A Work of Heart

Understanding How God Shapes Spiritual Leaders

Reggie McNeal

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118160275
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

Revised and updated edition of the classic work on spiritual leadership

In A Work of Heart, bestselling author and missional expert Reggie McNeal helps leaders reflect on the ways in which God is shaping them by letting us see God at work in the lives of four quintessential biblical leaders: Moses, David, Jesus, and Paul. McNeal identifies the formative influences upon these leaders, which he sees as God's ways of working in their lives: the same influences at work today forming leaders for ministry in our times. He explores the shaping influence of culture, call, community, conflict, and the commonplace.

• Offers guidance for church leaders to let God shape their hearts from the inside out
• Reggie McNeal is the author of the bestselling book Missional Renaissance
• Gives reassurance for maintaining perspective while doing the demanding work of ministry

The book includes illustrative stories of contemporary leaders opening their hearts to God's guidance.

PART ONE
HOW GOD SHAPED MOSES, DAVID, PAUL, AND JESUS FOR LEADERSHIP

WE TEND TO see things in others with greater clarity than we see them in ourselves. The first part of this volume seeks to use this power of observation to our advantage. We begin the exploration of God's heart-shaping work by examining its dynamic in the lives of the four most prominent biblical leaders (the ones that garner the most biblical material). The quest takes us over some familiar ground. Moses, David, Paul, and Jesus provide some well-rehearsed biographies for spotting the signs of divine heart-shaping. Their stories require no introduction for the reader. Because their lives are so well-known, they provide a quick connection for illustrating with real-life examples the thesis of this book: spiritual leadership is a work of heart.

The following exploration into the leadership of these four biblical characters will begin this course on divine heart-shaping. Learning to see God at work in them sets the stage for seeing him more clearly at work in us.

1
MOSES
A HEART ON A MISSION

HOLLYWOOD WOULD HAVE had to invent Moses if God had not created him. His story contains all the elements of great epics. The guy with everything going for him blows his advantage. Noble dreams of great accomplishment apparently fall victim to immaturity. However, the potential career detour provides an offstage recovery program. Unexpected turns of events thrust the hero back into the limelight. Deferred dreams come true. And this is only two of the three acts! Moses' drama holds us mesmerized, whether acted out by Charlton Heston in a Cecil B. DeMille production or drawn out by the imaginative talents of a Dreamworks animator.

Spiritual leaders find Moses especially engaging. They identify with much that he endured. High expectations. Public confidence accompanied by private self-doubt. Humiliation. Fickle followers. Draining conflicts. Exhilarating revelations. Miraculous divine interventions. Tedious and debilitating trivia. Fear of failure. Decisive victories. Ambivalent triumphs. Loneliness. Privileged relationship with God.

Moses stands as the colossus of the Old Testament. The legacy of his leadership, the Exodus, occupies center stage as the central event of the nearly fifteen hundred years of Old Testament history. He has commanded the admiration of millions for his mission to liberate oppressed slaves and for his contribution of the Decalogue to human civilization.

Our interest in Moses grows out of the remarkable case study he presents for studying divine heart-shaping dynamics. The subplots of culture, call, community, communion, conflict, and the commonplace present themselves with rare clarity. The Hebrew scriptures give us unusual exposure to so ancient a figure. Our hearts go out to him from the moment of his birth. We find ourselves strangely forgiving of his youthful impetuousness and fits of anger. We cheer for him against Pharaoh. We envy his mountaintop meetings with the Almighty. We wonder to ourselves if we would have endured so much (some of us think we already have) without similar disqualification in the end from entering the Promised Land. Not a few of us secretly wonder if Moses got the shaft or the royal treatment at Nebo.

We feel such kinship with Moses in his leadership challenges. We feel admiration for him because of his accomplishments. We feel challenged by him without being intimidated. His obvious flaws make him approachable but do not take away from his achievements. We too want to succeed in spite of our own flaws. That is why we eagerly search for clues in Moses' own heart-shaping that will instruct our own.

Beginnings and Family Relationships

Before Moses could leverage leadership or even speak a syllable, his life was being providentially superintended in order to prepare him for his unique assignment. Miraculous deliverances and Moses began a very early association. While other Hebrew slave parents were grieving over their losses, Jochebed and Amram were successfully hiding their baby boy from Egyptian authorities and subsequent death. The bulrushes plan worked beyond their wildest dreams. Pharaoh's daughter could not possibly have imagined the events she set in motion when she responded to her maternal instincts. Miriam too proved equal to the moment. Moses would be raised as an adopted Egyptian prince in Pharaoh's court. However, he spent his early months in his Hebrew home, where his mother could whisper into the young prince's ear the things she wanted in his heart. To the ancient Hebrews, nothing happened outside the will of God. Jochebed would believe that God had spared her son for some special reason. She would surely pass this belief on to her son.

This early scripting of a “great expectations” mentality figured prominently in God's heart-shaping preparation of the leader of the Exodus. From his earliest moments, Moses would have a sense of destiny cultivated in him. Robert Clinton (The Making of a Leader, 1988), professor of Christian leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, identifies this “sense of destiny” (p. 238) as a key insight into leadership effectiveness. He defines this awareness as a belief that God has his hand on the leader for a very special purpose or purposes. This belief is tied to an event or set of events that confirm to the leader that he or she has been chosen by God for a life mission. Yahweh made sure that Moses, the future deliverer, would grow up with the knowledge that he himself had been delivered through divine intervention.

Moses apparently enjoyed a significant connectedness to his family of origin. At some point, he discovered that he owed his life to Miriam, insight that forged a special bond between them. Miriam played a leadership role in the Exodus experience, particularly the early wilderness wanderings. She generally supported her younger brother. When she rebelled against Moses' leadership, Yahweh judged her by immediately giving her leprosy. Moses pleaded for her life and forgave Miriam quickly despite the seriousness of her rebellion.

Similar dynamics also characterized Moses' relationship with Aaron. They apparently enjoyed enough time together for Moses to gain respect for and confidence in his older brother. At the burning bush, Moses implored Yahweh to let him recruit Aaron as a leadership partner. Aaron would come in handy for at least two reasons. First, he apparently knew how to talk in front of a crowd. Second, Moses needed someone who still had connections with the folk back in Egypt. Aaron did serve Moses well as a contact person with the Hebrew slaves and as his right-hand man. He, like Miriam, received grace from his younger brother on several occasions. The golden calf episode alone raised serious questions about Aaron's leadership. However, God and Moses honored Aaron by setting his tribe apart as priests.

Although Moses was the undisputed leader of the Exodus, he was not alone in leadership. Many treatments of his leadership ignore this significant fact. Miriam and Aaron formed part of a family triumvirate giving leadership to the liberated nation. The three became a leadership community that faced together the critical challenges of the wilderness sojourn. Despite their failings, Aaron and Miriam contributed to Moses' success. For his part, Moses remained faithful to his brother and sister till their end.

The Prince of Egypt

Yahweh secured arrangements for Moses to grow up the child of two -cultures, both of which he would need to understand in order to fulfill his unique role in history. His family of origin provided his Hebrew grounding.

His experience of Egyptian culture would be very different from that of his kinsmen slaves, thanks to none other than the daughter of the same Pharaoh that wanted Moses never to grow up. Why did this boy capture her heart? What prompted her to defy her own father's wishes about this child? What price, if any, did she pay to give Moses his head start in life? Surely Moses' savior told him of the day she had rescued him from the bulrushes along the banks of the Nile. What expectations did she add to those of Jochebed?

Moses, then, developed personally in an atmosphere that heightened his uniqueness. The dynamic of his childhood and early adult years would set most young men to wondering about their destiny. In Moses' case, his unusual circumstances almost certainly conspired to make him feel “different” from the others.

An interview with any great leader will often uncover this same insight into their self-perception. Like Moses, they feel somehow different from others. This awareness often begins in childhood and continues throughout adolescence and young adult development. The sense of apartness signals part of the heart-shaping activity for leadership. It affords the necessary self-differentiation that one needs to provide effective leadership to others. (Leadership is the healthy expression of this dynamic. A sense of being different taken to extremes leads to pathological behaviors wherein people become disconnected from those around them.) In Moses' case, the confluence of these forces predisposed him for leadership.

Pharaoh provided the training that fashioned the future emancipator of the Hebrews. As a prince of Egypt, Moses would be schooled in leadership practices. He would study law. He would learn to express himself and to handle responsibility and authority. He would be expected to become adept in problem solving and project management because the royal building projects were superintended by members of Pharaoh's house. Moses would become versed in Egyptian religion.

All of these fundamental elements of training prepared Moses for different aspects of his assignment to be leader of the Exodus. God spoke his Ten Commandments to a legally trained mind. Moses the expert in law served as judge and eventually established a system of lower and upper magistrates when the stress of his handling each case himself became too great. His familiarity with Egyptian religion elevated his effectiveness as ambassador of Yahweh, God of the slaves. Each plague demonstrated the superiority of Moses' God over the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Moses' understanding of the royal priesthood of Egypt provided a rich background to the covenant he would receive from Yahweh at Sinai (Exod. 19:1–6). The Israelites were to serve a role that Moses had observed in the halls of Pharaoh from his youth. The ex-slaves were now to be Yahweh's royal priests, carrying out his will and serving as his ambassadors.

We have no clue as to how Moses fared in Pharaoh's court. Was he ostracized as a foreigner? Was he made to feel second-class? Or did he stand out as a symbol of slave-class achievement and become a celebrated prince? At some point, he learned how he had been brought to Pharaoh's household. He obviously maintained some contact with kinsmen. Every sight of a Hebrew slave served as a reminder of his special reprieve in life. The constant personal observations of his people's plight apparently grated on Moses' soul.

A False Start

One wonders how long Moses' anger seethed about the treatment of his fellow Hebrews at the hands of their Egyptian taskmasters. He probably witnessed Egyptian brutality to Hebrew slaves more than once. He may have harbored notions as a young man of redeeming his people. Maybe he lobbied unsuccessfully for reform, hoping to use his influence to change slave treatment. Perhaps Moses intervened many times on behalf of the slaves. But one day he snapped. In a blind rage, he killed the Egyptian oppressor whom he had caught mistreating a Hebrew slave. His opportunity to work within the system to better his people's lot ran out with his victim's blood into the Egyptian sand.

Whatever fantasies Moses might have entertained about being heralded as a hero among his own people were crushed the next day. His attempted intervention into a dispute between two Hebrew slaves proved to be a mixed bag. It probably saved his life, because he learned from them that his crime was known. But the rebuff he received from the slaves introduced him to an ingratitude that he would experience time and time again on the part of those he was trying to lead. This type of scenario may not have been covered in the “leadership curriculum” at Pharaoh's court.

Moses experienced what all leaders ultimately fear—rejection by the people they are called to lead. Part of his internal scripting had come true. As already noted, Moses' uniqueness had set him apart from those around him from the beginning. He was a child of two cultures, who never completely belonged to either. Moses would always stand apart from his people. More than any other biblical leader, Moses seems profoundly alienated from his leadership constituency most of the time. He was never quite accepted by the Hebrews.

These dynamics would play out over the succeeding decades. For the moment, whatever disillusionment Moses had suffered from his initial attempt to deliver his people had to be temporarily ignored. He had to get ready for the escape into the desert.

Flight into the Desert

Within a dozen verses after Moses' birth narrative, we find him in danger from Pharaoh again. The prince had become avenger (Exod. 2:11–12), then would-be judge (2:13–14), then fugitive from justice (2:15). Moses' struggle to liberate, to rescue, to make right of wrong, to champion the oppressed had erupted in lethal fury. It cost him his privileged position and could cost him his life if he stayed around. He did not.

The fleeing fugitive became immediately embroiled in another combative situation. Not far into the Midianite desert, Moses encountered seven young women in distress at a local watering hole. The women's attempts at drawing water were being thwarted by some ruffian shepherds. Moses must have been an intimidating figure. Singlehandedly, he rescued the women from the harassment of the hoodlums. He further attended to their plight by personally drawing water and distributing it to their flock. His bravery and kindness landed him a dinner invitation, a wife, and a job. It turned out to be a productive afternoon.

Some significant themes emerge in the early Moses. These themes reflect similar realities for many spiritual leaders. Moses had a strong internal sense of right and wrong. This compass propelled him into personal intervention on behalf of others, even if it involved conflict. He was particularly sensitive to the needs of the underprivileged. Standing up for slaves and women did not “enhance one's résumé” in the second millennium before Christ. The crusader, liberator heart was unmistakable in the young prince.

Leaders often become leaders because of the same internal drive evidenced by Moses. They ...