• Come On In To The Leader/ Hero's Quest •

Twenty-five years ago
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary professor Hal Warheim
taped a small piece of paper
with these words, paraphrased from The Wizard of Oz,
to his office door:
No one gets in to see the Wizard.
Not no one.
Not no how.
— So come on in;
I'm not the Wizard.
Cherishing the humor and the humility
in this simple statement,
I have taped the same words to the door of my office as well.

Humankind looks for leaders to be heroes,
to be magical giants
who use "special effects" and
turn life's knobs to control all of the outcomes.

As leaders we respond by trying (often frantically) to adjust these dials,
then we wonder if they are connected to anything.
In reality, good leaders are more like the person behind the curtain
in the Wizard of Oz
— after he comes from behind that curtain.
It is then that he reveals himself and his real leadership gifts
to those who seek him out.

Our power in leading does not lie in an elegant and logical code,
such as that which underlies this webpage.
Codes such as these become archaic and
then slip into obscurity.
Not so for the gifts God has given you.
They will be sustained as they were for Moses and Deborah
— and they will be tested.

So, what can leaders control?
There is cultural pressure to believe that we can control
all of the daily circumstances in our leadership environments,
that we can be like God.
This slippery slope of the Fall
lies at every turn in society.
In contrast, the real road to effective leadership stands upon
the necessity to recognize and develop
our individual leadership architecture
with every new situation.
There are tools, and
there are concepts
to aid in developing this framework
(both of which we will add to these pages).
However —
the blueprint is the understanding that
leading is organic and faith-driven,
not mechanical and specific.
It is lively and messy
because we are not leading robotic machines
that respond in singular and predictable ways
to a leader's words and actions;
we are leading people
who have fears, hopes, dreams
— stories that define their existence and meaning.

Join us for the Leader/ Hero's Quest!
Whether you are a lay leader or an ordained leader,
peruse the framework pages available here,
and look for future resources on leadership.
Soon we will upload an instrument
to aid in defining your preferred conflict responses.

we will add to this page
but slowly
because we are doing leading
every day

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* The Wizard of Oz . Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939. DVD. MGM Home Entertainment, 25 Mar 1997.