I’ve found that my grumbling and mumbling about the shortcomings of our policy makers and implementers helps to clear my vision in the midst of the competing noises and posturing of our political leaders… just what are the important issues? Local, state, and national politics are stunning, even for a person like me who thought he had seen it all. Often, however, we exhaust ourselves on the external issues that stir us, the policy issues (or the lack of policy issues) as they relate to aspects of life I believe are important for us as a community. How come we don’t have a sustainable agricultural production plan for our precious lands? Where is the renewable energy strategy we were promised and what are we doing in its seeming absence? How do we know we will have sufficient water resources for our children and grandchildren? Where is our comprehensive early education plan to insure our children and families are healthy and resilient?

It goes on and on and I tend to get stuck in the weeds with the details of the issues. Venting is helpful however, in that it gets all of the negative weight off my brain and helps me clear a path to the underlying and fundamental aspects of our system that need our attention. Once I’ve gotten all of the negative energy out of my system by grumbling, arguing loudly, or burning in silence over the stupidity of people who don’t agree with me on issues, I can finally consider and explore what it would actually take to bring health and resilience to our community through our political process. The real need is to change the system and culture that drive these issues.

Forty years ago I listened to a taped speech by a pastor’s wife, Jill Briscoe. She was commenting on the reaction of traditional churches to the revival that was taking place in England. As more and more young people came to faith and showed up at the church’s doors, the traditionalists struggled with what to do with all of the “Jesus Freaks” the revival had produced. Their dress, language, behavior, hair, and attitudes were outside of the box of traditional church culture. Many of the traditionalists worked diligently and struggled mightily to change their dress, change their language, and mold them into good traditional British Anglicans! Jill Briscoe likened the process to trying to get all of the dead leaves off the tree in the early winter. You can labor to climb each limb and pick each remaining vestige of a dead system, or you could wait until the spring breaks forth and allows the tree to replace the dead with the vibrant signs of new life! The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was probably climbing limbs to remove dead issues from our political process rather than paying attention to the system that produced it!

So, one asks, how do you grapple with an organizational system that behaves like an octopus? Its various arms keep moving us around and it keeps changing colors and appearance to a point of confusion. What is the key to making the system responsive to creating a healthy and resilient community rather than one that feeds the egos of the leaders? I think the answer takes us back to the picture of a dead tree and the need to bring life back to the trunk if the leaves of the issues are going to be healthy and vibrant. By recruiting and training men and women to be servant leaders, we can begin a truly transformational change in our local, state, and national governments. History has taught us that one or two committed servant leaders can bring substantive change to a system.

How do we do it, you ask? It begins, I believe, at various levels in our lives. It is hard to expect our children and grandchildren to embrace servant leadership if they aren’t given models consistently in their lives! How do we convey to our ‘ohana the responsibility to care for those in need, to strive for and seek excellence and honesty in all that we do, and to work to bring people together rather than use them as springboards for our own egos and personal plans? A few moments spent reflecting on how we can model the principles of servant leadership for those we love, can be a powerful beginning to a significant process of change.

As we commit to model servant leadership, we also have to ask those around us to do the same. As we come together with like-minded men and women, we begin to develop a shared vision of health and success for our families and our communities. We begin to recognize and define the values and the behaviors that should characterize our families, neighborhoods, and towns. In essence, we begin to “speak” a language and model behaviors that strengthen servant leadership in our lives and the lives of those around us. It hopefully begins a process of widening acceptance of servant leadership in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and ultimately in public policy formulation.

I think it is important to emphasize the need to identify, recruit, and train men and women who seek to apply servant leadership in the public policy arena. There is a growing interest in this concept both locally and nationally. Most of us are tired of individual egos speaking the language of self-promotion as the only alternative for political leadership in our local, state, and national governments. To change this, intentional action has to emerge. If we can begin a process of identifying men and women with hearts of service and if we can prepare them for the huge challenges they will face in running for office and serving as our political leaders, we can begin the process of public policy formulation based on deep rooted servant leadership. We can begin to strengthen our communities in their commitment to transformational change and care for the needy.

We are exploring a program called Pono Policy Training…”pono” being the Hawaiian word for righteousness and right relationships…in which individuals will be invited to learn how the political system works and to explore how servant leadership can bring substantive change.

 

On the national level similar programs are beginning and despite the tremendous challenges they face, they are beginning to gather traction. People are tired of climbing the dead political trees to pull down policies and practices they oppose. They want to be part of bringing our political systems back to life and relevance by resetting the goals of governance within a framework of responsible servanthood.

 

Enough said for the present. Let’s see if we can start by gathering together in small groups to commit to servant leadership, modeling it in our homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces as a means of bringing our communities back to health and resilience!