The best thing any of us have to bring to leadership is not our preaching, our education, our strategic thinking or our pastoral skills—as important as those are. The best thing we to bring to leadership is our own transforming selves and the inner authority that comes from our own life and practice.  As Jesus says in John 3, “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen.”

  • Ruth Haley Barton, “How the Spiritual Formation of the Pastor Affects Spiritual Formation in the Congregation,” May 2010 Transforming Centre blog