Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better
In 1987, the genre-defying songwriter Steve Taylor released his fourth studio album, I Predict 1990. I loved Taylor’s progressive music, which blended pop, new wave, and a little post-punk, and I was smitten with his intelligent lyrics, which bordered on irreverence. His was one of only a handful of “Christian” artists that I resonated with in my later years of High School, as, in my mind, so much other popular Christian music was tedious, homogenized, and vapid.
The song I remember most from that album was the sarcastic “Since I gave up hope, I feel a lot better.” If the title alone provides a hint of the content, the first stanza is a dead giveaway:
Enter the young idealistChasing dragons to slayExit the hustlerPacking up his M.B.A.
There were moments when Margaret Wheatley’s book Finding Our Way reminded me of Steve Taylor’s song. This book, first published in 2005, provides hints of Wheatly’s struggles when she did not see her unique vision of leadership take deep root in our culture. Here’s an example:
“For too long, I have lived in the world wanting to change it. This has been an impossible stance. It takes normal desires to contribute something to the human condition and intensifies them into crusades that are doomed to disappoint. I have gradually weaned myself from this posture, I think because it is just too exhausting and unsatisfying.” (244 Finding Our Way)
Wheatly’s widely acclaimed and groundbreaking book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World was released ten years before she published those words. Her thesis in Leadership and the New Science represented a new way forward for leadership and organizational management. She suggested that what we have learned from chaos theory and quantum physics should inform us regarding how to engage with organizations’ unpredictability and uncertainty. In her assessment, control and certainty are not a healthy or effective way to lead; instead, solutions emerge from within the system when space and attention are given to organic self-organization.
Predating what Edgar and Peter Schein would write in their book Humble Leadership (but much like it), Wheatly decries the accepted practice of leaders who exist to command and control their subordinates and organization. She and the Schein’s both instruct their readers that relational leadership is the key to how effective organizations can thrive in an uncertain and volatile world.
In Leadership and the New Science, modern science was the foundational connection and metaphor, and that brand of science is significantly connected to postmodern ideology. Wheatly writes, “The new physics cogently explains that there is no objective reality out there waiting to reveal its secrets. There are no recipes or formulas, not checklists or expert advice that describe “reality.” (9). That’s just one early example.
Many of her leadership ideas reminded me of post-structuralism in literature, which disembodies a text from a specific meaning (even an author’s intended meaning) and instead invites each reader to provide their own interpretation.
(Maybe that’s why my brain made the connection to Steve Taylor’s post-modern rock)
Whether you agreed with Wheatley or not, these were unconventional, unorthodox, and innovative ideas. She had charted and created fresh maps to help others navigate a new world of leadership, and she was disappointed when people didn’t use what she thought could change the world for their organizational journeys.
And that brings me to our doctoral work. Many of us have been laboring over the last two years to focus and strengthen our contributions. We may have thought of wild success when we started, believing we could create a project that made a significant difference in the world. But now that we are honing it down, perhaps we realize that our contributions will, at best, be what, in Oxford, Jason called “a small drop” in the vast ocean of knowledge.
So, maybe it’s okay to give up hope that what we produce will make as big a difference as we dream it will. The result is not ultimately our responsibility; the contribution is.
As Wheatly says, “In the end, We do what we are called to do because we feel called to do it. We walk silently, willingly, down the well-trodden path still lit by the fire of millions. And the rest, I now know, is not our business. (244 Finding Our Way)
I think if we give up hope that our projects will change the world but hold onto the knowledge that we’re doing it because we’re called to, perhaps we’ll feel a lot better.
About the Author
Tim Clark
I'm on a lifelong journey of discovering the person God has created me to be and aligning that with the purpose God has created me for. I've been pressing hard after Jesus for 40 years, and I currently serve Him as the lead pastor of vision and voice at The Church On The Way in Los Angeles. I live with my wife and 3 kids in Burbank California.10 responses to “Since I gave up hope I feel a lot better”
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Tim,
I love how you connected Wheatley’s disappointment in how her ideas did not take root with our NPO’s and coming back to our calling. I’ve had some very profound moments with Jesus asking if all this work was worth it, and what if it really has no impact. He always brings me back to the thought of simple obedience and as you said, calling. So hopefully I will make it to the finish line…
Thanks for reminding all of us of this.
Esther, i wrote this post for everyone else, but really, like any good sermon, I wrote it primarily for myself.
I never want to be cynical about my NPO but I also don’t want to have unreasonalbe expectations. That’s why what she said spoke to me, this is about obedience and contribution, the outcome or impact is not up to me.
It’s a good lesson for all of life, isn’t it?
I also have had similar thoughts regarding my final project. Will it make any difference? Have I managed to develop something that is not only technically excellent, but that people will actually opt to use? As I read your post and this thread, the story of the loaves and fishes came to mind. Maybe we need to just offer it up and watch what happens.
That’s a GREAT picture of the loaves and fishes. I want to hang onto that for my NPO… and, well, for everythign else, too.
Thanks!
Two things come to mind as I read your post. First, I’ll bet you are the first person to drop a Steve Taylor reference in the history of George Fox / Portland Seminary blog posting. By the way, when it comes to song-writing and artists who are Christians, in my opinion Dustin Kensrue is/was one of the better ones in the POST-punk genre (Kensrue is the lead singer/songwriter for his band Thrice, popular in the mid 2000s, but still producing music). Very different from Taylor, but like Taylor was on the margins of the industry.
Second, you quoted Wheatley: “For too long, I have lived in the world wanting to change it. This has been an impossible stance.” I’m wondering if Wheatley’s premise would have been more “practical” if she zoomed in on case studies that employed the sort of approach Toth and Bentley took in Exploring Wicked Problems (making what seems impossible manageable): “1. What manageable part of this chaotic and confusing situation do I really care about? 2. Based on what I have to offer, can I define it in a way that enables me to make it better.” (Bentley and Toth, 186). Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed Wheatley’s writing and am surprised I had never heard of her or her Leadership and the New Science until this year.
Travis, I considered adding Wicked Problems to my blog but realized fitting it in didn’t quite fit. Thanks for bringing it into the conversation.
I’d never heard of Wheatley either. I’m really intriuged to do a deeper dive on her writing and ideas.
And I appreciate that you know Steve Taylor AND Thrice. You never know people’s musical tastes until they get uncovered. 🙂
You have inspired a deep dive back into Steve Taylor and the Some Band’s catalog. Thanks for that.
I think there’s an even deeper connection made to Taylor’s work over the years. He has always been seen as a rebel contrarian – a chaos thinker – and yet, now, in hindsight, we see how accurate he was/is, and how his prophetic voice was crying out in the wilderness. He was calling out Christians hypocrisy long ago, and even today we read of more and more cases of evangelical garbage coming to the surface. Perhaps we all should have listened closer to Steve Taylor.
Steve Taylor and Margaret Wheatley both reflect chaos theory…. and we should’ve listened to the prophetic voice…hmmm.
Maybe there’s something to this. When we try to control and bring perfect order to something that is unsolvable, we skip the human and spiritual element in favor of organization. Then we get in trouble. Could it be that the junk we are seeing so much of in the ‘big’ church right now is a direct result of tryign to assert human control what can never be controlled?
In other words, maybe the problem isn’t big church or even celebrity cultutre (though each has it’s issues) but in both cases maybe the real problem is the insistence to run minsitry like a buisness and demand/manipulate control (for instane, NDA’s) over the life of the Spirit that is like the wind.
Hi Tim,
You wrote, “Whether you agreed with Wheatley or not, these were unconventional, unorthodox, and innovative ideas.” Do you still find relevance in her ideas and are they applicable in your current work environment?
Whoa. The quote from Wheatley. I must have missed that quote listening to the book instead of actually sitting down and reading it. And thank you for saying what you did about our projects. I’ve been having a difficult time trying to work on mine – or talk about it – because I feel like it is such a small drop in the ocean and not really what I thought I would produce (or hoped I would produce). But it is what it is. And it will help some congregations – or at least my congregation – if I’m not too sick of it by the end of next semester to actually implement it. A quote I read in a fictional smut novel recently that made me feel not so alone in my feelings about my project was something like, “All dissertations are shit.”