Ron Martoia on leadership in the wild (derness)

I was in a workshop/lecture, organised by eKerk with Ron Martoia on leadership in the wild(erness).

Of course, we in Riverlea, often wrestle with the notion of leadership. Growing leaders, in particular. Our context is a community who are in the midst of transformation. In the Riverlea schools, former coloured, Afrikaans schools as well as the residential area we see a growth in the number of people who join the community, as native IsiZulu, Setswana or Swahili-French speaking. So whilst the Riverlea is historically understood to be a coloured Group Area, its demographic is shifting radically-with the coloured community still in the majority. I don’t think we have been able yet to grap the significance of this and how to lead in the midst of this key shift that is taking place. So, as a community, we have a diversity of membership including Sesotho speaking; we have had members joining, speaking Setwana or one speaking Swahili, but we’ve also had some of these members leaving or disappearing. It is still majority coloured and Afrikaans/English speaking. Of course, a fair ammount of Afrikaans and Dutch speaking members also left ( for various reasons).

Martoia, is well-respected amongst a great number of churches in the US and South Africa, as a speaker and consultant on leadership. He maintain close links to mega churches in SA, like Mosaik and see his role as challenging the church on the shift from modernism and postmodernism. In the context of this shift, he argues, that ‘the church’ still wrestle with a ‘domesticated imagination’, i.e. in modernity, we took what was ‘wild’ ( our imagination) and we fenched it in, we’ve domesticated our wild imagination. He then explains, why our imagination is domesticated in modernity:

1)  because of our theory of knowledge. We have reduced knowledge to what works and then is is absolute and correct.

2) we’re fixated on quick fixes, i.e. programs, tricks in the bag which should fix our problems. These are often tricks which we copy from the neighbours, from the recipe books we read and then cut and paste.

3) because of our isolation: Because we are in competition with the church across the street for market-share and measure our success in terms of teh graphs we dont collaborate with our next door neighbours ( in the area), we would rather partner with those who are far away- to get some competitive edge. However, according to Maroia, competition is killing us all.

For Martoia, we are in a new postmodern (after modern) situation, which is a shift towards a world where there is no certainties anymore-the wilderness or the wilder. For him God is the ‘wilder’ (yes, its the first time I heard of this as well). A wilder was a tourguide of sorts,  who would consiously lead his tour group into the wild to be ‘lost’. Of course, the wilder would act lost, and the group would then experience the wild in its rawness and exitement. For him then, the church dont seek the lost, the church itself is lost. The key question is: How lost is the church today ?  How lost are we ?

So, to be able to understand lost-ness he then dialogues with sociologists and psychologists who study the brainfunctions of those who are lost. What made the difference between dying and surviving. What are the secrets of deep survivial ?  In a nut: those who die, are the ones OD-ed on adrenalin. They went into overdrive, exhausted themselves and died.  The others slow down, find a quiet place and remap. Being bewildered, in a different world, they see, are aware and realise this as an opportunity to re-imagine, remap.

He then suggest a new paradigm for leadership, in dialogue with this notion of deep survival. It seems to me that he starts with seeing God as a wilder, leading his people into the wilderness, on purpose. In this sense we can say: God is bewildering. he uses examples of Israel being led our of comfort, into the desert, Noah, Job, Hosea, the disciples, etc, who were invited into bewildering situations. This invitation ( from God) was never into safety, it was out it. Away from our worn-out histories and traditions, into an imagination of God doing something new.  So, we need, as leaders, to be able to manouvre the liminal spaces; liminality, where we are not at ease, but entering new spaces, new kinds of spaces, where our (well-known) stories mash with God’s story. God is actually transforming our story through taking us deeper (Luk 5:1-11-this textual reference is significant!). He is doing creating something new (kainos, also significant!) not simply renewing the old.

Let me make a few safe comments:

I preached last Sunday on the disciples being called into the deep spaces
(where they’ve never been) from Luk 5:1-13.  For me, the call is consciously away from the crowds, towards the smaller, intimate relations.  This was not an attempt to understand the crowd or their world better, this was a choice to side with fishermen who evidently failed and had to go home literally emptyhanded.  The choice was between masses who wanted another celebrity and the loosers who simply needed fish. These guys were called into a deeper struggle, to a place where they could not contain what God does, and where they had to call in, depend on others. I agreed that we are called into the wild, into the deep end, but its a familiar place, but its a place of failure and shame. Jesus takes them back to redeem that memory, to do something which calls for the individualism to be superceded and for a joint struggle to bring in what God is doing. I also think that Simon’s confession and bending the knee is a critical moment. Our response to what God is doing is submission, but also dying. Our way is not out of the  wilderness, but deeper into the dark abyss, following Christ towards the cross, the ultimate paradox, of our time. Yet, this is nothing new:  Bonhoeffer, being executed, following Christ, against his nation’s hegemonic story stated ‘when Christ calls a man (sic) he bids him to come and die’ and Bob Marley lamented against the empire, in Redemption Songs : ‘How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look’.  It seems that the challenge, for us in Riverlea is real, to open up and allow God’s new thing, in our country to shape us to follow his call here.