter consciously and purposefully our structures to better support our sense of connectivity, compassion, and love.
Human beings are not static—we are dynamic. We learn; we grow; we create. And so is spirit. It too is dynamic, it learns, it grows, deepens, and creates. Let our beliefs do the same.
In closing, conscious use of self is requisite for spiritual leadership if spirituality is not to lose its spirit. With conscious use of self, the courage, the patience, passion, and persistence needed to create “peace on earth, goodwill to all” can become our reality.