How to begin a new job (and avoid toxic masculinity)
What the Bible’s worst career move can teach us today
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Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel had come to Shechem to make him king
1 Kings 12.1
All across the world this September, people are beginning new roles and responsibilities. It will be my privilege this month to license new clergy to parishes and chaplaincies in Oxford. There will be new headteachers for some of our 280 or so church schools; a new Archdeacon; a new Principal for one of our theological colleges; new lay staff in senior roles. All across the world, people are coming into new responsibilities. Sometime this month or next, there may be a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Every single leader faces a demanding task. What’s the best way to begin?
How not to begin a new job
Shechem may seem a strange place to start. We’ve come here because of the story of Rehoboam, son of Solomon. This is the most powerful story in the Bible of how not to begin a new job.
Any life offered to God is punctuated by new beginnings. Often these involve leadership. These moments of change are full of potential and also full of risk for the leader and for the community. Much will depend on the way in which a person called into leadership approaches these times of transition. A good beginning can lead to learning and transformation for the whole community - but a bad start can mean disaster.
Rehoboam became king over 900 years before Christ at the height of Israel’s power and influence as a nation. His grandfather, David, battled all his life to establish a kingdom for the twelve tribes of Israel. His father, Solomon, consolidated David’s reign, built the temple, established the great institutions of Israel and fostered a flourishing Hebrew culture.
What went right?
David and Solomon each reigned for forty years. The Bible makes it clear that in the latter half of Solomon’s reign all was not well. But how was Rehoboam to make his new beginning? How was he to handle in the legacy of his father and grandfather?
The crown prince gets some things right. First, he pays careful attention to place, to story and to ritual, to the deepest traditions of the nation. Rehoboam calls all the people together in special assembly.
Second, Rehoboam begins by listening to the people, and especially by listening to what is wrong in the life of the nation. Outwardly the nation is secure, but on the inside there is decay.
Repair and renewal are urgently needed. Transition is a key moment to listen to the voices of dissent and to pay attention to the work of rebuilding. A new leader needs to listen well and see clearly.
The situation in Israel could have been saved. This is what the people say:
“Your father made our yoke heavy. Now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke that he placed on us, and we will serve you”.
So far so good.
Thirdly, Rehoboam asks for time to consider and in that time he takes advice. This is, once again, a good thing. It is a mark of maturity to know that you need help to understand a situation and to know how to respond to it.
Before we move on to think about Rehoboam’s mistake, pause a moment to reflect on the three things he got right.
He paid attention to the history and story of his community and, by implication, to the founding vision of what the nation was called to be.
He paid attention to what people said was wrong in the nation at that moment: he looked and listened.
He knew he did not have all the answers, and he sought advice - and sought that advice from different groups of people.
Rehoboam’s story could have been such a strong and powerful beginning.
But that was not to be.
Advice for the ages
Rehoboam seeks his advice in two contrasting places. He takes counsel first with the older men, those who had advised his father, Solomon: “How do you advise me to answer this people?” These older men, with nothing to prove, capture the essence of leadership and new beginnings in their answer.
“If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants for ever”.
Anyone called to a new leadership responsibility would do well to take these words and write them on a card.
Pin them to your desk, to your computer, to the inside of the office door, to the reading desk of the pulpit; to the inside cover of your iPad: anywhere where you will see them regularly and be reminded of what they mean.
Taking notice
The heart of Christian leadership is to be a servant. The word “minister” means servant. If you are a Christian and a leader, your calling is primarily to serve and to speak good words to all the people. Power must be mediated through gentleness and humility if communities are not to fracture. Offering leadership as a servant wins trust, confidence and affection.
Offering leadership as a servant translates positional power into the kind of authority which can effect change.
When I first became a Bishop in Sheffield 17 years ago, I held open meetings in every part of the diocese so that we could begin the process of getting to know one another. I did the same in Oxford in 2016. At each meeting, I gave a short talk and then the floor was open for questions. These were very wide ranging and stretching. People didn’t hold back.
I realised part way through the second meeting what was happening. I thought people might be coming to listen to what I had to say. Actually they were coming to see if I would listen to them. This was my extended interview for the role. I was being put to the test.
I’d already been appointed and installed as Bishop. What was at stake wasn’t whether I would continue in the role. What was at stake was whether or not people would take any notice, whether I could win trust, whether the positional leadership of my office could be translated into the kind of authority which can effect change.
Toxic masculinity in action
Most leadership roles bring with them this kind of Shechem moment: the moment of testing and discernment – are we able to trust this person to lead our community forward? Every new beginning will have its time of trial. Those are the moments to remember humility.
Rehoboam then turns to the young men, the ones who have grown up with him and now attend him. They are his contemporaries, his courtiers. They are full of machismo and bravado. They are unseasoned. They are crude. But perhaps they know what Rehoboam wants to hear. This is toxic masculinity in action. The seeds of the nation’s destruction have been sown long ago in the neglect of wisdom in the next generation.
“Thus shall you say to this people who spoke to you, “Your father made our yoke heavy but you must lighten it for us”; thus shall you say to them, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. Now whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips but I will discipline you with scorpions”.
The story leaves us in suspense for a few moments. We are not told at this point which advice Rehoboam will follow. Will he choose the path of humility, of servant leadership, of winning the trust and hearts of his people? Or will he choose the path of pride, of exerting his position and risk division and alienation?
“The king did not listen to the people”
On the third day all the people return. The king gives his reply. He speaks to them “according to the advice of the young men”. A plea for mercy is to be answered with greater harshness. This one window when division could be avoided is missed. “The king did not listen to the people”.
According to the storyteller, this is a moment like the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus. Somehow God’s purposes are at work here for good even in the midst of the tragedy which is Rehoboam’s reign.
But we need to be clear that what we are seeing here is a tragedy. Rehoboam sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind. Five sixths of his kingdom is torn away. Civil war will plague succeeding generations. Political division will lead to religious apostasy. The people of Israel will worship golden calves again in the new centres of worship in Bethel and Dan. The fabric of the nation is immeasurably weakened. Two hundred years later, the Assyrians will destroy Jeroboam’s northern kingdom and its capital Samaria, in 722 BC. In 587, Jerusalem itself will be destroyed, and Solomon’s Temple with it.
There will never again be a strong, united kingdom, though the dream is one which will animate prophets and poets for generations still to come. That dream will lead eventually to the vision of the king who will come as the true servant to his people, the one who will be gentle and humble of heart, who will give his very life, who will establish the reign of God for all time.
Tested to the limits
Sometimes people talk as though leadership in communities and organisations is easy, as though it can be reduced to hints and tips or five points all beginning with the same letter. Lessons about leadership are made to sound simple. That is not a Christian view. True leadership is difficult and complex. The exercise of leadership will stretch us and test us to the limits of what we can bear.
The Bible and the Christian tradition together form the longest continuous reflection on leadership in communities there has ever been. For well over three thousand years, those called to ministry and leadership have reflected in dialogue on the same texts and stories, and have written new ones as a way of passing on wisdom in leadership from one generation to another.
One of the absolutely key insights of this whole long tradition is that leadership in communities is demanding and difficult. There is little that is easy about the exercise of leadership in communities, whether you are called to lead in a church, a school, a local authority, a small business or a multinational corporation.
Finding your identity in leadership
All the more reason then to pay very careful attention to the first months of leadership in a new community. Transition is a complex, vulnerable time for the person called to leadership and to the organisation they lead.
You may find that you have left behind a role in which you were comfortable and colleagues you loved dearly. You may have come to a strange new place and a job which feels like you are wearing a jacket several sizes too large. You may find that this coincides with moving physically (with your family) to a new place.
God has much to teach us in these moments of transition and change, but they can be hard.
Be sure to take time and space to watch over yourself and those you love in those key months of change as you become re-orientated in a new life and a new role.
For many people, our own insecurity leads directly to a desire to assert ourselves quickly, to somehow prove we are up to the new task.
That way lies disaster.
A better way in these times of testing is to dive deep into the love of God in those, to find your identity in God’s call and God’s love and to acknowledge the impossibility of the task in terms of the human resources we bring.
Be a servant
On 13 March, 2013, while the world watched, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope under his chosen name of Francis. The new Pope immediately gave the Church and the world a powerful lesson in leadership and humility. He refused the more elaborate papal garments. His first request was to ask the assembled crowds to pray for him. He rode back to the same lodgings on the bus with the other cardinals. He refused to move into the elaborate papal apartments.
He chose, deliberately and publicly the path of a servant, the path of humility. He set the tone for all that would follow. In January of this year, the new Pope Leo built on the foundation set by Francis of humility and listening.
If you and I would aspire to be Christian leaders, we must choose the same path and make the same new beginning. For this is the way of Christ. This is the way trust grows and authority can be exercised in communities all over the world:
“If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants for ever”.
Part one of the Starting Well series. Adapted from Chapter 1 of The Gift of Leadership, Canterbury Press, 2016.