PROPHETIC LEADERSHIP

John English, sj in conversation with Elaine Frigo, CSSF 

(October 25, 1998)

Concerning the Leadership Formation ministry that was part of John's work in the last ten years or so, particularly focusing on his work with the Institute For Communal Life (ICL). Elaine Frigo, CSSF is a Felician Sister from Lodi, New Jersey who, since 2002, has been on the leadership team for her Province. Before that work she spent eight years at Loyola House,of the Guelph Centre Of Spirituality in Guelph, Canada. Elaine has experience in training spiritual directors and facilitates groups using the Ignatian discernment model.

JJE - This word "prophetic leadership" sounds a bit like creating prophets; it's a kind of strange expression. Are they to be seers of God and understand what is going on around them and therefore prophetic leaders? What I mean by a prophetic leader is one who assists a group of people to become a true community. For the most part, I have been working to create groups to become prophetic in themselves. Prophetic leadership is present among Christians when true Christian community takes place.

EF - Was there a foundational or watershed experience that resulted in your decision to empower Christian groups to carry the Gospel wherever they live and work, and to help them have an impact on social structures?

JJE - I'm not sure that I had a foundational or a watershed experience. In the early 1970s I began giving the personally directed retreat, especially with the Exercises, and as I worked with religious women I discovered that I could only deal with the issues that they were bringing up. The bigger issues were in the governance process that was taking place back home. This made me conscious that there were some dysfunctional ways of operating taking place as far as decision-making was concerned. I felt that there was a need to assist the leadership to recognize some of the dysfunction that was operating and find instruments and ways of overcoming this dysfunction. Following that they might learn what discernment really is, especially in communal decision-making, and from this learn how to make good decisions in the Lord. This is a good instance of prophetic leadership. The prophetic leader is one who is able to recognize what is taking place in the group, not just physically, not psychologically, but spiritually.

EF - You did mention that there were other experiences that contributed to the insight that groups really did need leadership that was attentive to what was happening among them in a spiritual way.

JJE - I think this arose at the time of the discernment and christian governance workshops to religious communities. The idea that a group as a group could discern decisions came into being. This ties in to the attitude of St. Ignatius with his companions when they were trying to decide whether they should become a religious community or not and then the way that they went about realizing it. I think this brought to the fore the understanding both of what a religious community is and what leadership is in a religious community.

EF - Could you describe the Institute for Communal Life and maybe say something about the history of its development?

JJE - Well, the role of the Institute for Communal Life (ICL) was really to assist groups to discern good decisions. What also is present in ICL was the notion that our life is basically a communal experience, that no one is an island, and that inter-relating with each other is very significant. Of course, it's one thing to know different psychological instruments like the Enneagram and Myers Briggs Type Indicator for myself as a person, but the real issue is how I am impacting on others or how others are impacting on me. This is a relational issue and ICL was really concerned about the relational dimension that takes place in our life. Its objective was to call forth that communal component in all human living. I guess, if you're asking me how it got started, it really goes way back to the early 1970s when we had a gathering of people doing the personally directed Spiritual Exercises. Because of the demand we had to train people to do the work of spiritual direction, especially the Exercises, we designed the Retreat Directors' Workshop for people who were not Jesuits. At the time, only individual Jesuits knew how to direct the Exercises. This movement carried the apostolate beyond the confines of the Jesuit community to other religious communities and to lay people. From this experience, the idea of graced history and communal graced history developed. From the experience of communal graced history, retreats developed that we called the Discernment Christian Governance Workshop. This was an instrument to help religious superiors and their councils deal with issues from a discernment point of view. This was a ten-day programme. It was a different style of prophetic leadership from the one-to-one directed retreat. It took fire across Canada, the United States, and even in Britain and Ireland. Eventually, Remi Limoges, Marita Carew, myself and some others actually gave these Discernment Christian Governance Workshops many times in Ireland.
            About 1976 at a meeting of Jesuit Directors of renewal centres in Milford, Ohio I met George Schemel and others. We got speaking about this style of leadership retreats and George Schemel and his team in Wernersville, Pennsylvania had come to the same kind of insight. So, we decided that we should start to meet on this topic. The teams from Loyola House and Wernersville met many times. We interchanged on the Exercises and what we thought the Exercises meant and how this would impact on a group. They had a program called the "Executive Leadership Retreat" and we had this Discernment Christian Governance Workshop. We discussed the two programs and from that came the desire to create Spiritual Exercises for a Communal Person. We named it ISECP, that is the "Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person".

EF - When the team from Loyola House started to work with the team from Wernersville and you put the two programs together that would eventually become ISECP, where does the Institute For Communal Life figure?

JJE - Now you have to remember that Jack Milan was part of the Loyola House staff at the time and he was working on "Marketplace Spirituality" and what he wanted to do was to assist the laity in bringing Ignatian spirituality into the workplace. He wanted to bring Ignatian spirituality into the hearts of those in the marketplace. We had been discussing all this with Jack, and he had worked many times on the Discernment Christian Governance Workshop, so we started to develop together the thought that we could do something as a team. At the time Margaret Kane was just completing her M.Div at Regis College and I invited her to be part of this team. That was the beginning of the Institute for Communal Life.
            We had some pretty rocky times those first couple of years, because we were not really focused on what we were trying to do. We were running all over the country, meeting with parish councils and different groups for short times, and trying to present materials to the laity for them to do. It was very tiring. After about two years Bill Brown, who was the Director of the Bruce-Grey Roman Catholic Separate School Board, read our brochure. Also, Rosemary Kennedy was there and she was a friend of Margaret's, so that is how I think we got involved in the Bruce-Grey effort. They invited us up to Bruce-Grey at Hanover and we told them what we could do and Bill was willing to try it. At the beginning, we worked basically with the Director and the Superintendents of the system. And then we designed a program for the principals and vice-principals. Out of this effort emerged the Spiritual Leadership Formation Program for teachers. This became the highlight of the ICL. Jack Milan left the group for personal reasons and Marita Carew joined the team. Now, Marita had been here many years before in the early 1980s so she knew the whole Guelph situation. So Margaret, Marita, Carolyn Arnold, (our secretary) and myself continued as the Institute for Communal Life. At the same time the Provincial gave me three years (I didn't know it at the time) to develop Christian Life Communities (C.L.C.) across Canada. Now C.L.C. has a communal approach to spirituality and they needed a set of instruments for leadership, guidance and facilitation. So ICL and C.L.C. came together. Then, I was made Rector of Ignatius College which reduced my work with C.L.C. across the country but ICL was right here at Guelph. So, as the Rector, I was able to continue with ICL.

EF - Could you say something about the ways your work at the Institute for Communal Life called forth prophetic leadership in the groups you were working with? And also describe the impact your work was having, whether with the school system or some of the other groups. What kinds of things did you begin to see happening?

JJE - As we did our programs with different people, either with the sisters or the school systems, what became very obvious was that if you were going to have leaders who could discern what was happening in the group and beyond the group they had to be good listeners. Leaders had to be able to recognize what was happening with an individual in a group and what was happening in the group as a group. Sometimes, one had to know whether one was dealing with a physical, psychological or spiritual issue. If there is prophetic leadership, then the leader has to recognize the movement of spirits in an individual within the group and in the group as a group itself. That's what we discovered and it became our basic teaching instrument. To tell you the truth, what we were really teaching them to do was learn to how to listen and recognize what is taking place. I think that is what makes for prophetic leadership, the active belief that the Holy Spirit is in the midst of a group and the ability to recognize the Holy Spirit in the group. Prophetic leadership, is quite different from facilitation. The facilitator tries to recognize what the problem is in a group and then tries to solve the problem, instead of recognizing how the Spirit is present in a group and going with the movement of the Spirit. We have a statement that there is always consensus in the group and the issue is to discover that consensus, whereas a labour negotiator would hammer out a consensus to get people to agree. There is a difference in attitude and approach. That's what we were really trying to teach them.
            Now the interesting thing is that at our team meetings we were trying to follow this process, and we discovered, even with ourselves, how we were operating in the group. We had one quite significant experience of communal desolation. We were planning a big conference at the University of Guelph and we were going to bring together different groupings in Southern Ontario. It didn't matter whether they were Mennonite or Jewish or justice groups or whatever. We started to work on this and eventually planned for about 150 people. Our program envisioned that these groups would interchange with each other on what they had discovered about communal life. We had committees for this and committees for that composed of all kinds of people in Hamilton, in Toronto, and in London.
            As we worked on this plan, we discovered in some of our team meetings that the conference was wearing us down and we could not meet the other kinds of requests coming our way. We had thought that we could prepare this conference along with our other work. This led us to give up on the whole conference. In other words, we had dropped down into spiritual desolation. We knew it wasn't one of us that had done this. It was the team. With reflection, we recognized how we were caught in the deception that "bigger is better". Our initial response was to drop the whole idea. But then we recalled that "small is beautiful" so we decided to continue working with this, because we'd done a lot of work, but we needed to change our image of what we were doing. So, we changed the image to six or eight groups. Then we assembled the groups and did the program at the University of Guelph. The next year we did the same program in Peterborough. This was an experiential example of discernment of spirits in a group. Now, we are also able to recognize these deceptive patterns, these desolate patterns, in the History Line of a group.
            The History Line is an instrument for assisting a group through its memory to get in touch with how its past is impacting on it today. It assists a group to get in touch with its story and with its myth. Well, that instrument can be looked at in terms of physical, organizational or psychological experience, but also in terms of a group's spiritual experience in recognizing its consolations and desolations. One interesting question for a group is, "Where were we deceived?" And, therefore, "Are we being deceived now?" We use many of the instruments from M.D.I. (Management Design Inc.) but we use these instruments from a spiritual perspective.

EF - John, you've already spoken about working with George Schemel, Judy Roemer and Jim Borberly, and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person endeavour. Could you say in what ways your concept of your own ministry in Leadership Formation might have departed from the ISECP program and what was happening in Scranton? Did it depart? Were there differences between what was happening with the Institute for Communal Life and what was happening with George and Judy's work and the ISECP program?

JJE - I should talk a bit about these people, especially George Schemel, Judy Roemer and Jim Borberly. They are quite brilliant people and in some sense they had combined the M.D.I. instruments with Jungian psychology and were able to see these as helpful with Ignatian spirituality. They grasped the relationship between the psychological and the spiritual. George has been able to express the experience of the "dark night of the soul" in terms of Jungian functions. He is quite brilliant on this level. Our interchange in ISECP focused on the group as a group. This is a significant phrase for us. What is happening to the group as a group, not what is happening to an individual in the group. What is the movement of spirits taking place in the group is the focus. My sense would be that in the ISECP program, as it is basically designed by George, Judy and Jim relies heavily on teaching through quite long lectures. In terms of Myers Briggs, it is an NT approach and spirituality flows out of the psychological, whereas my approach flows from an historical experience of graced history which places great stress on anamnesis. Since I am an NF, the concept of memory is the dominant experience. Graced history addresses the significance of my story. It builds on the concept of my story with God and tends to be very prayer orientated. From this point of view, the ISECP lectures were too long and not enough time was available for prayer and reflection. Of course, I am an introvert and they are extroverts. Their approach is that if you have clarity and really understand, that is enough. My approach is that reflective time is necessary to let the Spirit come to you. In that sense, we are quite different. I think we were complementary though. I don't think we were in conflict.

EF - Would you say, then, that in working in leadership formation programs your emphasis is on helping people to know how to reflect on their experience and articulate their experience from a faith perspective?

JJE - I think so, yes. I would say that is the difference between the ICL and the ISECP approaches.

EF - I know how often you speak of working with groups and using what you identified as the Ignatian dynamic. What do you mean?

JJE - The Ignatian dynamic is the dynamic that is contained in the Exercises or is the paradigm of the Exercises. If you consider one prayer period in the Exercises it has a preparation, the prayer itself, the review or reflection on the prayer experience, and then how you will move forward into the next exercise. That dynamic is very similar to Lonergan's experience, reflection, judgement and decision. But we add another component, articulation. The Ignatian dynamic is Experience, Reflection, Articulation, Interpretation and Decision. There is also the longer paradigm that is in the Exercises (the Principal and Foundation, getting in touch with sin, call, companionship with Christ, etc.) that also uses the same interior dynamic.

EF - So you were using that with groups and leaders of groups and helping them to see the significance of that dynamic in the groups that they were working with.

JJE - Yes, that becomes one of the important instructions on discernment of spirits. We teach the dynamic that we're going to use, that is, what is your experience, reflect on it, and interpret it. When we present the method in a Personal Graced History retreat or the Communal Graced History retreat we suggest that participants get in touch with their historical experience and use their memory to find out what it is, and then ask how they interpret it, and then how is it moving them into the future.

EF - I was wondering, if on a more personal level, you might be able to highlight one or two experiences that were experiences of consolation for you as you began to work with the Leadership Formation programs.

JJE - I think that one of the significant things that eventually came to me is that the group has its own life and I am not the one who gives it its life. I am not the one that has to be the expert. What I need are some instruments to assist those in the group to speak to each other and to listen to each other. I've seen that work. If one can get them together and get the right atmosphere and let them pray and speak together, the Holy Spirit will act among them. Everybody working with me jokes that I continually ask "have we got the handout." For me, the handouts are the instruments to help carry on with spiritual conversation. If I've got the handout, and if they carry on spiritual conversation, the Spirit works. I can see their eyes brighten as the days go by. But one of the most significant things is the experience of reconciliation that I've seen in a group. People who haven't spoken to each other for 10,15,20 years come together and speak to each other. This is a real Christian experience. As one watches this, the only response is amazement. I have seen this happen time and time again. But the main thing is that, even for oneself, one's own faith grows. And because I've seen how the Spirit moves in a group I am encouraged to create an atmosphere of openness and trust knowing the Spirit will work.

EF - What would you say are the present needs with regard to leadership formation?

JJE - Well, that's a very good question. I remember in the 1970s when we were starting to do the Exercises and I said to somebody that what this country needs is 1000 spiritual directors of the Exercises. Well, I would say the same thing now - what the country needs is 1000 spiritual directors of groups. Now, this is a shift in my understanding of spirituality as individualistic to communal. This happens when one is given a communal experience of spirituality. This takes place when groups praying together make discerned decisions. That's what I think is needed. This moves spirituality beyond the God-me-church experience into groups discerning the will of God for them. Even good Christian executives don't know this. They need the kind of communal dynamic I have described.

EF - John, in other words, what you are saying is that in some sense the CEO or the school administrator is a spiritual director.

JJE - Yes, if the CEO can get his head around communal spirituality then he will be able to do this spiritual direction. You've given me the topic for a talk I have to give to school board trustees next time.

EF - In terms of leadership formation when you talk about Ignatian discernment and decision making what you are really doing is forming a spiritual director.

JJE - Yes, it's a change of image from being a facilitator of a group to being a spiritual director of a group. That's a great shift.

EF - Would you say a little about what still energizes you and what you are most grateful for in your work.

JJE - What I think I'm most grateful for is these experiences of the Holy Spirit operating in groups, the deep sense that the Holy Spirit is constantly with us. What really energizes me is to assist the leadership or the group to move to a deep sense of communal spirituality and communal discernment of spirits.

EF - And, finally, what is your hope regarding leadership formation as we move into the new millennium?

JJE - I look at different groups in the church and I see that they are trying to become communities of faith. There are many committees in a parish life. The Renew Program has helped people to share their faith. The RCIA tries to instruct people using a faith-sharing dynamic. My hope would be that these groups eventually see themselves as a community rather than as an aggregate of individuals sharing in a group, and that out of this they learn what communal discernment is. My sense is they don't have a reflective knowledge of discernment, although they are able to pray and even to share the results of their prayer. I question if they are good listeners. Groups tend to get into problem-solving. The whole activity of spiritual discernment in a group/communal life is what I hope would happen.

EF - Lots more work! Thank you, John.