Robert Dale, in Leadership for a Changing Church, claims we want leaders who make sense.  At first blush, we might be tempted to respond that we also would prefer spouses, children, neighbors, and even books that make sense.  To be fair, Dale further specifies leaders in sense-making as those who can effectively translate across paradigms and eras, and maybe even people, and scriptures.

Leaders provide continuity frames for between-the-times eras by showing what deserves to be preserved from the past and by creating what’s required of us for healthy futures. (p. 101)

This normative hope for post-modern religious leadership finds echoes in unexpected places. David Abrams describes the tribal role of the shaman as

the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture…in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. His magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations…of the larger, more-than-human field. (The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 9)

In Genius 101, Dean Keith Simonton describes polymathic genius as an unusual ability to perceive patterns underlying paradigm perimeters. The polymathic religious leader maps patterns of confluence and dissonance across physical and metaphysical systems. Our Millennial shamans are paradigm and people transliterators in a Universe of symbiotic meaning development.

It is difficult to imagine what this string of abstractions would look like within one leader. William James argued that the incarnated definition of religious and spiritual genius is a renowned mystic or saint, or preferably both. For heuristic purposes, we might translate “shaman” as “Messiah,” operating within a defined historical-cultural information system.

• Messiah:  Shaman, a transliterative adept with universal paradigms and languages, and diverse species;
• Messianic Universal Field: Functioning optimally within an Open Set 4-dimensional sphere with (0) Core Vector soul  (see Buckminster Fuller and Gregori Perelman, and William Thurston);
• Purpose of Religion/Spirituality: symbiotic meaning development.

Due to constraints of timeliness, let’s try substituting the word “compassion” for the two words “symbiotic meaning,” thereby synchronizing with the Dalai Lama’s, and perhaps Jesus of Nazareth’s teleological belief that “the whole purpose of our practice is to become more compassionate human beings.” (Beyond Religion, p. 183)

Messianic Leadership Purpose: development of compassion.

Even if all that does make sense together (and I have a dissertation thesis topic in mind that would investigate whether the hypothesis proposed is one that could be scientifically and religiously and/or metrically confirmed as “sense-making” or “True,” or not) what might it mean to say that our best and brightest spiritual leaders have the gift of transliteration?

To transliterate is to accurately exchange letters, words, information, thoughts, nutrients, into corresponding values of another language, or paradigm, person or information system. Transliteration is to translation as nutritious yogurt is towarm milk.  Transliteration unveils, decodes, what translation reveals. Transliteration comprehends the why of what translation understands as a correlation of meaning. When we put them together, something diastatically metamorphic occurs, a new pattern of symbiotic relationships across what had been two distinct entities.  Transliteration is the ability to translate, and accurately predict, emergent patterns across languages, individual organic systems, polycultures; each a type of Closed Set universe (or Group in mathematics and sociometrics) information system. The more adept at paradigm and person translation, the more compassionate becomes the leader; the more compassionate, the more adept at communicating with optimized sense-making, or mutual-meaning-creation, mindfulness, and effectiveness.

Christian Schwarz chooses empowering facilitative leaders as the first of his eight necessary qualities for Natural Church Development optimization. “These pastors equip, support, motivate, and mentor individuals,”…. “They do not use lay workers as ‘helpers’.” (p. 24) This is leadership operating in a cooperative transaction economy and ecology. Capitalists and socialists, government regulators and “free” enterprise advocates alike need not apply for the role of post-modern shaman. Empowerment optimizes as cooperation becomes equilateral, mutually initiated and received. This is a highly mindful and effective cooperative value exchange.

Leaders who realize their own empowerment by empowering others experience how the “all by itself” principle contributes to growth. (p. 25)

Mutually empowering iterative loops are the economic-ecologists way of advocating the benefits of local cooperative-based transactions with emergent win-win symbiotic value optimization. This is the kind of reality that sounds like our most abundant purpose is to grow in mutual compassion. The fruits of compassion are cooperative-oriented transactions and relationships of mutual gratitude.

Schwarz further observes that empowering sense-builders enjoy bipolar balance between “goal” and “relationship” orientations. In his theological paradigm, too many of us are either imbalanced toward a technocratic faith or a spiritualistic hope.  It is the adept religious leader who is able to consistently self-and-other empower, keeping both her faith-in-self goals, and hope for relationship development, in equipoised balance.

Our polymatic shaman maintains an internal and external landscape that compassionately balances faith in self as other, and other as self; a combination of the Golden Rule and the enthymematic awareness that “we are all in this together.”  This is a solidarity that echoes our theology of the marriage bond—but applied universally, radically, inclusively, embracingly to all species and all of nature.

Our millennial shaman transliterates the patterns within and between self and other during an inclusive pilgrimage toward a mutually discovered universe of ultimate compassion. This sounds like a good thing. But, is this theology supported by what we discover in natural patterns of healthy development? This, after all, is the infrastructural analogy behind Schwarz’s thesis; we are a system of nature. He implies that a spiritual and/or metaphysical information universe is incarnated as nature, so we can notice nature’s patterns to improve understanding of this metaphysical universe, and perhaps vice versa.

If an ecology of deeply balanced empowerment, internal to the religious leader, and external within the community’s culture, is fertile soil for our millennial shaman, then why,

Now for the good news: pastors of growing churches do not need to be superstars. Most of the pastors with the highest scores in our survey are little known. They generally provide us, however, with more helpful basic leadership principles than most of the world-famous “spiritual superstars.” (p. 25)

It would be interesting to analyze confluence and disparity patterns between “famous” spiritual leaders and “most helpful” spiritual leaders. On what basis does Schwarz establish transliterative ability; the gift of mutual compassion? Religious leaders are helpful, fruitful, to what end, for whom? Is the problem that famous-but-not-especially-helpful pastors are too goal-oriented or is the problem that the helpful-but-not-famous are too relationship oriented, imbalanced toward compassion for others? How do we  balance compassion for ourselves with compassion for others? The problem, and the opportunity, with polarities is they are mutually self-defining.

Even so, certainly the fields of geometrics, biometrics, permaculture design, thermodynamics, and binary systems theory would all agree with our Taoist friends that sustainable optimized values are richer when polarities are balanced, than when not.

Schwarz perhaps misses an application of an old design principle that favors greatest effect with least effort. It is only implied that the six phases of his transformative cycle may be as true for the shaman as they are for the shaman’s exterior landscape, the faith community. His Stage Theory is anciently known and recognized. Perhaps this is acknowledged in his Three Color Compass, but not mentioned in Natural Church Development. For simplicity, compare Schwarz’s Growth Spiral stage theory to Bloom’s Deep Learning Taxonomy and Robert Norton’s Laws of Interaction (Communication and Consequences):

Polar Alignment                      Norton                                    Schwarz                       Bloom

1. Yang (effective)                    Enthymematic                               Perceive                    Knowledge

Communication

2. Yin (mindful)                Prima Facie Validity                                 Test                       Comprehend

3. Yang (effective)                  Prior Dependence                          Understand                     Apply

4. Yin (mindful)          Idiosyncratic Understanding                      Plan                            Analysis

5. Yang (effective)           Sufficient Similarity                                     Do                             Synthesis

6. Yin (mindful)              Narcissistic Strength                              Experience                   Evaluation

——————————————————————————————————————-

Yang/Yin Deep              Existential Excitement                              Perceive                    Self-Knowledge

Ecology Threshold                                                                                  Self/Other                   Group Identity

Yang translates Schwarz’s “technocratic” and “goal-oriented,” while Yin translates “spiritualistic” and “relationship-oriented.”

The concept of leadership is directional and temporal, enhanced with analogical balance between one’s interior and exterior landscapes. This leader is pointing us to where or what end in the future, with what evidence that this direction makes sense? Schwarz is working toward regenerating a permacultured planet of post-modern leaders who are compassionate, cooperative facilitators. This translation expresses faith in leaders who share a deep eco-equity learning culture.

The millennial shaman’s mutual ministry is EcoMinistry. This core solidarity, that we are all gratefully in this together, catalyzes a synchronic evolution toward a compassionate mecca of mutual gratitude; in this life, future lives, a trans-generational continuity of re-ligioning, reincarnated from generation toward ReGenesis. To do as Jesus did, to in-form the Body of Christ, to be today our faith for tomorrow, we cooperatively incarnate into our regenerated future, with gratitude. Always with gratitude.