{"id":30306,"date":"2023-01-19T22:52:03","date_gmt":"2023-01-20T06:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30306"},"modified":"2023-01-20T08:24:56","modified_gmt":"2023-01-20T16:24:56","slug":"looking-under-the-hood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/looking-under-the-hood\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking under the hood"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a PK\u2026in other word\u2019s a Pastor\u2019s kid.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019m (or was) a pastor\u2019s Grandkid, Pastor\u2019s niece, Pastor\u2019s sister-in-law, Pastor\u2019s wife and Pastor.\u00a0 I have grown up inside the fishbowl of a ministry family. I start this way because I want to orient why I am a harsh critic of the church and leadership within.\u00a0 I have watched many a Pastor \u201cfall\u201d or toxic leadership within a system that broke the pastor down.\u00a0 I loved a lot of what I read in Tom Comacho\u2019s book Mining for Gold. <\/em>I also felt some resistance to some of it as well.<\/p>\n

Some of the resistance I have is feeling challenged by using God as He language, in full transparency I strongly dislike this.\u00a0 I struggled with this my growing up years as a female in a conservative church.\u00a0 I was \u201cchosen\u201d repeatedly to be a leader at school, in my youth group, etc.\u2026yet I failed to see any women leading the church and was often told (and sometime still get told I can\u2019t be a leader or clergy).\u00a0 I\u2019m sure there are many women here who have experienced this very failure of leadership and understanding of the Bible.\u00a0 I do appreciate that he talked about Esther \u201cHer natural beauty drew him close, but her character and insight set her apart. He saw Gold in Her\u201d (Comacho, pg 58) Esther has always been a hero and mentor for me as a female embodied leader\u2026recognizing that mentor other future leaders\u2026seeing their Gold was \u201cFor Such a Time as this\u201d Esther 4:14. However it\u2019s sad to me that the mentoring Esther had was on how her first night with the King will go.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to gloss over that, she had to use her body and looks to gain a voice though it is said it was her character and insight that made him see her gold.\u00a0 \u00a0I marvel that the world as modern as it is, still has this wrestling with how we view women, and it is usually looks and attraction first and character later.\u00a0 I participated in an online group of clergy women whose sole purpose was to wrestle with what we would wear while preaching so as not to draw attention or distract.\u00a0 The church must do better\u2026it\u2019s time.\u00a0 Women leaders in the church and ministry setting need more women coaching for the journey and male allyship\u2026it\u2019s not an easy place to be.\u00a0 Therefore, even though it seems simple to get the idea of what He language for God means, I have come to believe that inclusive language always matters, I am made in the image of God.<\/p>\n

I have a few things in myself that lent me to really appreciate, feel convicted by and Amen and dog-ear a chapter in this book, chapter 11: The Cross: God\u2019s Great Refining Tool.\u00a0 My NPO and ministry context can be a bit of a downer, as I am a Hospice Chaplain and my NPO is around talking about Death!\u00a0 I live in the paradox that I am an Enneagram 7, the enthusiast so at least when I talk about death, I\u2019m enthusiastic about it?\u00a0\u00a0 Enneagram 7\u2019s are known for avoiding pain, and this has become a real gift and curse.\u00a0 On one hand I can absolutely listen and bear witness to another\u2019s human suffering without taking it on as my own.\u00a0 This lends to longevity in a very difficult and heavy job environment.\u00a0 It also means if I am not tending to my own pain, it can become easy to experience transference with my patients and work out my pain and grief by \u201cfixing\u201d it for them.\u00a0 There is a saying in grief work that \u201cif you don\u2019t work your grief, your grief will work you.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the church and in leadership, dying to self can be one of the biggest challenges I\u2019ve seen leaders face. Ego can be healthy and yet can quickly get out of balance when not checked.\u00a0 One challenge I see leaders face is jealousy and envy and have watched churches and non-profits be destroyed by raising leaders but feeling threatened by growth in these leaders. In chapter 2, Comacho mentions a quality that \u00a0\u201cBarnabas was not afraid to let another leader outshine him\u201d.(Comacho, pg 41) \u00a0\u00a0Now I love this quote, but once again this could be interpreted differently because it implies a \u201creluctant\u201d leader is of higher quality then those who are not reluctant which can be understood very differently from a female perspective, \u201cPlay small\u201d, \u201cdon\u2019t be too big for your britches\u201d, etc.\u00a0 But I suppose this leads to the overall problem of leadership that we walk on a razors edge of Being Gold and seeing Gold in others but must do so with confidence yet with humility!\u00a0 Wow, what a challenge.\u00a0 Tom Comacho utilizes a word that I think encapsulates all of this and it\u2019s an under preached, misunderstood concept in a lot of churches but in my work in spiritual pain at the end of life\u2026 we must understand and extend Grace. \u00a0\u201cBuild a culture of Grace\u201d, \u201cGrace is God\u2019s supernatural power to change everything. Rules don\u2019t change people, Grace does.\u201d (Comacho, pg 79).\u00a0 \u201cGrace gives us the courage to look under the hood of our life and leadership.\u201d (Comacho, pg 48).<\/p>\n

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I am a PK\u2026in other word\u2019s a Pastor\u2019s kid.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019m (or was) a pastor\u2019s Grandkid, Pastor\u2019s niece, Pastor\u2019s sister-in-law, Pastor\u2019s wife and Pastor.\u00a0 I have grown up inside the fishbowl of a ministry family. I start this way because I want to orient why I am a harsh critic of the church and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2530,2531],"class_list":["post-30306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dglp02","tag-miningforgold","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30307,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30306\/revisions\/30307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}