Finding Hope in the Undefended Leader as Biblical Prophet
This week, I read Leading Out of Who You Are by Simon Walker. Walker situates leadership as power and trust. A healthy leader has the power to take responsibility while they trust beyond themselves, ideally in God. In the first section, he presents Erving Goffman’s Dramaturgy and his front stage and backstage to explain what we do in front of others and what happens inside ourselves. In the second section, he examines trust on the front stage and backstage. Here, he presents four egos around trusting self and others. Section 3 is about the undefended nature of healthy leadership. He says the book is about undefended leadership, it’s actually a prophetic book that situates the leader as prophet.
I want to take his insights on undefended leadership and examine them against the biblical role of the prophets to show the undefended leader as prophetic.
Prophets in the Bible are raised by God to tell the truth about a situation. Usually, they are telling the truth about a king, his power, and his trust in God. When the prophet predicted the future, it was typically short-term and told the outcomes of the choices made by powerful people. Paul Redditt says the prophets “spoke the truth about the present and what would happen if people did not change their behavior and return to Yahweh’s ways.” [1]
The prophet inhabits two worlds, the present one with grievances and the future one God is bringing. In his classic book, The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann writes, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” [2] This means that the prophet, for Brueggemann, lives engrained in the memory of all that God has done and feels the friction between the future posed by that memory and the current reality. Walker, writing on cognitive dissonance, says, “the leader lives all the time with a discrepancy between the world that she wants (and wants others) to inhabit and the world she (and others) actually do inhabit.” [3] Undefended leaders live as prophets who occupy the present with a sight for the future.
In that same line of thought, prophets provide hope for the future. It is only people who struggle who need hope. In chapter 14, Walker describes a common feature of leaders is struggle. Brueggemann writes that for the people of God, hope is on the other side of hardship: “The prophet must speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation.” [4] That hope over hardship is found in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who took death into himself so that the people of God would no longer face it.
That type of hope allows people to take responsibility. Walker writes, “I want to suggest that the only proper goal of leadership is this: to enable people to take responsibility.” [5] When we as leaders believe that tomorrow can be better than today – the definition of hope, then people can take responsibility. Without hope, a belief in a better future, why would anybody take responsibility? If the world is destined to get worse and worse, why steer the Titanic after it hit the iceberg?
Walker spends a few paragraphs to describe cultures of deprivation and generosity.[6] Brueggeman describes the same phenomenon as the liturgy of abundance and the myth of scarcity, he writes, “A regime that operates with a claim of scarcity can legitimate hoarding, accumulation, and eventually monopoly to the disregard of the needs of others, even when such strategies evoke and legitimate the violence of the strong against the weak.” [7] When we have no hope, we live in deprivation, evoking strategies that legitimate violence and the worst parts of humanity.
The worst humanity has ever done is crucifying our lord. The cross becomes the greatest symbol of hope. All symbols of hope must simultaneously show the depravity of man and the forthcoming victory. In his classic book Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner says something like, “Before it became Good Friday on Easter Sunday, it was the worst Friday.” Jesus’s turning the worst Friday into Easter Sunday is the greatest story and symbol of hope. The cross represents the struggle and the worst thing to ever happen—Jesus crucified. Simultaneously, it is the greatest hope after the resurrection.
Hope must be symbolic; it can never be actualized here today, so it is, in a sense, scarce. Anybody possessing the object of hope is no longer hopeful but fulfilled. Yet, Hope is not scarce; as a symbol, it can be shared and passed to any and all. That’s why the cross serves as the greatest symbol of hope. We cannot grasp the resurrected Jesus, so we hold on to the symbol of the cross as a precursor to our resurrection, to our Easter Sunday after our worst Friday.
The hope of Jesus, the tomb, and the cross is abundant because the eternal and infinite God gives himself for you. Our leadership is grounded not in who we are but in what he’s done—not in what we’ve done but who he is. The undefended leader is hopeful in Jesus’s resurrection and uses the symbol of hope, the cross, to take responsibility.
I wrote this post from scratch. I noticed the connection between Walker and the prophets because I wrote a longer post on my Substack a couple of months ago about the prophets, the desire for a king, and our current political situation in America – you can find that here.
[1] Paul Redditt, “Prophets, the,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).
[2] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 40th anniversary edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 3.
[3] Simon P. Walker, Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership (Carlisle: Piquant, 2007), 16.
[4] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 66–67.
[5] Walker, Leading Out of Who You Are, 153.
[6] Walker, 116.
[7] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 131.
About the Author
Robert Radcliff
Hi! I'm Robert, and I'm seeking to understand who God is calling me to be in my community while helping others do the same. I enjoy reading, training for triathlons, and using exclamation points!12 responses to “Finding Hope in the Undefended Leader as Biblical Prophet”
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Robert,
I enjoyed your connection with the prophets. Right before reading this, I had asked Joff a question about a similar thought. He had mentioned that his son was not concerned about status or being good enough; instead, he just wanted to help his dad. I see that same characteristic in the prophets: no concern about status or being good enough, just wanting to help God the Father. What are your thoughts on why we seem to have lost that freedom in today’s society?
Darren, that’s a great question. I wonder if we ever had the value of being with the father is enough. So much of American history and culture is about expansion and westward movement for progress. There can be an inner conflict – God is enough as long as we progress. I don’t know if that makes sense. I have a terrible head cold this week, and I’m on the good medicine.
Hi Robert,
I think I understand your question on my post much better after reading your blog post. I’m going to take that as a lesson learned for how to best respond to future comments!
Reflecting on your comments on hope, a surgeon friend of mine who has spent nearly all his career performing free surgeries for deeply impoverished people, says “for hope to be possible in the future, it has to be tangible in the present.” His faith in Christ is the model for this, and it determines how he approaches his work. There is a hope for a brighter future because something real has happened today. This, for me, describes the gospel beautifully. Today and every day can be brighter because of what Christ has already done, as we look ahead to the day when his redemptive work will be completely fulfilled.
Joff, there’s something about how we always bring our context to the questions. We can try to ask questions of each other in a vacuum, but it’s always contextual.
I love the idea that hope is here today for us. That’s it! It’s been a while since I had a physics class. As I understand relativity, the closer we get to the speed of light, the more time dilation happens. Until we reach a point where time appears to stop moving at the speed of light. For us, the resurrection happened 2,000 years ago. The hope of the resurrection moves through space and time at the speed of light. 2,000 years have passed for me, but for hope, no time has passed at all. That means that while I am distanced in both space and time from the resurrection, the hope of the resurrection is as fresh today as it was when it radiated from the empty tomb. It always will be.
Hi Robert what a creative and interesting way to weave the message of Walker into the prophetic. When you take a look at the prophet’s role, how does the prophet define authentic leadership and self-awareness as a leader?
Judith, great questions. I don’t have good answers,
but I have a gut feeling. My gut feeling says the prophet would define leadership as a calling by God. Rarely did prophets in the Old Testament ask to be prophets; God picked them. This type of leader’s self-awareness is hearing God’s calling in our lives and the world around us.
I think about Jeremiah in with the potter in Jeremiah 18:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, where he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
If Jeremiah lacked self-awareness, he could have heard the wrong message. It would be easy for me to hear God say, Go to the potter’s house and for me to think, I’m going to share the gospel with the potter. Jeremiah though, heard go and hear my word from God. He was aware that his position was to observe and listen, not speak nor act. The message was about the clay collapsing in the hand.
God uses this ordinary thing (clay collapsing) to show Jeremiah an extraordinary message. Jeremiah needed authentic leadership and self-awareness to hear the actual message.
I AGREE wholeheartedly with Jeremiah’s need for authentic leadership and self-awareness. Imagine, even as prophets in those days, they had to unpack how they would respond to God and how they would unpack this with the people. It does take a good amount of listening, humility and personal resilience to fulfill that appointment. Thank you, Robert.
Robert –
I think your perspective on the prophetic and the undefended in leadership rings very true. Part of leading from an undefended place is a willingness to release and suffer–which indeed seems to be part of the prophetic calling. How have you seen leaders or prophets effectively prepare themselves for the cost without losing the redemptive hope of what they are entering into?
Jeremiah, thank you. I think prophetic leaders are at the worst risk of constantly moving the target just a little beyond reach. The risk for prophetic leaders is not losing hope but leaving their people behind. They move faster than their people can handle and leave them behind.
Looking at Biblical prophets, I’m not sure they prepared themselves for the cost. I think for us today, we have to spend enough time with God so that our work for God doesn’t consume us. I think we have to come to a place like Paul, where all the gains of the world we can count as loss for surpassing joy of knowing Jesus and his crucifixion and resurrection!
Thanks, Robert!
What are ways you’ve seen more prophetically-inclined leaders avoid the pitfall of leaving others behind? How is that tied to the posture of counting worldy gains as loss in light of Jesus?
Your connection of undefended leadership in Walker’s book with the biblical prophet is amazing. So well done. It spurs me on to further reading of prophetic leadership. It rings so true to me when you said that no one would take on responsibility if there is no hope. The prophet is one who can see a vision for the future which fuels hope.
I recommend “Prophetic Lament” by Soong-Chan Rah, if you haven’t already read it, to further affirm your point on a prophet holding the present reality of the grievances today and prophetic vision of hope in the future. In light of this, How do you think a leader today can realize the prophet’s dual focus on present grievances and future hope?
Jess, thanks for the comment and the book recommendation! I’ll check it out soon. Your question for today’s prophets and holding the tension of future hope I’m today’s grievances is fantastic.
I think we need to recapture the now of the now and not yet kingdom. Inaugurated eschatology tells us beginning with John and the incarnation that the kingdom of God is here. We are in the process of building a kingdom on earth as it is in heaven that will be fully realized when Jesus returns. Today’s prophets, and all Christians, live in the now and not yet.
Our role is not to wait for Jesus returns but to live at the intersection of the kingdom of God and the usurped kingdom of Satan. Alan Hirsch said, the church of God does not have a mission, the God of mission has a church. We are not invited to mission but created for it. Living with that in mind shows the present grievances to be understand through the lens of mission and eternity.