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Upgrading Leadership In Churches Interview With Rev. Dr. Bishop William Willimon Hugh Ballou: Greetings, this is Hugh Ballou. Welcome to this version of The Nonprofit Exchange. We talk to leaders worldwide about their particular perspective in leadership, their expertise, and to hear from their perspective, from their seat that they led from for so many years. My guest today is Will Willimon, Dr. Reverend Will Willimon. We are sitting in Durham, North Carolina at the Duke Divinity School where Will will tell you a little bit about what he does here. He and I got connected a number of years ago when he came to north Alabama as a bishop, and I was serving in a Methodist church. We first got connected there. I have been extremely impressed with his writing, and we have interfaced a few times. You have even spoken at one of my events in Greensboro. Welcome, Will, to the Nonprofit Exchange. Will Willimon: Thank you. Hugh: It’s like when I go somewhere and say, “I’m Hugh Ballou. This is Will Willimon.” Tell us about yourself, your background, and why you’re here at the Duke Divinity School. Will: I’m a Methodist preacher from South Carolina. As a young preacher, I was summoned by Duke Divinity School. I came up here and joined the faculty back in the ‘70s to teach worship. Didn’t like teaching full-time, so I went back in a parish in South Carolina. Then again Duke called me to the pulpit of Duke Chapel, and I was there 20 years. It was my first experience with a ministry that large, a budget that large, a staff that large. From there, I was a bishop. After being a bishop for eight years, I was invited back to Duke. I teach courses in preaching and mission. I also teach a class for ordained leadership, and for the doctor of ministry, I teach a leadership class. In my latter years, I find myself moving more into leadership. In fact, in my mind, I think every class I teach here at Duke Divinity School is a leadership class because I think leadership is utterly necessary for ordained clergy to be leaders, but often that is something they say they don’t get in divinity school. It’s right at the top of the clergy list of skills they wish they had more of. Hugh: That’s amazing. As people go into this meaningful work in ministry, first off, it’s very difficult work. It’s very challenging work. Let’s go back a minute. We talked about leadership. I want you to define leadership. I also want to ask you about what do you think from interviewing pastors that have been in churches for a while, what do they think they wish they had known before they started? Define leadership. Then what are you hearing from preachers out there they wish they had gotten from this class you’re teaching? Will: I hear pastors complain about administration. That consumes too much of their time, they don’t enjoy doing it, they had no training in how to administer well. Larger church pastors, whenever you’re together, the talk always gets to staff: staff problems, problematic people on staff, hiring people, holding people accountable, all those things you got to do in supervision. I think few pastors come into the ministry saying, “God is calling me to administer a church.” And yet that is the work you find yourself in. Another problem is I know when I went into ministry, my vision of myself was I will be a part of a small rural congregation in South Carolina. I hope I’ll have a part-time secretary. That would be wonderful. Then you wake up one day like I did at Duke Chapel, and I had 30 human beings that I was supposed to be supervising and orchestrating and coordinating and leading. That was when I reached out and tried to get better leadership administrative skills. Probably should have reached out sooner. I hear about administration. Then I hear pastors complaining about conflicted congregations, congregations that don’t seem to respect their authority and leadership. This whole complex set of things that leaders, managers, administrators have to do. I hear a lot of that. You mentioned that being a pastoral leader is hard. I agree. However, there are times I think when pastors get together and complain, whine about administrative leadership difficulties thinking this is what everybody faces who works with human beings that have some tasks assigned to them, some mission they are engaged in. Maybe the surprising thing is that pastors are surprised this is the world. Hugh: This is the work. It’s with people. Years ago, I interviewed you for an article I was doing for a magazine on the topic of conflict. We were talking about particularly how pastors do or don’t approach conflict. One of the statements you made was typically, pastors want to move away from conflict. One of the people I interviewed on the podcast was a woman named Dr. Roberta Gilbert. She was a psychiatrist and a colleague of Murray Bowen. I don’t know if you- Will: I know Bowen theory, yeah. Hugh: I have been studying it for nine years. She was on this series of podcasts. What she helped me realize was that we move toward conflict, remaining calm, sticking to the facts. Instead of avoiding it, moving toward that. I found that Bowen systems is a way to know self, so it helped me to reframe some of my leadership. But conflict is one of the things that exists in any human system like Bowen talks about. Part of what that theory helped me do was he calls differentiation of self. What are our principles? That is a really foundational piece for leadership is defining self. Will: Agreed. For pastors, self-knowledge is a never-ending task. It may be complicated by the fact that for pastors, we have lots of opportunities to be self-deceitful if we want to be. One, I think people aid us in our self-deceit as they say to us, “You’re just so loving and caring. We have never had a pastor like you.” Pushing all those buttons. Then you start to believe that. It is a halo effect. I was in a church recently that has severe problems with decline and severe problems with their staff being unable to step up. The first thing the pastor said was, “We have a wonderful staff here. I feel so privileged to be working with them.” I’m thinking that from one angle, that sounds charitable, and you seem to be a charitable person. You’re thinking positively about these people. From another angle though, let’s be honest, you don’t want to do the work that would be required by being truthful, that you’ve hired the wrong people, you are going to have some painful conversations, you need to make some moves. Rather than do that work, you are going to say, “We have a wonderful staff, and we are all Christians.” I love that self-knowledge. For instance, in a leadership class I teach here, two thirds of the class always admits they have problems with conflict. Much of the class says one of the appeals of Christian ministry is that they could do this without hurting people. In business, you have to fire people. I know it sounds ridiculous as you know the church. I try to say it’s very important to own that. I put it on my list, too, with clergy. I think we clergy think of ourselves as powerless people. We look at our paycheck and say we don’t have much influence or power or they’d be paying me more. It’s easy for us to say there is a problem of the staff, that it’s for the personnel committee. They deal with this; since I’m the pastor, I don’t deal with that. I think that can be very dangerous. One of my jobs as a bishop was to discipline errant clergy who had moral lapses, and invariably, the image was, “I am just a loving, caring pastor. I couldn’t hurt anybody.” That is dangerous. It’s important for pastors to own who they are, the power they have. Use that power carefully. Self-knowledge is a big deal. I don’t know if the president of General Motors has to know thyself, as Socrates advised, but pastors do. There are so many opportunities for deceit, for those moments where you say: I am telling you this for your own good and because I love you. Probably more typical is for pastors to say in response to when I ask “Why didn’t you tell the truth? Why didn’t you share the facts?” “Oh, I am such a loving, caring person. I didn’t want to hurt this person.” We pastors have many resources for deceiving ourselves about our real motives. Hugh: Along that channel, I find that the really best leaders have a confidential advisor or coach, a mentor, somebody that helps them discover their blind spots because they are called blind spots for a good reason. That would be one of them. It’s an accountability partner. Will: Good advice. I remember we had a consultant in Alabama, and he educated us during a day about what it takes to revitalize a moribund, static, plateaued congregation. You gotta do this and this and this. Have these discussions, these strategies. At the end of the day, at the bottom of the list he put- His voice raised and he said, “None of this can be done by yourself. You’ve got to get external assistance. You have to get a coach, an advisor, a mentor. You have to get somebody who is not embedded with you, somebody who has no power in that configuration.” I sure found that to be true. As Alabama’s bishop, the church gave me a job but I had no training, and as you can see, very few gifts. I had 800 pastors, 600 churches. It was a leadership management nightmare. After a couple months, I got a retired business executive. I asked, “Bill, what’d you make your last year at the life insurance company?” He said, “About $400,000.” I said, “Well, I’m prepared to offer you $20,000 to work with me and to be my coach, to be my advisor. God wants you to do this. God has told me to tell you to do this. You wouldn’t want to disappoint the Lord, would you?” He said, “Wow, you really do need an advisor if that’s your attitude about things.” It was wonderful. He had an office near mine. Bill went with me to meetings. He sat at the back of the room usually, took notes. We would have an evaluation after the meeting. He would say things to me like, “Once again, you talked about a third of the time, and two thirds of the time, they were talking.” Or he would say things to me like, “You know, you’re asking less questions than you did when we first started. I think you have to discipline yourself to ask more questions and make fewer declarative statements. Your questions are not as good as they were in the early days. I’m afraid you’re falling into the trap of thinking you know what’s going on now. No, you don’t.” Because that is a moving target, people are being deceptive, and they don’t even know they are being deceptive. It was wonderful. The trouble with being a bishop is it is really hard to find anybody who will tell you the truth, except generally your most severe critics whom you can’t stand because they are so critical. Bill was wonderful. Now, when any pastor says to me things like, “Oh, this church. I tried this, and it didn’t work.” “Let me stop you right there. I know where you’re going with this. I am going to recommend you get a coach. You get some help. Let me just stop you right there and talk about the help.” I’m just not sure pastors can do much of anything without somebody coming in from the outside and making the work as difficult as Jesus means it to be. I use that phrase a lot. If the work assigned to us was simply to be a loving, caring group of people, a lot of churches are a loving, caring group of people because that’s all the pastor knows how to lead, the pastor is uncomfortable around anybody in their twenties, so therefore the pastor ends up spending a lot of time with people my age. Unfortunately, Jesus Christ, the work he has given us to do, the mission is much more demanding than that. There is going to be disagreements. There will be crises, not simply because people are hard to work with, which they are, but because Jesus Christ is hard to work with. He won’t let us be the men’s garden club. I keep trying and thinking about leadership. What difference does it make that we are Christian doing this? How is our leadership of a different quality than, say, leadership by a well-meaning humanist or something? That is a hard question to answer, but nevertheless, I think it important for clergy. Hugh: It is. We take sound leadership business principles, and we learn from them. When we put them in the church, they are different because it is the church. There are things we can learn. In my conversations with Jim Forbes, a pastor from Riverside, New York, he said, “We need for our spiritual journey experience 15-20% outside of our discipline.” Talk about the coach so we don’t get stale and blind. Nothing else is there. This is what I know. Part of what Bishop Joe said to us at Blacksburg is the Methodist Church was losing 1,200 members a week in America. We get on a track where we think this is how it ought to go, but it’s not working. We have sat ourselves up for failure. Some of the gaps in leadership. When I talked to Cal Turner, and he has talked to the council of bishops, he went to his leadership team at Dollar General and said, “I am the son of the boss. I got this because I am son of the boss.” He was president and chairman of the board. “You have the skills. I have the vision.” He claimed the vision, but he said that he wanted them to do this. Everybody stepped up. Cal said, “Hugh, leadership is about defining your gaps and finding really good people to fill them.” He also pointed out that transparency is- You’re not whiny, but he was very straightforward. They know. They know you don’t know it. Why pretend? If I didn’t tell them, they would be like, “Well, I’ll show him.” There is this vision thing. I worked with Dick Wills when he was bishop in Tennessee. We were talking about a cabin retreat. I was talking about the vision for that since I was leading it. He said, “The cabinet is not going to develop the vision. I didn’t see anywhere in the Bible where God gave the vision to a committee. Here is the vision.” That is the vision piece. I don’t think the great commandment is your mission. That is a commandment. That is a commission. That is not a choice. Paul Borden said that when you brought him in to talk to north Alabama. That is not a choice. What is it that God has called this church or organization? We are talking about leadership in the church. There are some unique differences, but there are some global differences for anybody leading any organization. A lot of what you are talking about corporate leaders have trouble with, too. Talk about the pastor. Back to Bowen systems. There is this pseudo self and basic self. We want to please people, so we go into pleaser mode, which is a downward spiral, rather than going with our principles and making the right decisions for the right reason. Not pulling people in and saying, “This is not how we do things.” It’s a pleaser personality. You did say to me in that interview a while back that in addition to avoiding conflict, it gets worse as it goes on. You also said that conflict is the sign of energy in an organization. We don’t ever eliminate it. We are energetic people. Managing this and addressing it, I think we misunderstand words. One word is we need to confront the conflict. The root of it is with your front. It doesn’t mean you hit them with a baseball bat. With your front means approach it directly, calmly, and openly, stating the facts. There is a huge challenge I see in this area you’re talking about. How can pastors equip themselves, besides having a good coach? I suggest it doesn’t always have to be clergy. Will: You can have coaches. When pastors talk about difficulty of personalities, because you have graduated from divinity school, you have had zero training in how to handle people, how to hold people accountable, how to have difficult conversations with people about their work. But I guarantee you you have people in your church that God has called to the ministry or personnel work. Draw on them. Commission them to do this with you…
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