The eCrozier

One of the recurring laments I hear from clergy is their perception that many laity in their congregations don’t have a serious investment in the Church’s mission. For the most part, clergy aren’t saying laity lack a love for God or that they don’t desire for the Church to flourish, but the clergy’s experience is that the laity are not committed enough to the transformation of their church into a vital center of mission for Jesus Christ. While there may be a few laity out there who truly fit that definition, my experience tells me that the problem isn’t a lack of commitment from the laity, rather it’s a lack of emotionally intelligent leadership by the clergy and lay leaders of congregations.

In their new book, The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe a widespread problem they found in many of the businesses and organizations they studied. Leaders, they contend, regularly and unconsciously inhibit the commitment and creativity of the people with whom they work. The authors make the corresponding point that this ultimately hurts the emotional inner lives of employees because as they experience this inhibiting, they lose their personal engagement and connectivity with their work. The authors conclude that all this is very avoidable.

Amabile and Kramer argue that employees both want and need to make real progress toward meaningful work. They write of the “inner work life” of employees. When this “inner work life” is attended to, even in small ways, employees become “more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs.” So, before setting production metrics, work goals, or strategic objectives, leaders would do well to focus on creating the conditions for their employees to develop “positive inner work lives.” And for this to be positive for the long haul, employees must actually experience in tangible ways some personal meaning in the work they’re doing. When that happens, the commitment and investment in the goals of the organization deepen and become widely shared.

What might we learn from this research in the Church? My hunch is our leaders often wrongly assess laity as being complacent or apathetic and lacking sufficient motivation to accomplish the goals of the Church’s mission. What really might be going on is this: Clergy and lay leaders have failed to engage the laity in their “inner spiritual lives” in such a way that helps them connect their personal spiritual practices with the larger mission of the Church. Without attending seriously to the inner spiritual lives of the laity, clergy and lay leaders unconsciously inhibit the commitment, and consequently, the creativity and passion of the laity for the Church’s mission.

Church leaders, I believe, need to spend less time on grand strategies and audacious goals. Those are important, to be sure, in the long run. But they are the cart before the horse, so to speak. When a critical mass of laity have, through personal spiritual practices, attended to their inner spiritual lives, and thus developed from the inside out a commitment to the Gospel, then church leaders will not lament a lack of commitment from the laity. They will actually find themselves leading a congregation alive with missionary zeal.  Or, they will discover that they better just get out of the way.

+Scott