Translating the Trinity to the Church and to Leadership

As I start week 5 of the sabbatical. I'm thankful for Joan's theological partnership in person and your theological partnership via e-mail. (Usually it's the other way around.) Joan recommended my newest devotional guide and I would recommend it to anyone who is a leader in the church: "Leading a Life with God: The Practice of Spiritual Leadership." In the first devotion Rev. Daniel Wolfpert (Pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Crookston, Minnesota) urges us as leaders in the church to take time to listen to God. By being silent he says we free ourselves of our need to control everything and open ourselves to actually listen to God instead of ourselves. He says that, in our silence the first person we encounter is surprisingly "our fallen selves". In other words we have to face up to our temptations in the wilderness before we can be about the business of God. He goes further to say that the business of God is a life of prayer: "Prayer is not just another program to be undertaken by a strange few but it is the program, the one activity that undergirds all activities." (p. 21) What a great insight and it is totally consistent with the other book we have been studying together in Sunday School classes in the church "Unbinding the Church".

My academic reading this week is equally challenging and particularly helpful in my project "Trinitarian Leadership." Miroslav Volf, a theologian who wrote "After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity" explored how we can find any correspondence between the Trinity and the Church since God is God and we are not. This is crucial for a project that is trying to develop a way of Christian leadership that is modeled after the triune life of God. Miroslav starts with the statement that "In a strict sense, there can be no correspondences to the interiority of the divine persons on the human level." (p. 210) He is talking about the fact that the persons of the Trinity mutually permeate each other- that each person of the Trinity is at the same time subject and object (Jesus says "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 10:38). Of course we as human being can never be that close in any human relationship, even marriage. And yet Miroslav says because the Holy Spirit dwells in us (remember "We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord") then by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we can be made by God into a "communion corresponding to the Trinity; a communion in which personhood and sociality are equiprimal." (p.13) In other words we can never know each other as intimately and completely as the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Holy Spirit. And yet in the church, as we are mutually known by God, we begin to know each other. We begin to understand each other "even as we have been understood" (1 Cor. 13) It is fascinating when my academic reading and devotional readings come together (as they often do) and this is one of those places where theologian Miroslav Volf and pastor Daniel Wolpert are essentially saying the same thing- our unity and community does not come from ourselves but rather from the Christ by the Holy Spirit. Both writers challenge us as Christian leaders to invest time becoming a community together in Christ before we dare to lead anyone in a shared Christian journey. (Food for thought; Manna in the wilderness: bread and fish to feed the five thousand!) Let me know what you think....