Abstract
It is often said that you should pay attention to someone’s last words, as they are likely to convey what is most important to them. How important should it be, then, for the church to pay attention to the final prayer uttered by Jesus on the eve of his impending crucifixion? For it is in this prayer in John 17 that Jesus reminds his disciples of the importance of their continued unity if the world is to recognize Jesus’s Sonship and, by extension, if it is to see him as the Messiah and the Church as his apostolic people. In many ways, however, it appears that the Church today remains fragmented across racial, cultural, tribal, socioeconomic, and denominational lines. Consider, for example, that less than one in nineteen Christian congregations in the United States could be considered multiracial at the turn of the millennium using even liberal standards.1 Or consider that the largest Protestant grouping in the world—Baptists—is actually composed of at least 221 separate Baptist denominations, many of which do not associate with one another.2 What does this lack of racial integration in Christian churches, or lack of doctrinal agreement within the largest evangelical faith tradition, say about the condition of the church’s unity today?
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Notes
Curtiss Paul DeYoung et al., United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2–3.
Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
Mark Lau Branson, “Ecclesiology and Leadership for the Missional Church,” in The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry, ed. C. Van Gelder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).
Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Transforming Culture: A Challenge for Christian Mission (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998).
See Craig S. Hendrickson, “Using Charisma to Shape Interpretive Communities in Multiethnic Congregations,” Journal of Religious Leadership 9, no. 2 (2010): 53–82.
Mary L. Connerley and Paul. B. Pedersen, Leadership in a Diverse and Multicultural Environment: Developing Awareness, Knowledge, and Skills (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 34.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Racialized Social System Approach to Racism,” in Rethinking the Color Line: Readings in Race and Ethnicity, ed. C. A. Gallagher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007).
Michael Jindra, Culture Matters: Diversity in the United States and Its Implications (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Soong-Chan Rah, Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church (Chicago: Moody, 2010), 14.
One example is Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work Related Values (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987).
R. J. Sternberg, “A Framework for Understanding Conceptions of Intelligence,” in What is Intelligence? Contemporary Viewpoints on Its Nature and Definition, ed. R. J. Sternberg and D. K. Detterman (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986), 3–18.
Chris Early and Soon Ang, Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions across Cultures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
David A. Livermore, The Cultural Intelligence Difference: Master the One Skill You Can’t Do without in Today’s Global Economy (New York: AMACOM, 2011), 37.
David A. Livermore, Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ to Engage Our Multicultural World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 13.
Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury, 1976).
Thomas H. Groome, Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1991).
Heifetz and Linsky, Leadership, 2002.
Branson and others in the missional church discussion have contextualized Heifetz and Linsky’s “adaptive leadership” framework for congregational settings. See, for example, Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006),
or Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007).
Matthew Valle, “Crisis, Culture, and Charisma,” in Contemporary Issues in Leadership, ed. W. E. Rosenbach and R. L. Taylor (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 111–16.
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© 2016 Craig S. Hendrickson
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Hendrickson, C.S. (2016). Interpretive Leadership and Cultural Intelligence. In: Chapman, M.D., Haar, M. (eds) Pathways for Ecclesial Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57112-0_9
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