Leadership itself, like the People of God, is in transition.  It, too, is passing through a transformation experience. We know, as an observation of life, that change is the only constant, and that change is the natural state of all living organisms.

In "Leadership Is", author Harrison Owen explains that leadership is experiencing the 3 C's which are change, challenge, and crisis.  A transitional event, or change,  is the source of new life, new energy, and a new cosmology.  It is a challenge because all persons and all systems are conservative by nature.  It gives the appearance of a crisis because it can be painful and difficult, and can seem to take an inordinate amount of time to come to pass. 

Owen defines the current leadership transition as a shift from formal to informal leadership.  He draws an analogy with the game of soccer:

New Rules for Leadership:
1) Whoever has the ball is leader.
(It is impossible that one person should lead with the ball all the time.  This means exhaustion for the leader and defeat for the team).
2) Ball hogs die.
(The old model of leadership that we are leaving behind, in which the one or the few had all the answers, the power, and kept the order/protected the rest of us, no longer produces or achieves or is creative for us).
3) Never oppose force with force.
(Gathering all the available forces and charging through the resistance as a management/leadership tactic, results in failure).
4) Play the whole field.
(The soccer way is to take advantage of the available space in order to reset the dynamics of play and create an open space which reveals the path).
5) Cooperate in order to compete.
(Cooperation replaces a desire to succeed that is based on hostility and anger).
6) Honour the opposition.
    
We ask why it is time for new rules of leadership and why it is time to move from formal to informal leadership.

People everywhere are discovering their spiritual identity, their spiritual birthright, and often that discovery is being made outside of formal religion.  Statistics quote two-thirds of adults as having a personal spirituality, but only one in ten as attending a church. 

For Owen leadership is about empowering the spirit.  Owen's definition of leadership is, "Leadership is liberation, the capacity to inspire the human spirit on its quest for fulfillment".  He believes that all of us all of the time operate out of a sense of being connected to an inner core of meaning. This is very similar to Diarmuid O'Murchu's definition of spirituality as the human search for meaning.  Spirituality is our instinctual drive for the transcendent, and is equally as powerful as our other instinctual drives, perhaps even more so.  The drive toward meaning and toward ultimate mystery, which comes from deep within the human spirit,  is inescapable. Anthropologists and archaeologists say that as a species, we have behaved in a distinctly spiritual way for at least 70,000 years.  Formal religion is only 4,500 years old.

Therefore, in order to be effective and fruitful, what must the characteristics of  informal/creative leadership be? 

Creativity comes from the brain itself, which is split into two hemispheres, each controlling very specific and very different functions. The "right brain" controls our creativity, so we all have the capacity to be creative; it is the natural function of the brain.  Rollo May, in "The Courage To Create", defines creativity as, " the encounter of the intensely conscious person with his or her world".

May lists the characteristics of creative leaders.
1) They are passionately innovative.
2) They often question the status quo.
3) They think holistically, perceiving the overall patterns, which often leads to differing conclusions.
4) They are not likely to be obedient all the time.
5) Their loyalties are first to their own ideas and second to those who will help carry them out.
6) They do not presume that supervisors in the organization will always make the right decisions.  
7) They acknowledge their own limitations and strengths, and are not threatened by the strengths of others.
8) They embrace the opportunity to help others grow and develop.

Other observations of May are that the creative person is always dissatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional and thus is always threatening the status quo by first seeing and then pushing on to new worlds.  Hence creativity is first an act of destruction, necessary for the birth of something new, and is always a threat.

May's position is, "We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born... we are called upon to do something new... to push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths...to leap into the unknown".  

He then challenges us, "If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.  You will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution to the whole".

In this interim time, this time of  "dying but not yet reborn", where will creative leadership come from?  For increasing numbers of spiritually awakened people, soul-making has become the goal of living.  If church leaders are not enabling and nurturing this, many others are.  These are some of the sources of leadership that are sustaining me.

1) Books: To learn how to soul-make, the advice of Joseph Campbell in "An Open Life", is to find a writer who speaks to you, and read everything he/she has written.  Stay with that author until you have devoured the teaching, and then devour the books the author has read. (Bibliographies are wealthy coffers).

2) Meditation:  Access the deep soul by the practice of meditation, or Yoga, or Reiki, or contemplation of nature. 

3) Nature as meditation:  Draw soul-life from the energy fields of the Universe.  Grow courage from exposure to the light of the moon and the stars and the sun.  Grow health from the earth's fruit and vegetation and natural medicines.  Breathe in the cosmic breath of the winds.

4) Art as meditation:  Feed the soul from myth and storytelling.  Draw out the soul. (see www.touchdrawing.com).  Write out the soul in personal journalling.

5) Reform Groups: Other sources of leadership available to us are the many groups, such as ARCC, CITI, Dignity, and of course, Corpus, who are seeking to establish compassion and justice both inside and outside the Church. Within the Institution is the leadership of the Congregations of Religious Women who continue to labour and fight, often against great odds, to implement the reforms of Vatican 11.

In order to again lead vibrantly and effectively,  all major religions are called by these times to let go of themselves as religions and recover themselves as spiritualities.

In the interim, the People of God are "leaping into the unknown" of their own spiritual depths, and discovering the nature of true leadership.