by Andy Crouch
Nothing in the introduction prepares my audience to see me, to whatever extent I may be so, as someone who dwells with both authority and vulnerability. All of it paints me, quite unrealistically, with pure authority. (Sometimes to the point of outright inaccuracy, as when I am introduced, despite my lack of a doctoral degree, as “Dr. Crouch.”) When I step on stage, no one in the room is thinking about my exposure to risk—except me. As I wait to speak, and while I am speaking, if I am not disciplined and careful, my mind races to my various vulnerabilities in that moment. I am exquisitely conscious of the risks I am taking—even though with rare exceptions, no one else in the room registers them at all.
Not long ago I bought a new pair of dress shoes and wore them for the first time on stage. As the warm and flattering introduction came to a close, I rose from my chair—and felt the brand-new, slippery sole of my left shoe nearly skate away from me on the stage’s polished hardwood. No one in the room realized I had nearly taken an inglorious tumble—but for the next twenty minutes, I was keenly aware of every step. The audience knew nothing of that vulnerability. Even less did they imagine the vulnerabilities in my life, as in every life, of far longer duration and far greater depth—the broken relationships, the deep disappointments, the persistent sins. But all of these come with me into every moment of leadership, no matter how much authority I am given.
And this is absolutely as it must be. Because if any of us, let alone those entrusted with leadership, showed up and were completely transparent about all the dimensions of vulnerability in our lives, nothing else would get done, any more than if every citizen knew of every threat to the nation’s welfare. Were I to offer every audience a full accounting of the present, past and future exposure to loss in my life, I would be nothing but a distraction.
For one thing, these audiences have no authority in these vulnerabilities—no capacity for meaningful action to address them. Others in my life do have that authority—my supervisor, my friends, my confessors, my wife. But a hall full of strangers could only listen, with sympathy or alarm, to the reality of my—or anyone’s—broken life.
But there is another, deeper reason that an endless parade of personal vulnerability would be the opposite of leadership at these times. When I am speaking, my deepest calling is to help a community bear the community’s vulnerability. Every person in the room has their own litany of difficulties, dangers and doubts, and to serve them well is to directly or indirectly address those realities, not whatever may be preoccupying me on that particular day.
None of this means that leaders, whatever their cultural context, must be impenetrable fortresses of false authority. It certainly does not mean that leaders never expose their communities to the reality of the risks they face and the losses they must bear. It just means that when leaders take risks, including the risks of personal disclosure, they do so for the sake of others’ authority and proper vulnerability. This is one sense in which leadership is always servanthood—it is always about others’ flourishing, not our own, and it is always directed toward others’ authority, not our own.
As Max De Pree likes to say, “Bad leaders inflict pain. Good leaders bear it.”
Make no mistake: transformational leadership helps people see and address real vulnerability. But leaders exist to match that vulnerability, as much as possible, with commensurate authority. So our job is often to increase others’ authority while gradually, in a measured and intentional way, alerting them to vulnerabilities (including our own limitations, foibles and blindness). In the meantime, we must bear vulnerability that others cannot see, and sometimes will never see. Hidden vulnerability is the price of leadership.
Or as Max De Pree likes to say, “Bad leaders inflict pain. Good leaders bear it.”
Burnout
This is a dangerous business. A public identity that emphasizes authority over vulnerability—even when we know just how vulnerable we and our communities are—is constantly in danger of sliding into idolatry and injustice. Institutions and communities constantly hope, if not demand, that their leaders assure them that they, too, can live with the kind of invulnerability they imagine their leaders possess. At its worst, leadership becomes an exercise in mutual deception, with both leader and community assuring one another that they have no vulnerability to bear, that authority without vulnerability is possible.
But the gap between public and private can take forms that are even more perilous. Often the public perception is not just of less vulnerability than the leader actually bears, but also of more authority. Others see us as living in quadrant IV, but in fact we know that our true reality is much more like Suffering (see figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3. Burnout
Very often, leaders have far less real authority than others imagine. The seemingly powerful chief executive has been put on notice by her board that she is one quarter’s results away from being fired. The pastor who preaches powerful sermons in fact has entirely lost touch with prayer, solitude and grace—the sources of true spiritual authority—and is consumed with lust, fear or bitterness. The universally beloved actor is unable to control a consuming and isolating addiction.
If only these were generic examples—but there are real names for every one of these and more. One of the more ironic photographs ever published in the pages of Christianity Today was of then-megachurch-pastor Ted Haggard in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado. Haggard, the caption informed readers, had been urged by his staff to get away from the busyness of daily ministry in order to write and prepare his sermons. The image in the magazine was of a leader seeking solitude and contemplation to serve his growing flock and national audience.
But within a year, a masseur and sometime prostitute in Denver claimed that he had been called by Haggard to hotel rooms just like that one. The revelations that followed, and Haggard’s eventual acknowledgment of many of the accusations against him, overturned Haggard’s ministry, ended his presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals and shook the faith of countless followers. Haggard’s vulnerabilities were far deeper than anyone knew—but that is true for every single human being. What was really eroding, far faster than anyone guessed, was his authority, his capacity to live faithfully with those vulnerabilities.
When our perceived authority is completely out of step with our actual vulnerability—when there is no one who knows the true reality of our private life of suffering or flourishing—we are at the edge of burnout. Burnout does not just afflict popular and visible leaders. No one who has stepped into the story of this broken world is exempt—burnout is a risk for anyone who cares for others’ flourishing. It emerges from our deepest callings and giftedness, but it feeds on our deepest brokenness. When people praise our commitment to a needy child, a chronically ill spouse or an underserved community, but we have no one who knows the depths of our fatigue, disappointment or despair, the gap between authority and vulnerability can become overwhelming. Indeed, public recognition of our authority and praise for our faithfulness can actually be fuel for the fire of burnout, compounding our sense of isolation in our loneliness and need.
The only question is how the story will end.
He Refused to Go In
In my eighth year of campus ministry at Harvard, the students decided to throw a party for me and for our ministry’s coleader, Ming. Our campus fellowship ended each year with a weeklong leadership retreat after the end of final exams. These “chapter camps” were intense, rich experiences of study, worship, prayer and fellowship. They could also be surprisingly tiring for those of us responsible for leading them. A week of life together tends to expose vulnerabilities that would go unnoticed in less intense environments.
For whatever reason, in the course of that particular week, I had begun to feel the signs of burnout. I had joined this campus ministry as an outsider, a status accentuated by the insular culture of Harvard College. (I remember a friendly dinner conversation in my early years of ministry during which a student discovered that I had not gone
to Harvard and in innocent surprise said, “That’s funny—you seem smart!”) After eight years I was completely accepted as a member of the community, but those early insecurities and frustrations lingered.
Then there were all the accumulated small griefs. In campus ministry, if everything goes as well as you could ever hope, your most beloved students, now in many ways your friends, leave after four years, rarely ever returning to your life. And everything does not by any means go as well as you hope. Along with the extraordinary joys of campus ministry—still to this day the most satisfying work of my life—had come conflicts, disappointments, disagreements, challenges to my authority, knowing or unknowing jabs at my own areas of vulnerability. None of this was unusual—none of it was unbearable. But all of it, after two full generations of students had come and gone, was wearing me down.
The students planned a party for Thursday night at 10:00 p.m., after the other scheduled activities were over—an event with only one agenda, to thank Ming and me for our leadership of the fellowship over the past year and to lift us up in prayer. It was supposed to be a surprise, but I got wind of the secret early Thursday morning. And in the course of the day, as unacknowledged resentments and discouragement bubbled up to the surface, I began forming a bitter plan, one I barely admitted even to myself that I was forming.
I would not go.
That night, I would go back to my room, dress for bed, turn out the lights and go to sleep, party be damned. My wife and I had a private cabin. No one would bother me there, far back in the woods, if the lights were out. Since the party was supposed to be a surprise, no one would know I was deliberately avoiding it. At some point they would give up, celebrate without me, and let me sleep through the night in my undisturbed loneliness.
Ten o’clock came and went. I lay in our bed, resentful and relieved. I was going to escape being celebrated, escape being thanked, escape having to see my students’ love and gratitude. And escaping all that, I would be able to hold on to my frustration, justifying my emotional withdrawal even as I continued to go through the motions of leadership. Burned out and bitter, I was heading deep into the corner of quadrant III of Withdrawing, preparing to sleep like the untouchable dead. Party be damned, indeed.
But I had not counted on the persistence of my wife, Catherine. She was there waiting for the party to start, and as the appointed hour came and went she realized something was wrong. She walked down the lane to our cabin and opened the door. I considered simply feigning the deepest of sleep. But the second time she called my name I answered.
“Andy, you don’t know about this”—she, like everyone else, had no idea how well I knew—“but there’s a party for you and Ming right now. You have to come.”
And then Catherine got one of her early, clear glimpses of the hardness of my heart.
“No. I’m not coming. Tell them I’ve gone to bed.”
She was shocked. “They’ve been planning this all week. Everyone is waiting.” This only made me even more embarrassed and determined.
“I’m not going to go.” Now she could hear the bitterness in my voice, the distant retreat born of unjustifiable rage.
“You have to go,” she said. And here is where my wife exercised both authority and vulnerability—because as she pleaded with me, she both came close to tears and became more and more insistent. She would not let me stay there in my petty and ungrateful pain. She won the argument, and in some sense she probably saved my life.
I got dressed, walked up the road to the main building, and as I came through the door the room erupted into cheers. No one knew where I had been or why I was late—they just knew that now that I had arrived, they could begin to celebrate. The party began.
I have had a few moments of sheer grace in my life—utterly undeserved, unmerited, unjustified abundance. That party, which went on so completely irrespective of my own best efforts to undermine it, was a foretaste of heaven, the party planned under our noses as we tried our best to destroy it. It was as if the older son in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal had decided to go in after all, and it turned out that everything was planned for him all along. At the end of the night the students gave Ming and me countless envelopes of notes of thanks, full of tenderness and kindness—I have them within reach as I sit writing, nearly twenty years later, in a folder simply labeled “Encouragement.” I suppose it could also be labeled “Flourishing.”
Jesus’ Hidden Vulnerability
Of every human being who has ever lived, Jesus lived most completely in the fullness of authority and vulnerability.
His authority was evident to everyone—at every turn of the gospel narratives we see Jesus exercising unparalleled capacity for meaningful action as well as restoring authority to the marginal and poor.
But no one fully grasped Jesus’ vulnerability. Those around him comprehended almost nothing of his true purpose and destination. The gospel writers report that even when Jesus began to try to explain to his disciples the fate he knew awaited him in Jerusalem, they resisted and did not understand. As his ministry brought him nearer and nearer to the final confrontation with the forces of idolatry and injustice, only Jesus understood what was truly going to be lost.
We see Jesus gradually explaining his vulnerability to his disciples. He predicts his arrest and death three times. When he is anointed by the woman in Simon’s house, an act that any Israelite would have assumed was a sign of kingship—a proclamation of authority—he reinterprets her lavish gift as preparation for his burial—a recognition of vulnerability. When he gathers them for dinner the night before his arrest, he speaks of his body and blood and the dark truth that he will be betrayed by a member of the apostles’ inner circle. But none of this seems to have truly penetrated the minds or imaginations of his companions—at least not his male companions. They remain fixated on the dreams of a Messiah who would deliver Israel, freed from their enemies and returned to rightful possession of their land. Even at the moment of Jesus’ arrest in the garden, one of his followers resorts to a burst of violence to ward off the approaching doom.
Jesus bore not only his own knowledge of his own personal fate, but a clear knowledge of the risks hanging over the city of Jerusalem—the knowledge that one generation later, the city would be razed to the ground as the Romans put down Jewish rebellion once and for all. This knowledge, too, he shared with his disciples, but the full weight of it fell on Jesus alone. Beyond the fate of people, land and temple, we may suppose that even the very human Jesus of Nazareth had some grasp of the full exposure to loss of the One who was very God—the comprehension of the full rebellion in every time, place and cosmic dimension against the Word through whom all things were made, a rebellion that could only be redeemed by his own substitution and sacrifice.
We see Jesus’ authority and vulnerability come together in a most astonishing way in the scene we call the transfiguration, when Jesus took his three closest followers with him, went up a mountain and was changed before them into a being of dazzling glory, accompanied by Moses and Elijah. This might seem like a scene of pure authority, and so the church has usually interpreted it. But it is much more than that. Luke tells us what the three powerful figures were discussing: “his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). They speak together, not about Jesus’ power, but about his impending condemnation and crucifixion.
At a moment when his own followers are clueless, Jesus speaks with two of Israel’s greatest leaders, Moses and Elijah, about the greatest risk of his or any life. What is revealed on the mountain of the transfiguration is not authority alone, but authority with vulnerability, power with self-denial, divinity with humanity—unconquerable life and imminent death.
Was the transfiguration a set piece staged for the benefit of Peter, James and John? That hardly seems likely, given that they were barely awake, confused and uncomprehending. Much more likely, the transfiguration reveals the absolute necessity of communion with others to sustain a life of flourishing. Jes
us, who regularly sought out communion with his Father, went up a high mountain to seek the human companionship of those who, like him, had borne authority and vulnerability on behalf of Israel, who could foresee clearly with him what his own followers could not, who could speak with him of the risks he was choosing to bear and strengthen him for his final journey to the city he loved and wept over.
No one can turn hidden vulnerability into flourishing without friends.
It is dangerous to draw any simple parallels between this extraordinary story and our own small lives, but it reminds us of at least one universal truth: no one survives hidden vulnerability without companions who understand. No one can turn hidden vulnerability into flourishing without friends. We will never be able to fully reveal our vulnerability to the wide world—but we will never survive it without companions willing to bear it with us.
The transfiguration, along with everything that followed, now leads us to the other great, paradoxical theme in the lives of those who would bring flourishing into the world. We are called to risk hidden vulnerability, finding a way to bear authority without becoming an idol or tyrant. But we are also called to very visible suffering, to journey to the quadrant down and to the right—to descend to the dead.
7
Descending to the Dead
