Know Your Story and Lead with It: The Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership
Richard L. Hester, Kelli Walker-Jones
Knowing your story is an essential component of effective leadership, but finding your story among the myriad narratives that fill your life isn’t a simple task. Richard L. Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones have offered a path to finding your own story amid the powerful family and cultural narratives that may be obscuring your vision.
The aim of this book is to show leaders how to explore their story of reality, tell it to other group members, and consider how it can be used as a resource for leadership. This narrative perspective holds that because there’s always more than one story about a situation, we have choices about which story we will embrace.
After more than six years working with groups of clergy, the authors have woven these stories together to create the fabric that is the backdrop of narrative clergy leadership. The book is an account of their pilgrimage. As you read you will have a sense that this is your pilgrimage, and it will encourage you into narrative ventures of your own.
Praise for the Book
"Hester and Walker-Jones provide a context in which ministers are able to realize they are not alone. This happens when they are able to share the stories of both success and failure that shape their lives. In the process, ministers are able to thicken what Hester and Walker-Jones identify as the “thin narratives” that too often shape the lives of those in the ministry."
—From the foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
"On the basis of wise experience and anecdotal accounts from their research, Hester and Walker-Jones weave a new pattern of pastoral leadership. Given the inadequacy of any top-down leadership, they model and exposit a relational way of leadership based on acute self-awareness, whereby pastor and people together walk into the unknown with freedom and intentionality. Their study reflects not only an awareness of old failed patterns, but a recognition that newness is dawning in the church that bespeaks healing, engagement, and the generativity of trusting collegiality."
—Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary
"Know Your Story and Lead with It brings alive the power of personal narrative in shaping ministry. Many clergy, in an effort to live up to the multiple and conflicting expectations of their congregation, lose themselves in stories that others have created. Kelli Walker-Jones and Richard Hester beautifully describe how clergy can re-write their own narratives and in the process reclaim authentic and effective leadership."
—John A. Fenner, Program Director, Courage to Lead for Clergy and Congregational Leaders
"God’s story is woven with divine care in our stories. The wisdom in this book will help you mine your story and lead with it. Gather wisdom from the cutting floor of your memory. Explore the spaces between memory and the telling of it. Celebrate what you discover. Nurture your community into the rich life of curiosity and not-yet-knowing."
—Hope Morgan Ward, Resident Bishop, Mississippi Conference, The United Methodist Church
About the Authors
Richard L. Hester is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project at Triangle Pastoral Counseling in Raleigh, North Carolina. A Baptist minister, he has served a local congregation, is a pastoral counselor, and for 21 years was professor of pastoral theology, first at Phillips Theological Seminary and later at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Kelli Walker-Jones, an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project on which this book is based. She has also served as minister to several congregations and as associate director of field education and admissions at Duke University Divinity School.
ISBN# 978-1-56699-388-3
Alban No. AL388
paper
2009
In stock
$18.00
($14.40 for members)
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