Creative Leadership

This weekend the American nation turns its attention to celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the his greatest attributes was his creativity in response to complex social issues. He understood that passivity and violence were both ineffective responses to the deep rooted problems in our culture. He was always thinking about and implementing innovative responses within a population that mostly focused on simplistic responses to complex problems. In the struggle for civil rights, many people were either arming themselves and turning to violence or they were being passive by either letting people dominate them or standing idly on the sidelines and watching things play out. Sadly, many Christian leaders chose either violence or passivity during that struggle. Dr. King said, "A mere condemnation of violence is empty without understanding the daily violence that our society inflicts upon many of its members. The violence of poverty and humiliation hurts as intensely as the violence of the club. This is a situation that calls for statesmanship and creative leadership."

Dr. King is such an inspiration to me because God has called me to be a leader who stands up and does something about the violence in my city. I am thankful that there are other leaders who God is calling to do the same thing and join in the struggle to bring about God's shalom community in Pittsburgh and in cities around the world. The violence in my city is not a simple issue that can be broken down into right versus left, the law versus the criminals, or bad guys against good guys. Systemic brokenness in my city has contributed greatly to the violence of poverty and humiliation. In learning from Dr. King, I dedicate much of my time as a leader to thinking about and implementing creative solutions to complex urban and cultural problems. Responding to violence with violence is wrong, and responding to pain and brokenness passively by standing on the sidelines is wrong. My heart has broken for the violence in my city. I have great hopes for the transformation that God is bringing about through leading a church in the city, by leading a mentoring program involving some of Pittsburgh's most vulnerable youth population, and by mobilizing thousands of people at my church to begin to reconcile with one another across racial, socioeconomic, cultural, neighborhood, and religious boundaries. My hope is that God will continue to open up my eyes to creative leadership and grow me as a leader in a society that desperately needs innovative responses to complex issues.