The Four Postures of the Spiritual Leader of the Future (Part 3)

These postures are taken from the original ebook, The Four Postures of the Spiritual Leader of the Future, which is available on our website.

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Much has been made about the actions, attitudes and thoughts of a leader,but I’ve found few books that talk about the importance of the posture of a leader. Our words and actions are crucial as leaders, but as posture has even greater potential. We often overlook posture and its power. Posture, of course, includes our non-verbal body language. But it’s more than that. If our content –our words and actions – communicate what we say and think, but it is our posture that communicates what we believe, value and prioritize. Our posture clearly communicates our motivations – why we are doing what we are doing.

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The Poet - The Posture of Heart-awakening Storytelling

Humans are wired for stories. When my sons were little, they never asked me at bedtime for me to read them statistics or spreadsheets or the day’s stock earnings from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They asked, of course, for me to read them a story. Multiple stories. Each night. Every night. We tend to think stories are for children. But we all need stories, no matter our age. Why? Stories move us. Stories shape us. Stories inspire us. Those who tell the best story are the ones in control of shaping the culture.

Sometimes stories entertain us. But the poet posture is not a call to entertain those we lead; it is to inspire. Leaders often live under the false premise that if we simply give people more information or rationale or logical reasoning they will change their lives. Information (truth) is important, as is logical reasoning (discovery) but it’s not as important as we often believe it is. Research continues to show people make changes to their lives when they are inspired and moved to do so.

What is it that poets do? They don’t just write poems. They awaken others through story and possibility.

What are they awakening? Hope.

A different future.

The apostle Paul, writing to the church in Ephesus, wrote, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10). The word handiwork is sometimes translated workmanship. The original Greek word is poeima, where we get our English word poem. Paul writes that we are God’s poem. God, the Great Poet, sits down with pen in hand, and creatively, purposefully and compassionately writes a poem about us, of us. Not only are called to be poets; Paul says that we are a poem in the eyes of God.

As leaders we must embrace that we are storytellers. Leaders are like curators in a museum who collect stories and learn to tell those stories at the righttime to the right people. Our role is to do the hard work (laborer) to take the truth (scientist) and translate (as a poet) the truth into language and story and possibility that inspires hope. But to speak to the heart requires courage. You can’t create anything without courage. There is risk involved when you create, when you are vulnerable and when you seek to inspire others by stirring their imaginations. If you want to play it safe, don’t be creative. But you’ll never stir the imaginations of others. People, oftentimes without even knowing they are doing so, are saying “inspire me, move me, tell me a story.”

Jim Rayburn, the founder Young Life, a ministry primarily targeting middle school and high school students, said he believed it was a sin to bore a kid with the gospel. And the story of the gospel is so rich and inspiring, it should be a sin if we bore others with it, no matter their age. We must do the difficult, brave and inefficient—but necessary—work of embracing the leadership posture of poets.