{"id":41145,"date":"2025-03-13T08:37:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T15:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=41145"},"modified":"2025-03-13T08:37:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T15:37:29","slug":"finding-hope-in-the-undefended-leader-as-biblical-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/finding-hope-in-the-undefended-leader-as-biblical-prophet\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Hope in the Undefended Leader as Biblical Prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I read Leading Out of Who You Are<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The prophet inhabits two worlds, the present one with grievances and the future one God is bringing. In his classic book,\u00a0The Prophetic Imagination,<\/em> Brueggemann writes<\/span>, “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]<\/a> 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]<\/a> Undefended leaders live as prophets who occupy the present with a sight for the future.<\/p>\n

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]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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]<\/a> When we as leaders believe that tomorrow can be better than today \u2013 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?<\/p>\n

Walker spends a few paragraphs to describe cultures of deprivation and generosity.[6]<\/a> 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]<\/a> When we have no hope, we live in deprivation, evoking strategies that legitimate violence and the worst parts of humanity.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Telling the Truth<\/em>, Frederick Buechner <\/span>says something like, “Before it became Good Friday on Easter Sunday, it was the worst Friday.” Jesus’s turning the worst Friday int<\/span>o Easter Sunday is the greatest story and symbol of hope. The cross represents the struggle and the worst thing to ever happen\u2014Jesus crucified. Simultaneously, it is the greatest hope after the resurrection.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n

\n

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 \u2013 you can find that here.<\/a><\/p>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Paul Redditt, “Prophets, the,”<\/a> in The Lexham Bible Dictionary<\/em>, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination<\/em>, 40th anniversary edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 3.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Simon P. Walker, Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership<\/em> (Carlisle: Piquant, 2007), 16.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination<\/em>, 66\u201367.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Walker, Leading Out of Who You Are<\/em>, 153.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Walker, 116.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination<\/em>, 131.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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