This article¹ will not deal broadly with the subject of leadership, but will focus on the relationship between spirituality and leadership, that is, on how what we are influences the leadership we offer.

It is recognized that the way we exercise leadership will depend on a range of factors. Personality type will influence the leadership we give, as will personal ability in preaching, pastoring, counselling, theological analysis, organization and inspiration. Cognitive capacity, or the time-frame within which our task is conceptualised, will also play a part.²

The mix of theological models out of which we operate is an important factor,³ as is the philosophy of leadership we espouse. The context in which we minister is also critical, a context that includes such factors as the size of the congregation, the stage the congregation has reached in its life-cycle, the congregation's social location, the polity of the denomination to which the congregation belongs, the ethos of the local congregation, including power dynamics, protocols, history, traditions, stories, heroes and mythologies.

While such factors are recognized as impinging on the exercise of leadership, this article will argue that the way we exercise faith, that is, the degree of our openness to God, will impact on the leadership we give more powerfully than any other factor.

Faith as Openness

In this exercise, faith will be defined as openness, openness to ourselves, to others, to the full spectrum of reality and to God.

Faith, as distinct from belief, has been defined as trust. To trust someone we need to be open to them and be willing to trust the weight of who we are to them. Openness precedes the willingness to trust and is its foundation. It also constitutes the trusting, as the facilitating thread running through it and sustaining it.

Trust is an openness to newness, to new meanings and to transforming Presence, that is, to Grace. Openness to the broader reality, or to God, can bring us assurance of what is not yet clearly visible, that is, the evidence of things not seen.⁴

Unfortunately, as David Shainberg, a psychiatrist and painter, has indicated, at the core of human being there is a lack of this sort of faith.⁵ [209]

LEVELS OF EXPERIENCE

How we conceptualise and experience faith will depend on what part of themselves it is that is engaging God and the world.

There are, at least, four different ways of experiencing ourselves, or of appropriating human nature.⁶

The Ego

We can live out of that part of us with which we interface with the world.

This is that aspect of ourselves with which we are most familiar, that is, the conscious ego. This ego is a dynamic construct and is sustained and modified moment by moment.

The ego emerges out of its unconscious ground, that is, out of an experience of primal unity with its environment. In the young child's early life, it is the mother, and the external world she represents, that constitute this environment.

In time, the young child develops the capacity to reflect upon itself, or to become subjectively conscious of itself, distinguishing itself from the objects and feelings of others.⁷

The individual later develops a series of personas through which they relate to others. When the persona dominates, when the person identifies with their persona, they lose contact with their truer self and forfeit the possibility of meaningful relationships with others.

The Self

Moving beyond the sheerly egoic level of existence it is possible for us to become familiar with the deeper self that results from a connectedness between the ego and unconscious.

The ego needs to separate from the unconscious before it can reconnect with it. This reconnection can happen in a number of ways, the most natural of which is through the ego inflating, encountering a crisis, repenting and being embraced in its brokenness by the community of those concerned for its welfare.

Through this process, which is continuous, and provided the environment that embraces us is positive and welcoming, we are granted insight into elements of the personality that are hidden from sight in the unconscious and we can begin to intentionally connect with the unconscious.

From one point of view, it can be argued that there are two types of material in the unconscious, that which is perverse/painful and that which is best described as unrealised potential. Aspects of what is perverse/painful, that is, aspects other than repressed memories of painful experiences, can also [210] be regarded as positive, though they manifest perversely because they are rejected aspects of the self that are seeking expression, reintegration and healing.⁸

Reconnection with the unconscious, and the gradual reintegration of ego and unconscious, leads us to an experience of what could best be described as a divinity within, an experience which is both an in-touchness with our libidinal energies and with the God who is the source of those energies and the ground of our existence.

The Body Self

We can proceed to a further stage and appropriate, or re-appropriate⁹ our bodies, which leads to our living out of a self that is in-touch with the diverse aspects of its embodiment, that is, out of an integrated body/self.

We, in the West, suffer from disembodiment, resulting from a shift in consciousness that Ken Wilber argues began to manifest around 2500 BCE¹⁰ and that was reflected in the body/mind dualism reflected in Gnosticism¹¹ and Stoicism. These two philosophies, which were in vogue at the beginning of the Christian era, deeply influenced the Church's initial theologising.

This disembodiment is gradually being recognized for what it is and many are seeking to reconnect with their bodies, to listen to them and to flow with their rhythms. This re-embodiment has meant that those, at this stage in their development, have discovered new ways of embracing reality, which include sensation, feeling, intuition and imagination, in short, the eloquent, apperceptive knowledge of the total body-self.¹²

Unity Consciousness

Living out of the body/self gives way finally to a form of existence that is a surrender to a pervasive Grace that holds the whole of life in existence. This larger, all-encompassing entity could be called the Universal Mind or Consciousness,¹³ the all-comprehending Self, the Logos, the Tao, Brahman, the divine Spirit, the God who is immanent through all things as their ground or constituent element, that is, the God in whom we live and move and have our being.¹⁴

While human development, up until this stage, has been effecting a centering of the self, this new phase of human development leads to the experiential understanding that this grounded self is not a reality separate from the rest of reality but is one manifestation of the reality that we call God.

Two critical insights, related to this phase of development and reflected in the intuitive, meditative experience of contemplatives of all religious traditions, are that everything is connected to everything else and that God is in everything.¹⁵ [211]

FAITH STYLES

The way we conceive of faith, and therefore attempt to exercise it, will be contingent upon the stage we have reached in our personal, spiritual development. Faith is more clearly manifest the more one has appropriated one's true self, the more one has developed one's personhood, one's spirituality.

The Ego

For those living out of the ego, who are unconnected with the unconscious ground out of which they emerged, God is experienced as an external presence, separate from the egoic centre of consciousness. This God is largely the projection, onto an external parental or traditional image, of both the numinous and unresolved elements of the unconscious. Faith is a matter of appealing to the graciousness of this external presence and often of consciously or unconsciously appeasing the presence by the very act of faith. At this level, reflected in Paul's pre-conversion experience, morality substitutes for spirituality.

The Self

Those whose lives are centred in the self, as distinct from the ego, and who are in touch with the unconscious, encounter God as an internal presence. Exercising faith is a matter of being open to the God who addresses them in the depths of their subjectivity. Faith is an openness to an internal Presence that echoes through the unconscious and a surrender to that Presence. Wisdom, for those living out of this level of spiritual development, is not something found in books, but comes from within, as gifted, intuited, personal truth. In their knowing, and in themselves, they exhibit an intrinsic, rather than an attributed authority, the sort of authority that was characteristic of Jesus.

The Body Self

Those who live out of the body-self take this openness further, into the body. It is the body/self that is the organ of apperception. The intuitions of Grace come, not only out the unconscious, or through the dialogue of the conscious with the unconscious, or out of the realm of our deepest subjectivity, or in the context of the integration of material from the unconscious into the conscious, but through the total body/self. They listen to and flow with the body/self. The body/self becomes the medium of divine self-communication.

Unity Consciousness

For those who have discovered themselves to be part of, one with and an expression of a larger Self, of a universal Mind or Consciousness, of an all-embracing, constitutive divine Spirit, of a cosmic Logos, faith, as openness, [212] is the experience of being constituted by, infused with and sustained, enlightened, gifted and carried along by this ubiquitous reality.

The groundedness of such people becomes less a groundedness in the substantiality of the body/self and more a dynamic groundedness in the reality of the universal Self. The transcendence of this Presence is experienced immanently in themselves and in the totality of the environing reality in which the Presence presses in upon them. Grace has ceased to be a concept and become a dynamic reality with which our thinking and acting increasingly co-operates. Life returns to its ordinary dimensions, for God is now discerned and engaged in the flow of secular experience, rather than in some special spiritual dimension.

For those living at this level, prayer takes the form of either or both meditation and sheer being. They have experienced the inwardness of the insight that we are saved by grace through faith.¹⁶ Their experience also makes sense of the suggestion that we work through the issues that confront us in a spirit of reverent awe, recognizing that it is God who works in us inspiring both the inclination and the deed.¹⁷ It is also related to Paul's comment that Christ was living within him.¹⁸ The description of this sort of experience was expanded in Ephesians 3: 14-19, where the author rhapsodised about the incomprehensible and inexhaustible love of God, the receipt of which lead one to experience a Spirit-gifted fullness of being, a fullness of the being that was nothing less than the experience of God and of God's fullness.

Jesus

Jesus can be seen to have exhibited a species of faith that reflected elements of the final three of these modalities.

Jesus did not live out of an isolated egoic persona nor worship a deity that was little more than a projection of positive and negative shadow material. Unlike the Pharisees, he refused to substitute morality for spirituality.

The fact that he could discern the forces at work inside people's subjectivities meant that he was aware of what was happening inside himself, that is, he was engaging his unconscious. This was also evident in the fact that he spoke with authority, that is, his knowledge, or wisdom, was sourced within himself and was not mere book-learning.

Jesus was also in-touch with his body and with what the Father was saying to him through his body, the body being part of his total apperception of reality. He was aware of the outflow of personal energy¹⁹ and his discernment of guidance, reflected in his reaction following the death of Lazarus,²⁰ arose from an acute sensitivity of the total body/self.

Jesus was also open to and sourced by the larger Self, his words and deeds being the gift of that Self,²¹ which he referred to intimately as Abba.²² So [213] open was he to this universal presence that he could say, When you encounter me, you encounter God: I and the Father are one.²³ So powerfully was he impacted upon by this sense of the unity of all things, and by the presence of God within all reality, that he experienced no separation between himself and others, which gave rise to the comment: Inasmuch as you do it unto one of the least of my brethren, you do it unto me.²⁴

Jesus flowed with this grace, though not always comfortably, as his experience in Gethsemane indicated. Ironically, in following through on the guidance of this grace, in a situation in which he was confused and bewildered, and in which his co-operation was hardly won, he felt himself deserted by it.

Through his death, Jesus became so much one with this Presence that his disciples, following his resurrection, had access to this Presence through Jesus and experienced it as Jesus.

LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP

Before proceeding to explore a range of leadership styles, based on the different ways in which we experience faith, it should be stressed that there is an element of fluidity, of slippage, in our self-appropriation and in the transitions that register an increasing openness towards and surrender to the ubiquitous divine Presence.

On the one hand, we sometimes enjoy a foretaste of things to come, of levels of existence not yet consolidated. On the other hand, it is also true that we frequently regress to earlier levels of engagement, usually when a past emotional injury has not been adequately processed.²⁵

Leadership, like the exercise of faith, will reflect the degree to which those giving leadership have appropriated the different levels of the self.

In outlining patterns of leadership relating to the different levels, profiles will be deliberately overdrawn, even caricatured, to accentuate, and therefore to clearly differentiate, the different levels. Because this review is little more than a brief freehand sketch, individual differences due to personality, background and the severity of perceptual and pathological distortion, will not be explored.

The Ego

We will look first at the leadership offered by those who live almost exclusively out of the ego.

The God these offer the congregation will be little more than the projection, onto an external image, of the distortions of their own unconscious. If they have not been able to accept, love and feel comfortable with themselves, because they have either been unable to face their shadow selves or to [214] affectively appropriate God's loving of them, they will not be able to convey a sense of God's love and acceptance to others, and their talk of God's love, if they do talk of God's love, will remain cognitive and notional.

Instead of enabling congregations to open themselves to the gentle but enlivening grace of the Spirit of God, they will offer, in its place, a debased spirituality that is little more than disguised morality, that is, they will remake the congregation in their own image, in the image of their personal pathologies.²⁶

They are also liable to debilitate congregations by encouraging people to trade in their integrity, and their capacity to be honest about themselves, in exchange for naive visions of supposedly Christian virtue that are psychologically destructive parodies of the real thing and that lead either to self-deceit, double think and hypocrisy or to a repudiation of the faith and despair.

They will also project their own inner distortions onto others, without realizing what they are doing, as this will be one of the ways, however inadequate, that their unconscious will attempt to force them to relate to it.

Their capacity for understanding and nurturing others, and for helping them to appreciate what God is doing in their lives, will be severely restricted, for they have little or no understanding of what is happening in their own depths, of what is there or of what God is attempting to effect. The less they are able to experience God in their inner being, the more they will be focussed on dogma, for dogma substitutes for experience.

Not only will such leaders remake others in their own image, they will also use them, both individually and as a congregation, to attempt to meet their own unrequited ego needs, and they will do this through every facet of their leadership, that is, through preaching, pastoring, counselling, theological analysis, organization and inspiration, all of which can be seen, in such a context, to represent a form of abuse. Because their own needs cannot be met in this way, they will merely redouble their efforts, which will increase their frustration and their inclination to blame others for their failure. The temptation to manipulation will also be strong.

The Self

Those who live on the level of the self, who have come into touch with the unconscious, and who are in the process of integrating its contents into that part of themselves of which they are conscious, will offer a different style of leadership.

These do not need to use ministry, to the same degree as those living out of the ego, to meet un-met needs. Because they are more self accepted, the sense of who they are--their identity--is less dependent on what others [215] think of them or on their achievements and they are, therefore, more able to be true to themselves.

Because they are more familiar with they inner territory, they better understand what is distressing others and are less judgmental and more compassionate. Accepting and loving themselves, they are able to accept and love others, while, at the same time, helping others experience God's love and acceptance, an acceptance that is conveyed through who they are, through their actions and through the mediation, through their being, of the energy of the grace of God.

Because they are less at the mercy of the un-met demands of the unconscious, they are freer to truly attend to others and to be aware of the intuitions of the Spirit in the multi-layered dynamic of communication. God for these is experienced as an inner Grace. Preaching, pastoring, counselling and organizational encounters will be healthier, less prone to shadow contamination.

Leaders living out of this part of themselves will evidence such characteristics as energy, poise, focus, patience, humility, compassion, discernment and other-centredness.

The Body Self

Those giving leadership at the level of the body/self will exhibit, in greater measure, the positive qualities that begin to be manifest at the level of the self. Because they are in touch with their bodies they will be far more integrated. The body, acting as body/mind, is an amazingly sensitive vehicle of communication with the total body-self, with others and with God.

As God is experienced, not merely through the mind, but through the total body/self, the capacity for apperceiving God's presence is enormously enhanced. The more we are in touch with our bodies, the more cerebral insights are earthed and intuitions grounded. Leaders, who live out of the body/self, will want to, and will have the capacity to take others to this stage of personal, Christian maturity.

Unity Consciousness

Those living at the level of unity consciousness, who experience the interconnectedness of all things, and who experience God in all things, will be able to take people on to a different level again.

Competitiveness will diminish almost to zero because of their experience of a ubiquitous grace that flows healingly through all of reality. Not only is the upstart ego no longer in exclusive control, the body/self is also seen to be part of a larger whole. Others are not regarded as wholly separate entities, but as part of one's self. The world of nature is similarly and sensitively embraced because of an experienced affinity and because of the discernment [216] of a ubiquitous constitutive grace. Spirituality ceases to be something imposed, as the divine is discerned in the flow of ordinary life.

Summary

I have argued, in this article, that faith is openness to the whole of reality, and, by implication, to the God who is the ground of that reality. This openness will be differently expressed depending on the degree to which we have appropriated the different levels of the self, a self that is ultimately transpersonal. The more of ourselves we are in touch with the more of us there is to be intentionally, and in an integrated way, in touch with God. There is a sense in which self appropriation, appropriation of God and the development of an intouchness of the wider reality within which we are embedded, is an integrated activity.

I have further contended that the leadership we offer, like the faith we exercise, will depend upon the levels of the self that we have intentionally embraced. [217]

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