Leadership as Playful Creative Adventure
By Michael S. Koppel

I learned a lesson about leadership early in my childhood from the game “follow the leader.” Selected as leader, I lined up my friends behind me for a trek through the neighborhood. I stepped forward and turned my head to make sure others were following. Immediately, I walked directly into a huge wooden plank used by a neighbor to support his boat and earned a gash in my forehead that required several stitches. Several insights about leadership are revealed in this incident: Leaders and communities pay a price for not paying attention to where we are going. Others will not always point out obstacles.  And the practice of leadership itself, while weighted with responsibility for organizations and other people, can also be conceived as a form of skillful play.

Creative leadership, like “follow the leader,” is an adventure. Unlike the childhood game, though, the playful nature of adult leadership is not nearly as simple as following the person in front. The kind of religious leadership I refer to draws on intellectual mastery as well as a honed capacity for creative and emotional intelligence.  Development of true and authentic selfhood – for ourselves and for members of the congregations we lead – may place us in tension with predominant cultural norms and expectations. We risk embarking on this creative adventure in response to the God who calls communities to vibrant life.

Playfully creative pastoral leaders foster the valuable qualities of imagination, intuition, speculation, and intellectual daring. Such leadership synthesizes adult and child-like qualities in an effort to open minds and hearts to the wonder and challenge of God: adult in that we recognize and honor ambiguity, and child-like in that we never lose sight of amazing things. 

In play we can move from the realm of possibilities into actuality. While God’s future holds boundless possibilities, it is through creative action that these possibilities can become actualized in ministry. Play frees us to step outside of comfort zones and habitual patterns for new action.  Play develops transformative leaders of stature and moral clarity who engage communities with issues of deep significance.

• Play is fully immersed in the immediacy of the present. Leaders cannot help usher in God’s new future for the community if they are unwilling to be here now.
• Play orients us differently to reality by bringing us to experience the event before we intellectually categorize the event.
• Play cultivates our innate capacity for intelligence. Pastoral leaders increase their effectiveness in relating with people as they develop skills in strengthening their primary forms of intelligence as well as developing other intelligences.
• Play awakens, or reawakens, the passion for God’s call in our lives. As acclaimed theological author Frederick Buechner writes, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
• Through play, we practice trusting God, ourselves, and others. Soulful character is developed because we face the possibility of failure, but it is here that we discover that Divine arms are ready to catch us.

How would our leadership practices and ministries look if we imagined God as the Being of Creative Play or Serendipitous Creativity? Gordon Kaufman explains that God as “Serendipitous Creativity” differs markedly from God as a parent to humanity as children (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, June 2001, 409). Such a shift in our view of God can influence our thinking about leadership. If God by God’s very nature shares creatively and lovingly in the constructive power of creation, then we might free ourselves to participate in this endeavor through our ministerial practices. 

God as Serendipitous Creativity hopefully expands our theological view of pastoral leadership and draws us to a playful, creative effort on behalf of all. In this vision of ministry as play, we begin to see ourselves as significant agents in the process of creating in relation to the Creative One.  Pastoral leaders who value Serendipitous Creativity will more likely embody and lead others toward appreciation, delight, and surprise in God. 

Leadership through improvisation is another playfully creative practice that can be more effective in ministry than we realize. Far from being capricious or arbitrary, leadership improvisation is an advanced and creative skill that benefits ministry. As a skillful leadership practice, improvisation is a form of play that allows ministers to exercise what Craig Dykstra calls pastoral imagination. It builds on our ability to engage actively in other practices that support professional response:  continuing education seminars, advanced reading, consultation with colleagues. Creative and playful leadership is improvisational as it builds from an increasing base of known skills and knowledge, and continually stretches toward the unknown.

Leadership conceived this way helps pastors frame ministry and leadership in terms of being flexible in meeting the next challenge instead of hoarding the status quo. Playful leadership, like adaptive work, places emphasis on developing capacity and means to respond to and initiate change on behalf of enriching the congregation’s morale and mission. Imagination is the only limit on the possibilities for creative ministerial leadership.

Michael S. Koppel (mkoppel@wesleyseminary.edu) is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Congregational Care at Wesley Theological Seminary. This material is taken from Open-Hearted Ministry by Michael Koppel copyright © 2008 Fortress Press. Used by permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers.  The book can be purchased at:
http://www.augsburgfortress.org/store/item.jsp?isbn=0800662954&clsid=194865&productgroupid=0

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