The following article, “Leading From the Second Chair: Christian Education Ministers as Servant Leaders,” was published by Patricia E. Clement in the March 07 issue of Catechetical Leader Magazine, the professional journal for the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership – the North American association for Catholic Education Ministers. Catholic Education Ministers refer to themselves as “Catechists” from the Greek word for “echo.” In the early Church, the ministry of faith formation was called catechetics, because the goal was to proclaim God’s Word until that Word “echoed” throughout the daily lives of the listeners. Any printed material used in the faith formation process became known as a catechism.

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A Sunday School teacher entered my office, presented a hands and shoulder gesture that says, “I’ve tried…done my best,” and said, “Man, I’m frustrated. We need to change curriculum. This just isn’t working.” The problem? The members of this 30-45 year old class were not reading their lesson in preparation for class and would not engage in discussion when this teacher threw out questions in class.

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One of the concepts I often stress when giving presentations about leadership is that of function. The idea is that leadership is more about providing the function of the position of leader that a system needs at the moment than it is about those things people assume leadership is all about, like, personality, intelligence, experience, style, power, authority, or even competence.

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I just bought a new bible. Not that I need it. Like most clergy cum seminarians I have about a dozen of them, including my “first bible” given to me upon entering fourth grade. I have my ordination bible, a couple of study bibles (including one dog-eared, marked up, annotated, and ratty-edged study bible my wife had re-bound in thick leather after it started falling apart). I have some de rigueur foreign language bibles, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, including two of my dad’s Spanish bibles and one Portuguese. And the collection is rounded out by a nice balance of older (KJV) and modern translations (GNB, NEB, NREV, NCEV, NASV, NIV, etc.). Any paraphrased bibles I had I’ve given away or gotten rid of long ago, finding those less than satisfying and some actually irksome in their attempts are relevance and winsomeness.

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Yesterday my youngest son graduated from his university’s school of engineering. When they called his name to walk across the stage I heard my father’s name echo in my son’s middle name, Thomas Samuel Galindo. My father was never able to start college, much less finish it. Circumstances in his native war-torn country and a decision to emigrate to a foreign land for the sake of his family—and its later generations—-meant personal sacrifices of opportunities, and of dreams deffered. My father loved learning. Despite his lack of formal education we grew up in a home full of books. (That’s an environment rarer than I realized until years later. Even as an adult, visiting many homes as pastor or as hospice chaplain I was always surprised at the lack of books people had in their homes).

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When I was a school principal we had an annual fundraiser in which our small army of 800 elementary school students sold hundreds of dollar candy bars. You know the ones, those one dollar, delicious, long bricks of chocolate and almond kids used to sell door-to-door but which today get sold by helpful (often eager and overfunctioning) parents in their offices and workplaces. While I suspect that I’ll be doing hard time in Purgatory for that shameless and unconscionable use of child labor I must admit that it was our most profitable fundraiser. We consistently cleared around $10k after expenses. As any private school bookkeeper will tell you, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

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On ocassion I run into a skeptic that challenges the validity of Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST). I typically don’t spend a lot of energy trying to “convince” people of something or other. But when there’s evidence that a person is genuine in his or her critique or is genuinely interested in learning and dialogue I’ll invest the time.

My typical response is to argue that the issue is not whether BFST is “true” or not. We’re dealing with a theory and not a philosophy, in other words. Unlike philosophies, which seek to arrive at truth, theories are speculative but disciplined explorations of discovery that try to arrive at conclusions about the nature of things. And I tell them that what makes BFST “valid” is that it is characterized by all of the components that make any theory valid (those which make distinguish a theory from an ideology, for example):

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One of the most important traits of an effective leader is his or her ability to listen. While hearing is a natural ability listening is an acquired skill.

Listening involves more than just the capacity to understand what is said and how it is said. The act of listening happens on several levels, the most important of which is being able to listen for the emotional process behind the words and the give and take of dialogue. In other words, leaders know how to distinguish content from emotional process. Effective communicators have that quality of “emotional intelligence” that allows them to address emotional process through empathy and intuition.

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I’ve always found it fascinating to see how difficult it is for adults to appreciate children’s cognition. It seems as if when the brain makes those leaps from one stage of cognition to another we develop a sort of cognitive amnesia arelated to how we used to perceive the world at a previous stage. Unless one is trained or working in a field that involves daily contact with children it often becomes a challenge to appreciate the mind of the child. As Paul the Apostle wrote, “When I was a child I thought like a child, reasoned like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

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Full disclosure and legal disclaimer: I’m not a pet person. I’ve never been a dog owner, don’t have cats, and don’t understand what having pets around the house is all about. The most I’ve tolerated was allowing the kids to have hamsters and gerbils during their tender formative years—partly because those critters tend to have a limited lifespan and so become good opportunities to teach the kids “first lessons” about death. My opinion about dog owners has not been helped by my experience of them on walking trails or jogging lanes, but that’s a rant for another day.

Given that attitude you can understand how puzzled my family is that I’m such a fan of Cesar Milan, “The Dog Whisperer.” Milan has a TV show on the National Geographic channel that I try to catch as often as I can–even the repeats. My kids don’t get my behavior. The typical exchange goes like this:

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