• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

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After nearly 20 years of teaching, including stints at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, Henri Nouwen moved to Toronto, Canada to live the rest of his life with mentally handicapped people at the L’Arche community. He moved “from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs [of] society.”

Upon moving to the L’Arche community, Nouwen would later say that “their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then.” “I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment.”

In one of his most widely read books, In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen shares his thoughts on Christian leadership from a talk he gave in Washington, D.C. during the fifteenth anniversary of the Center for Human Development.

Nouwen begins this short book with three assumptions he had about leadership. A desire to be relevant, a desire for popularity and a desire for power was his prescription for leadership.

Nouwen came to understand that these three things were actually temptations. Instead, our approach to leadership should be a direct response to the question Jesus asks all of us: “Do you love me?”

Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.

The “Christian leader of the next century,” says Nouwen, “is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”

“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God.”

“Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.”

“When [Christian leaders] live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy.”

Nouwen begins and ends the book with a very moving story about Bill Van Buren, one of the mentally handicapped people he lived with at L’Arche. Bill and Henri traveled together on this trip to D.C., which is the backdrop for the whole speech/book. The experience they shared together is powerful. I’ll let you discover it for yourself.

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