How can an innovative exploration of Moses’s biblical narrative offer a more generous leadership model for today’s religious leaders? In this interview, Doug Powe speaks about leadership with Kathleen McShane and Elan Babchuck, authors of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire. Consider how God is calling you to a leadership model where power is shared so that power multiplies, and people are connected to God and each other.
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Doug Powe: I want to jump into the book, and let me begin with the easy, obvious question: Why Moses?
Elan Babchuck: In today’s lexicon of leadership, we tend to use terms like brave leadership and visionary leadership. We lionize these models, many of which come from Silicon Valley, and they are really damaging. It is really, deeply damaging to the people who don’t see themselves in that model, and to others who don’t even want to see themselves in that model.
So, why Moses? Because universally, we have looked at Moses for thousands of years through the lens of, in Jewish tradition, we say: “Lokam be Yisrael kemoshe’od.” There has never been a prophet like Moses that has come up. He was one of one. The reason why we picked him, was in some ways we wanted to deconstruct that myth. So much of the mythology about Moses’s impenetrable leadership came after Moses’s death and after the Bible. The later commentaries looked back on him and sort of embellished his resume. I think there’s certainly a place and a time where it can be healthy to revise history so that we have a cleaner narrative. We do that all the time. But I also think that clinging to that clean version of the narrative about Moses, the infallible leader, who was born a leader, died a leader, and led perfectly—that narrative is doing a lot of damage.
Kathi McShane: One day while we were working on the Changemaker stuff together, Elan said something about Moses not becoming his full self as a leader until his very last sermon, while they were at the edge of the promise land, and he said to the people, “you choose: life or death.” It was really at that moment that his leadership became full, and perhaps even all that God hoped it might be. A light bulb went off for me. I thought I was at the end of my career in pastoral ministry, and I realized while doing the Changemaker work that I had, for most of my years of leadership, been leading differently than the way I was learning to lead now. I had led as visionary. I was supposed to have all the good ideas. I could lead everyone else because I could do their jobs better than anybody else. I could do all the jobs, and it served me well. But what I was learning in the Changemaker work was that my job was to invite and empower everyone in the organization to participate in leadership with less focus on me at the top of the pyramid.
Suddenly, Moses’s whole story became this treasure. How did Moses get from sitting at the feet of Pharaoh to learning how to be a leader, to the point where he said to the people, “I’m not in charge of you anymore. I won’t be. You choose.” That’s when they grew into the fullness of being the people of God, the people of Israel. So, the whole story of the Exodus and the little vignettes that we pulled out are the moments when Moses was learning those important lessons, and that became the frame for the book.
Doug Powe: Let me push both of you a little bit to think about one of the challenges in the church. Individuals, often amazingly, can have wonderful, important jobs in the secular world. But when they get into church, they look for the pastor to be the visionary—to be the very myth you’re fighting against. So, it’s a culture change not just for the pastor but also for those in the church. How do you all help congregations think about this differently?
Elan Babchuck: There are some congregations designed as a spectator sport, and that’s okay. But if we are going to live into that model, then we must be really honest about asking ourselves if we are in the transformation industry or the entertainment industry. They are both wonderful industries. You can give a great sermon and people can walk home, be moved by it, and be better in their lives. Yet, I also believe that whether they tell you or not, people are yearning to be needed. It’s great for a community of belonging to make sure that you’re named, to make sure that you’re known, to make sure that you’re noticed, but the highest form of belonging in a community is to be needed. So, that’s the invitation. That’s the invitation for every community leader, to say “okay, I know it says in the charter that you want me to do everything and be everything. The other question that I invite you to reflect on is how sustainable do you think that ‘everything’ is?” We just went through COVID, and every pastor I know, had to be everything. Every one of them was dealing with the, “Hey! I can’t log into Zoom, Pastor. Can you fix this?” It’s “I’m sorry, I’m trying to give a sermon.” To be everything to everyone at all times, I think, is a dangerous model.
Kathi McShane: I totally agree with Elan. We’ve created that passivity in people, in churches, and in congregations. I used to think people would say, “Well, I think the church should do this.” And I’d say, “Who do you think the church is?” It’s not a standalone institution apart from the people who are part of it. But when we focus on the institutionality of this “thing,” then maybe there’s a small place we let people plug in. “Will you serve coffee on Sunday? We need somebody to hand out bulletins. Somebody needs to serve on the finance committee.” We leave so much on the table in terms of what people have and can offer. I don’t think we’re curious enough about what it is that people bring with them to make the church a place where the shape of it will bend around people’s gifts and offerings. I think Elan’s right, that people long to participate more fully. But they don’t have a sense that what they bring is needed by the church, and we don’t do a very good job of making those connections.
Elan Babchuck: Kathi, it’s the difference between the golden rule and the iron rule. The golden rule is we do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or in Judaism, it’s the reverse. It’s that which is hateful to you do not do unto others, but either way, it’s the reciprocal. The iron rule is never do for someone else what they can learn to do for themselves. That’s a whole different way of showing compassion and making sure that people feel beloved. It’s giving them the space and the tools, to learn how to do it themselves.
Kathi McShane: So, what’s at the center of this way of leadership is to listen. Not to speak, not to say, not to know—but to listen to what it is that people have, bring, and want for their own fullness of life.
Doug Powe: Now I must get to the pyramids because that is central to the book. Why don’t you share a little bit about pyramids, and how pyramids relate to leadership?
Kathi McShane: We start with organizational charts. Virtually every organizational chart in our society is shaped like a pyramid, whether it’s the church, educational organizations, corporate organizations, or government. Somebody is at the top and everybody else fans out from there, occupying their own little space in the pyramid. That’s the structure of how organizations are put together. We have this story in our faith tradition in which God says, “those pyramids are houses of death.” God says, “let me get you, people I love, away from the pyramids because they are killing you.” And we keep saying, “But no! We want to go back to the pyramids.” The people in the story of Exodus did, and we do it in all kinds of ways, too. We say, “Wait! They work, they’re efficient, they’re effective; look how well pyramid structures work. They make everything happen in a productive, efficient way.” So, we’ve really inherited this metaphor, not from our faith convictions, but from the culture. Pyramids have been the way societies have ordered things since the time of the Egyptians. That doesn’t come from our theological imagination; that comes from our culture.
There have been people who have studied, promoted, and thought about flatter models of leadership for a very long time. We have a couple of chapters in the book where we talk about cultural models of people who have promoted these ideas, and the idea that leadership can be done in a different way. They’ve never grabbed our organizational imagination because as soon as organizations get stressed—they need more productivity or efficiency or profit—they snap right back into that pyramid shape. So, what we are arguing and provoking (we hope) in this book, is that our organizations, our communities—entities organized by our theology and our community with one another—are the perfect places to sustain a long-term experiment about what it might mean to move ourselves away from pyramids and to try something else.
Doug Powe: Elan, before you jump in, maybe you can pick it up from this angle: I’m struck by the image that we are reliving the story by wanting to go back to Egypt or go back to the pyramids. You all talk about some ways to avoid doing that. Maybe you could share one or two thoughts about how we can avoid falling into that trap and continuing to live that narrative.
Elan Babchuck: Look, it would be a lot easier if I could tell you, “Look around, and if you notice any pyramids, stay away. Or go the other direction.” It would be much easier if they were readily noticeable, and it would be easier, also, if the pharaonic behaviors that we exhibit were readily noticeable. But oftentimes, pyramid kinds of power operate very subtly, and you can almost not notice them if you’re not paying attention.
Power works in invisible ways, and that’s what makes it so dangerous. So, what I would say is: keep your eyes open and be reflective. If you’re a leader and you’re wondering, “gosh, I wonder if I …” then you need to have a trusted colleague, mentor, friend, partner who can hold up a mirror for you. If what you find is that your executive committee looks more like a wartime cabinet of “yes” people, then it’s probably the wrong crew. You might need some people who will lovingly challenge you.
Doug Powe: Elan, I’m going to have you share a bit of your story from chapter four, about realizing that building something that lasts really means encouraging ownership from those in the community. This builds on what you all have been saying, but I think your personal story really helped bring this to light.
Elan Babchuck: So, special needs work and building the special needs community has always been extremely important to me. Every stop along the way in my leadership journey, I’ve been grateful to be a part of building communities with families and children with special needs, specifically. In 2012, I started serving a large synagogue in Providence, Rhode Island. When I got there, I found that there really weren’t all that many community members who had special needs or had children with special needs. I thought, “Gosh, why is this happening?” I did some exploration, and it wasn’t even my active research and networking that lead me to answers. It was this: I was sitting at a coffee shop wearing a kippah, and someone comes in and says, “Are you the new rabbi?” I’m thinking, “Oh, how wonderful.” And then they said, “I will never go to your synagogue. I will never step foot in that synagogue because when my child was in the sanctuary making noise, trying to sing along to the prayers, it was constant shushing. People were turning around and shushing, shushing, shushing.” I said, “Wow, that’s not the culture that I would want to be a part of, please understand. Will you tell me more?”
Eventually, this person actually became a leader in building this community of families and children with special needs. It was such a joy to take a community organizing approach that believes every single person has a gift to give. The work was about activating those gifts and creating the physical space inside the chapel. That meant bringing in things like bean bags, painting, and adding some color and posters. But it also meant making the existential, spiritual space for people to really feel beloved in that community after decades of not feeling that way.
The one thing that I continued to do was lead the prayer services. We had monthly prayer services, and it never even occurred to me that, “Gosh, maybe I should train others to do this,” or that it doesn’t really matter if we hit every note, or if the all the liturgy is exactly as it’s written down, or if the choreography is all right. What matters most whether people feel like they’re connected to God and connected to one another in this space. In my mind, I didn’t ask: “Who else might want to hold this space?”
I left the synagogue in 2016, after we had raised an endowment to ensure that this community would continue to grow and be served in perpetuity. Six months, nine months, 12 months later, the community stopped meeting. What I came to realize—I was just speaking this morning with the gentleman who made the endowment gift in his late brother’s honor—what really broke my heart was that all the pieces were in place. They had the right people. They had the funding. They had the space. They had the will. They had the momentum. But what I failed to do was follow the iron rule, which was that I didn’t give them space to learn to do it themselves.
Doug Powe: Thank you. Kathi, you had a similar but different experience. You were a lawyer, and in the book, you shared about how that experience has helped you, also, to think differently about leadership.
Kathi McShane: I practiced law for 15 years before I went to seminary. I was a good lawyer. I had high standards and was a partner in a small law firm; but I’ll confess, we went through a lot of associates. We would hire someone for the litigation practice that I headed up. One after another, I would find ways in which they didn’t quite measure up to the standards that I had for the work that was coming out of the firm. So, a number of associates came for a while and left, or we dismissed them because they didn’t quite match what I thought the lawyers in our firm ought to look like or how their work ought to look. I look back now, and I think: “Why wasn’t I more concerned with investing in them and helping them become something perhaps more than they were at that point?” They could have been learning if I could have seen it as a learning opportunity for them and for me. My work as a leader was not to focus first on a standard of excellence, but on the people. That would have made a lot of difference in the way that I led. I think I was hard on people.
Often times people ask us about the book, “Isn’t what you’re proposing a leadership model where everyone gets to share? Isn’t that just a recipe for chaos?” Either it’s paralysis, where everybody has a voice so you do nothing, or it’s chaos, where everybody thinks they’re a leader and there’s entropy. The story I often tell when people ask that is this: Think about inviting your child into the kitchen to make cookies with you. It’s something many of us do, and you don’t do it because the cookies come out better; in fact, your kitchen is going to be a mess at the end of that experiment. But you do it because there are more important things at stake than the quality of the cookies and the condition of your kitchen. It is because the relationship that you have with that child is the most important thing, and this is a bonding experience. What we are trying to say in this book, and what I feel like I have learned from a myriad of mistakes in my leadership, is that people are more important. You have to think that relationships and people, the flourishing of people in the organization, is more important than any accomplishment or production goal. It took me a long time to learn that.
Doug Powe: Thank you both for sharing those stories. I want to have you share on what you call the “mosaic cycle” where you talk about dreaming, disturbing, and distancing.
Elan Babchuck: Dreaming, disturbing, and distancing. The main reason that we were leaning towards a cycle and not a linear process is the same reason why we don’t offer, “Hey, this is a 10-part blueprint for transforming your leadership and transforming your community, and here’s how you negotiate every step.” It’s that it’s an emergent process. The truth is that pyramids were not places of life. They were burial tombs. So, in order to get away from that pyramid model, we need to ask ourselves: “is love flowing through our community? Is power flowing through our community? Are all of the resources, access, connections—are they all flowing through the community in such a way that every person feels like they can partake, like they’re invited to be a part of telling that story?”
So, rather than a linear path: “Okay, you change this, then you do this, and then you’re done. You can retire now. Everything’s good in perpetuity,” we really wanted to make it clear, that this is the kind of thing that needs to be nurtured over time. Even if you feel like, “Gosh, I just took two steps back,” that’s why we underlined and highlighted Moses’ journey, because he does the very same thing. From a Jewish perspective, when we finish reading Deuteronomy, we start reading Genesis. We don’t jump to Joshua. Instead, we finish the five books, and then we start them again in the very same breath. That’s what we’re inviting people to imagine. That, okay, you’re in the messy part right now and everything’s kind of getting disturbed. This is what we feel like in the world, especially in an election year. Everything feels like it’s topsy turvy. That’s exactly where we need to be right now because from here on out that’s going to give us an opportunity to then move through this change before we try to solidify anything. That’s the invitation.
Kathi McShane: I’ve learned so much from Elan about the story of the Exodus and this cycle of reading the Torah and coming right back. I’ve started to sort of internally experiment with the idea that they actually never get to the promised land. They get to the place they thought was the promise land in the story of the Exodus, but once they’re there, it doesn’t really feel like the promise land. So, all the good things that happened in their relationship with God, their growth, and their becoming a people, happened out in the wilderness. In the Changemaker work, I’ve shifted from thinking that what motivates churches is not some vision at the end. Really, the hurdle that people and churches have to get over is to step into the wilderness. All the good stuff happens in the wilderness. It’s where we “become.” If our faith, our spiritual process, is this process of becoming, then we’re going to have to stay in the wilderness for a long time. Maybe our lives should always feel like we are out there in that mix of discomfort, so that we’re being stretched all the time. So, it’s a cycle. I don’t think our faith story has a known telos; that is, maybe we have a vision for its end goal, but we never arrive there.
Doug Powe: Thank you both. It’s a wonderful book, Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire, and I appreciate your taking the time today to share.
Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire is available at Fortress Press, Amazon, and Cokesbury.
Related Resources
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- Leading as Moses Led by Emanuel Cleaver III
- It Takes Teamwork by Kevass J. Harding
- Leading When You Don’t Know the Way by Susan Beaumont
Photo by PhotoGranary on Lightstock
