Wounded Yet Whole: Consilience and Leadership Formation in Anxious Times
When I revisit Friedman now, I read him not as a distant theorist but as someone whose voice quietly accompanied me during a formative season of my pastoral life. When I arrived at Compassion Church in 2014, we began navigating significant cultural and leadership changes. Those first six years were marked by surprising grace: steady growth, healthier structures, renewed mission, and a church increasingly open to transformation. Anxiety was present, of course, but it felt manageable. It was a hopeful period where God was doing deep and steady work among us.
And then the global pandemic hit.
Everything that had felt steady from 2014–2020 suddenly felt fragile again. The anxieties that had been slowly diminishing came roaring back. Every decision seemed loaded. Every pastoral move was scrutinized. People carried fear, grief, and exhaustion. In that pressure, Friedman’s voice became essential to my leadership survival. He reminded me that anxious systems function like living organisms—reactive, dynamic, and impossible to fully “fix” (Friedman 2007). Early in ministry, I believed strong leadership might eliminate anxiety. But Friedman taught me a liberating truth: my task is not to conquer anxiety but to stand within it as a grounded, differentiated presence. That truth steadied me through the pandemic and served as a kind of pastoral anchor.
I encountered Simon Walker later—when I made the decision to return to formal education through the Doctor of Leadership program. After the pandemic season, I recognized a need to sharpen my leadership skills, deepen my inner life, and gain fresh frameworks for the complexity of pastoral ministry. In that context, Walker’s writing was both a gift and a mirror. Whereas Friedman helped me understand the system, Walker helped me understand myself within the system. His four ego structures—Shaping, Defining, Adapting, and Defending—revealed something humbling: each of these structures is active in me (Walker 2011). Different contexts trigger different ego postures. Instead of trying to identify “my type,” Walker helped me pay compassionate attention to the inner patterns that emerge under pressure. His work illuminated my backstage—those hidden places where motivation, fear, and desire quietly shape my leadership.
Together, Friedman and Walker created two threshold moments in my development. Friedman gave me the threshold concept of self-differentiation years ago, permanently reframing how I understand pastoral leadership. Walker recently gave me another threshold: the metaphor of front stage/backstage (Walker 2010). Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It reminded me that my public ministry will never outrun my private formation. Without tending my backstage with truth, prayer, and humility, the front stage becomes brittle.
There are meaningful tensions between their models—especially around the interplay between the self and the system. Friedman argues that a well-differentiated leader can calm an anxious system. Yet Walker reminds me that I am not a detached observer: I am part of the system, influenced by its dynamics. Leading Compassion through and after the pandemic revealed both realities. I could help regulate the environment, but I was also absorbing it. This tension has kept me grounded and honest.
Other voices in our coursework reinforce these insights. Heifetz’s idea of “regulating distress” echoes Friedman’s leadership presence in anxious systems (Heifetz 1994). Greenleaf’s servant leadership complements Walker’s undefended posture, emphasizing power used for the good of others (Greenleaf 1977). Palmer centers leadership in the soul’s integrity, which resonates with Walker’s backstage work (Palmer 1998). Buber’s I–Thou relational ethic deepens the call to honor people not as problems to solve but sacred selves to encounter.
Taken together, these authors form a pattern of consilience—a convergence of theology, psychology, systems theory, and leadership studies. For me, this consilience finds a spiritual center in the image of the resurrected Christ who still bears His wounds. Leadership shaped by humility, presence, vulnerability, and integrity is not merely psychological—it is Christlike. It is risen-with-scars leadership.
These integrated insights reshape how I now understand presence, power, and resilience. Power looks less like control and more like wounded humility. Resilience is not white-knuckling through difficulty but regulating my inner world in God’s presence. Leadership is less about solving the system and more about becoming whole, grounded, and undefended within it.
In the end, revisiting Friedman and Walker—especially through the lens of the doctoral program—helps me reinterpret my journey at Compassion. It is not just a story of navigating change or surviving a pandemic. It is a story of God forming me into a calmer, clearer, more honest, Christ-shaped leader. And that is the leader I want to keep becoming.
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