Leading Christian Communities (C. Kavin Rowe) -- A Review

LEADING CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES. By C. Kavin Rowe. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023. Viii + 136 pages.

                Leading Christian communities is not easy. I know, I've led them. Since we who are called to lead and those who have been entrusted to our care are human beings who bring baggage to the relationship, leadership is always a complicated matter. While we might wish that Christian communities were less difficult to lead, that’s not the case. If we think that our situations are unique, we just need to look at the New Testament. There are those who pine for the golden age of the New Testament era, but to believe in that golden age involves a misreading of the text. A close reading of the New Testament reveals that the early Christian community was anything but perfect. Nevertheless, these early communities are part of our story. It's not just the New Testament, but the Old Testament reveals the complicated nature of the human community. Thus, the two testaments provide us with useful words of wisdom and guidance. Therefore, Scripture is worth studying when it comes to discerning the nature of leadership in Christian communities.

                C. Kavin Rowe, the George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament and vice dean of the faculty at Duke Divinity School, offers us in Leading Christian Communities, the first of a planned trilogy of collected essays and reflections. This book speaks directly and at times indirectly about Christian Leadership. He brings to the conversation his experience and training as a biblical scholar and his experiences in institutional leadership. The essays found in this book are drawn from writings produced over more than a decade and are published here as they were originally written. He writes in his preface that “the overall goal of these brief essays is to display the shape and dynamics of Christian thinking when it is biblically shaped and focused on critical questions Christian leaders face” (p. vii).  

                Rowe has divided the collection into four parts. Part 1 focuses on what he titles "The Acts of the Apostles and Thriving Communities." Part 2 speaks more directly to Christian leadership, with fourteen essays under the title “Christian Leadership.” Then moving on to Part 3, Rowe discusses the concept of "Traditioned Innovation." This term intrigued me after reading Andy Root's recent books, which raises questions about innovation. Perhaps "traditional innovation" can serve as a more balanced understanding. Finally, Part 4 contains two essays under the heading of "Christmas and Easter." These concluding essays are the least connected to the question of leadership, though they do focus on the larger story of Jesus.

                Rowe has written previously on the Book of Acts, so it's not surprising that he begins his discussion of Christian leadership with the Book of Acts. In the first essay, titled “The Pattern of Life in Thriving Communities,” Row lays out six elements that define thriving Christian communities as revealed in the Book of Acts. While he lays out the pattern in the first essay, he uses the next six essays to dive more deeply into each of these elements that include networking, visibility, room for the weak, incorporating disagreement, understanding why the community exists, and finally, he invites us to acknowledge that suffering will be part of being part of a thriving community. He writes in the opening chapter that "to learn from Acts how to think about thriving communities requires us to nurture an imagination that tries to think about a total pattern of life." As such the qualities he notes here are different strands that taken together help "constitute a particular way of being in the world" (p. 10). On the last element, suffering, he notes that the early Christian community experienced suffering from the very beginning. Thus, he writes that “the early Christians not only assume that suffering will be part of the pattern of their lives, they also rejoice in the occasion for such affliction—that it gives an opportunity to witness to the Lord Jesus” (pp. 27-28).

                Part 2 is the longest section in this collection of essays. It includes fourteen chapters that run the gamut from the importance of humor to recognizing the reality of the vanishing neighbor. One thing that he notes here is that hierarchies and institutions are necessary parts of the conversation when it comes to Christian leadership. When it comes to hierarchies, however, he notes that they’re not all the same. Therefore, we must recognize that an appropriate hierarchy will lead to the common good.  As for institutions, he reminds us that most of our significant experiences take place within institutions, including the church. That, of course, leads to a conversation about power, and again not all forms of power are the same. All of this involves becoming “Christ-shaped leaders” who have formed a “Scriptural imagination.” This involves the formation of a scriptural-shaped life. That is “a scriptural imagination is not a ‘thing’ we possess but a whole life, so no one seminary, congregation, or workplace could alone account for a leader’s transformation. A sustained induction into the lifelong practice of reading Scripture well is indispensable for those who serve the church and a gift to a world that desperately needs it” (p. 49).    

                This idea of “Traditioned Innovation” that is explored in the five essays found in Part 3 is intriguing. This idea of “traditioned innovation, which he suggests is a “Biblical way of thinking” centers on how we live into the future in the light of the past. The message here is similar to the one I shared in my book Called to Bless: Finding Hope by Reclaiming Our Spiritual Roots (Cascade Books 2021). Looking both into the past and the future, the first chapter lays out an outline of the biblical story that centers on fall, election, redemption, and consummation. I prefer Eugene Boring’s five-fold pattern of Creation, Covenant, Christ, Church, and Consummation (see his Disciples and the Bible). Nevertheless, the recognition of an overarching theme is a helpful way of telling the Biblical story. Rowe speaks of Pentecost being an expression of Traditioned Innovation, in that the event, as expressed by Luke, draws upon Jewish tradition. As part of this conversation, he also looks at the differences in the Gospels, which he believes are somewhat overblown. That is, he believes scholars have made a bigger deal when it comes to the differences found in the four accounts than is necessary.  He also takes note of how the New Testament can be seen as a traditioned innovation of the Old Testament. That is, the writers of the New Testament built on the foundations present in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). In taking this position, he tries to make the case that the New Testament fulfills the promise of the Old Testament. One way in which this is seen is Jesus’ position as king, a position that fulfills the promise of David.

                Part Four is the briefest and the least connected to the essays found in the earlier parts of Rowe’s Leading Christian Communities. The two essays focus on the connection of the two major Christian feast days—Christmas and Easter (he’s already discussed the third prong, Pentecost). The first essay makes the case that Christmas needs Easter. He suggests that the commercialization of Christmas has separated Christmas from Easter and in doing so it leads to sadness. He notes that it is an important part of Christian leadership to let the people know that Christmas is only the beginning. That is because while Christmas offers glad tidings, without Easter it offers only failed promises and a dead Messiah. At the same time "Easter needs Christmas." He writes that "Christmas reminds us that we can never think about the death or the resurrection without the human Jesus, without, that is, understanding their significance in light of God's decision to be with us and for us as a human being" (p. 130). I agree with Rowe on this. It’s not a matter of choosing between Christmas and Easter. We need both to fully understand the person of Jesus and his leadership.

                I found the essays in Leading Christian Communities to be interesting and helpful. This isn’t a fully developed leadership handbook. It is instead an invitation to consider what the biblical story has to say about leadership and why that is true. Rowe doesn’t attempt to cover all the bases of Christian leadership in this brief book, but Leading Christian Communities does offer insight into both the challenges of leadership and the nature of the church as a context for leadership. The one question I have for Rowe is why he didn’t update the essays. It’s a bit disconcerting to read an essay that speaks of “new books” that were published a decade in the past. I understand that he noted at the beginning that these are published as written, but it wouldn’t involve that much work to make minor adjustments. As for Rowe’s orientation, I sensed a traditional, somewhat evangelical, bent to the essays. He is affiliated with Duke Divinity School, which is related to the United Methodist Church. While some UMC seminaries, such as Claremont School of Theology, are quite liberal/progressive. My sense, knowing the identity of several Duke faculty, is that it is a more centrist school. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised by the moderately evangelical tone of the book.  As for the message of the book, we who are called to lead within the church can always use a primer on effective Christian leadership, even if it does involve a reminder that suffering might be involved at some point. Thus, there is good information to be found here that can help us be more effective in leading Christian communities.