A little over a week ago, a group of people gathered in a small chapel in Gilman, Vermont, about twenty miles north of where I live in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The people assembled in the chapel, named the Reverend George L. Fox Memorial Chapel celebrated and remembered the chapel's namesake. Many years ago, the chapel had housed a Methodist congregation and Reverend Fox had served as its pastor.️

What had made Fox worthy of a chapel named in his honor was a decisive moment during World War II when he exemplified servant leadership. Serving as a chaplain aboard the USS Dorchester, a transport ship moving troops across the Atlantic, Fox was one of four chaplains on the boat. A German submarine managed to torpedo the Dorchester, and the ship rapidly began to sink in the icy waters. Facing death, the ship's crew began to panic.

Fox, and his three colleagues, saw this as their chance to serve. Doing what they could, they helped organize the evacuation, gave assurances to the crew to maintain calm, and handed out life jackets to save lives. Having saved as many as they could, the chaplains - from different denominations, faiths and backgrounds - joined hands, sang hymns and prayed as they went down with the boat.

The primary feature of servant leadership is that it always puts others first and seeks ways to serve people. It is this feature that gives servant leaders their unique influence and power. People are inspired to follow leaders whom they trust will prioritize their interests. In the extreme example of Rev. Fox, it is not hard to imagine how terrified young men were able to find their way to safety because of Rev. Fox's sacrificial commitment to lead them out of danger. When people believe their leaders will offer their very lives in service to them, they in turn become servant leaders to others in response. Just knowing that Rev. Fox served a congregation so geographically close to me is inspiration in it's own right!

Reading Greenleaf's Servant Leadership today creates a sense of temporal distortion. The writing style and examples that Greenleaf employs often feel dated or even obsolete. That makes the reader wonder if the book might be irrelevant today. The approach Greenleaf takes, which is admittedly non-scientific and based on his own hunches, seems particularly out of place in our data-driven, evidence-demanding world. And yet, Greenleaf's insights are often quite interesting and profound. He is clearly making his suggestions and observations based on a wealth of experience and good sense. It is a worthy read.

There is an excellent preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition I own, written by Stephen R. Covey (remember that guy!). I would suggest that the preface is probably a better introduction to "servant leadership" as an idea for contemporary readers than the first chapter of the book itself. Nevertheless, once Greenleaf starts hitting his stride (or I just became more accustomed to his writing style) the first chapter offered much upon which to reflect.

Greenleaf was writing in the late 60's and early 70's - a period of time when our country was facing significant social transformation and turmoil. While the dynamics were different than our current conditions, remarkable similarities can be found. A few of note:

• a deep loss of trust in institutions
• generational shifts
• social upheavals along racial/gender lines

Greenleaf speaks powerfully and directly to all of these issues. His answer is the development of servant-leaders to lead the transformation of essentially all social institutions. The servant-leader is defined as servant first. That is the critical distinction. Greenleaf is really more interested in results, and the test of the successful leader (servant or otherwise) is expressed clearly:

The best test, and difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit, or at least not be further deprived? (Greenleaf, Rober K., Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, Paulist Press, 2002, p. 27)

That series of questions merits our consideration in light of our current crop of national leaders. Are they asking these questions of themselves? Are we measuring their success on those terms?

Greenleaf goes on to describe the basic character of a servant-leader. A few key quotes:

... only a true natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first. (Greenleaf, p. 31)

Pacing oneself by appropriate withdrawal is one of the best approaches to making optimal use of one's resources. (Greenleaf, p. 33)

The interest in and affection for one's followers that a leader has - and it is a mark of true greatness when it is genuine - is clearly something that followers "haven't to deserve". (Greenleaf, p. 34)

I picked these quotes in part because of how strongly they contrast with our current cultural moment. Our leaders do not listen, but demand to be listened to. Exposure of any kind, positive or negative, is considered a win, while any kind of withdrawal is a sign of weakness. Followers aren't so much cared for as manipulated and coerced.

These are the fundamental observations that have led me to think that "servant leadership" is due for a revival in our institutions. Greenleaf found hope in his troubled times, though he cautioned:

The future society may be just as mediocre as this one. It may be worse. (Greenleaf, p. 59)

I fear he was right here. We have progressed in some areas, regressed in others, but we find ourselves again divided over cultural issues that have allowed authoritarian-minded leaders to wedge their way to the highest offices of our nation. Is there any other way forward besides servant leadership?

A few additional notes:

• I initially thought I would be able to read and write a lot over the last few days, but I have been much slower than I expected. Some personal matters have taken my time, and they will not be resolved for a few more weeks, so I expect my pace to be slow.
• I have mixed feelings about Substack. I like the social integration features, but I hate the iOS app, which doesn't have the kind of granular control over notifications I wanted. So I silenced them all. Also, I always worry about how long services like Substack will last, as many similar services have come and gone. So I will be cross-posting my content on my personal blog, Overstatement where I have more control.
• No one reads this stuff anyway. I just do it for myself.
• Finally, a statement from Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America responding to accusations of mismanagement and fraud at the ELCA aid organizations. The statement is a powerful contemporary example of what servant-leadership looks like.

Note: I originally posted this on Substack, but have decided to cross-post my content here on Overstatement.

Watching the current administration take the reigns of the most powerful institutions in the world has caused me to wonder where exactly we slipped off the rails. Social media, renewed culture wars, economic woes all have played a part in destabilizing our society and creating openings for extremism of one kind or another. But I also think that leadership as a concept has been lost along the way. It seems that those who assume positions of power are not able exhibit the kind of leadership we need. Our leaders are hollow representatives of our worst inclinations and lowest ambitions. While I am concerned about the broader political agendas of the current administration, regardless of your political orientation effective leaders provide immense value in generating desirable outcomes.

Leadership is fundamentally broken today.

In 1968, Robert Greenleaf wrote his essay “The Leader as Servant.” A few years letter, this essay along with a number of related essays was published in book form as Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. The book became enormously influential in the years that followed, shaping ideas on leadership in government, business, nonprofit and religious organizations. Yet reading it today, much seems to have been forgotten. I recalled “servant leadership” as an idea as I watched the campaigns and elections last year, precisely because the concept seemed so absent in and alien to our politics.

For this substack, I am going to read through the chapters of Servant Leadership and offer some thoughts and reflections. I suspect the book will seem a little quaint; a remnant from a past that wasn’t really all that long ago, but that has been buried by some very strange and curious turns of history. I am hopeful that some of its observations and lessons will seem viscerally relevant to our moment. Even more than that, I hope we can reflect on our collective resources and find within them a renewed leadership that can address the crisis of our times.

I look forward to reading.

By the way, it is worth noting that Greenleaf didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum. Others were also thinking along the same line. Because of this, I intend to read another book after this. Martin Luther King’s 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community is a powerful reflection on the struggles of King’s time. No doubt some of this words will resonate well with our struggles too. And no one in the last 100 years embodied “servant leadership” as well as Dr. King.

Recently, I decided to move this blog, which is a very poorly maintained blog, I admit, to AWS. I wanted to do this more or less as a learning excersize and also because I figured AWS would be an inexpensive option.

I have been a happy customer of serices like Linode, Heroku and Digital Ocean for years. These companies provide a great solutino for web apps and web sites, and they have been improving and expanding their offerings lately. Generally speaking you can reserve a virtual instance with your flavor of linux and attach some storage and a database and get a basic project up and running. For projects like that - with a modern, but basic stack - these tools are perfect. I love how easy it is to fire up a Linode node and get to work.

But, for a simple static site, they seem like a bit of overkill. If you are just serving HTML, CSS and JS, Amazon Web Services seems like a better option. AWS has tons of different services, so if your project expands to include more needs, AWS allows you to take advantage of the vast resources AWS has to offer. Decide later you want to add DB functionality? What to add some basic API endpoints? What to run some maintenence workers? AWS has you covered. If you are sure you only want a static site, perhaps GitHub Pages is a better option since it is totally free. But AWS also allows you to integrate with your GitHub repo and update your static site with a simple push command.

But...and this is a big but...AWS doens't go out of it's way to make life easy. If anything, AWS is overwhelming with options. For any given problem there are multiple different paths to a solution. And AWS can be confusing becuase of it's sheer scale. There are loads of tutorials out there on setting up a static stie on AWS. And yet, AWS can still mess with your head.

Is it worth it?

I think so. I reduced my hosting costs from around $10/month to less than $1/month. The initial configuration and set up was a bit of work, but once things were all wired up, I could push up to my GitHub repo and AWS does the rest. It works. And it saves me a lot of money.

DHH and the 37 Signals team have been moving away from AWS, and DHH has recently talked about the reasons why. I think he makes some good points, and organizations in similar situations would do well to ponder the lessons they've learned. At the same time, no one should shy away from AWS. It remains an amazing service with a low cost to entry. The biggest barrier to AWS is the learning curve.

Since I began looking for a new full-time job, I have noticed two major challenges I face as a candidate. One is simply my age. As a "second-career" person, it is sometimes difficult to be considered for junior positions. I have some thoughts on that, but I'll save them for another post. The second major challenge, which I will focus on here, is overcoming a number of assumptions around my "first career."

Religion is a hot button topic in almost any context. But, as mainline denominations continue to decline and traditional expressions of religion become more marginal, I have noticed that many people know very little about religious people or regard them with suspicion. I think this is understandable. Perhaps another blog post could be "10 Myths About Me as a Former Religious Leader." I would like to suggest, however, that clergy develop a number of key skills that are of great value to any development team. I suspect that many people are unaware of what the role of 'pastor' actually entails. So, here are a few things to consider.

• Clergy are self-starters. Generally speaking, clergy have to supervise themselves. I always had to set my own agenda, organize my meetings, reach out to people for engagement, and then follow up to ensure things got done. I even had to train committees on how best to evaluate me and review my performance. In most of the churches I served, I had to initiate or facilitate almost everything that happened in the church life.
• Clergy know how to overcome adversity. I have lived in parsonages (housing for clergy) that lacked electricity. I have called 911 to protect my home and church building multiple times. I have escorted troubled, disturbed, potentially violent people out of the church. I have worked with highly restrictive budgets in order to get something done. I have managed small, overworked, underpaid staff. Difficult circumstances are the norm for clergy.
• Clergy are problem solvers. Running a church is like putting a 500-piece puzzle together with 250 pieces. You have to figure stuff out. I served a church that lost its boiler in the middle of a freezing cold winter. We had a very small budget. You have to figure it out. I served a church that needed a new way to connect with the neighborhood and the wider community. You just have to figure something out. Solutions have to be found. And you are the person to find them. The fact is that the "buck stops" with the pastor in most churches.
• Clergy are good communicators. Sure we have to preach and speak often in public settings. But we also have to organize people into leadership teams and committees. We draft newsletters and blog posts. We plan and lead educational programming for all ages. Most of all, perhaps, we have to motivate people to be engaged and to live their lives faithfully.
• Clergy know how to deal with people. Churches are people. And that means there are all kinds of people. Some are easy to work with. Some are not. Clergy work with them all. Navigating personalities, investing in difficult relationships, reaching out to people in need, listening, counseling, advising - all of this and more is part of the daily life for clergy.
• Clergy are life-long learners. Most clergy I know are in therapy with a professional counselor - not because of any particular diagnosis - but because they want to invest in a deeper understanding of themselves. Most clergy I know have a huge bookshelf full of books and attend conferences and are part of support groups. Clergy are committed to learning more and more about themselves and their craft.
• Clergy have high emotional intelligence. Clergy know how to listen closely to people and really integrate their ideas. Clergy also know how to address the concerns of others to meaningfully impact them. Clergy are trained to be responsive to the needs of the people they serve, and to always be authentic in their encounters with others. Clergy bring their "whole selves" to their work.

I understand why hiring managers are a little reluctant to consider former clergy people for their positions. But if they could take a more objective look at former clergy from mainstream churches, they might see a wealth of opportunity in their hiring practices.

With COVID restrictions loosening up, for better or worse, and with my vaccination well established, I decided it was time to venture out of the quiet spaces of Vermont where I have been for over a year now. So I set up some lunches with family and friends and headed down to Connecticut. Not a huge trip - but a good chance to test my traveling abilities before some longer road trips this summer.

As I left Vermont, I realized that it has been a long time since:

• I saw a billboard sign. I haven't seen a billboard sign in over a year.
• I saw a Tesla charging station....in Meriden, CT! The electric revolution is coming.
• I drove in traffic. I was even cut off!
• I talked to strangers. This seemed to be a universal issue, as everyone I encountered seemed quite chatty.

It was great to see friends and spend time with people I haven't been able to spend time with. It was nice to see a different part of the earth. And it was nice to drive old familiar streets in Hartford.