Holy Hope For Holy Leadership

I have very modest expectations for LDS ecclesiastical leaders. This keeps me from going insane whenever I hear of so many boneheaded policies, statements, and disciplinary decisions that cause so many to express concern about leadership roulette. I love and sustain my leaders, but to quote J. Golden Kimball, "I love some a hell of a lot more than I do others."

Recently I've written about my belief that most priesthood leaders read Doctrine and Covenants 121:41-42 and sincerely desire to lead in their calling "by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile." However, the scripture also tells us it is "the nature and disposition" of almost all of them to be easily prone to "unrighteous dominion", therefore, I have a healthy respect for the fact that "many are called, but few are chosen."

Krister Stendahl was one leader, not of our faith, who naturally understood that this is how the Lord himself leads--through genuine kindness, unfeigned love, and persuasion. He reportedly offered his Three Rules of Religious Understanding at a 1985 press conference in Stockholm, Sweden in response to opposition to the building of a temple there by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His rules are as follows:

(1) When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.

(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.

(3) Leave room for “holy envy.”

His comments were particularly timely for the Latter-day Saints then, but I find rule #3 particularly relevant for Latter-day Saints today after observing Pope Francis these past two years. My "holy envy" for Pope Francis means I admire him and wish leaders like him would find greater scope and influence within Mormonism. The Lord revealed to the Latter-day Saints that there were other "holy men that ye know not of" (D&C 49:8). In light of this scripture and Stendahl's rule #3, I think that all Latter-day Saints should want to get to know Pope Francis better.

I'd like to start by recommending "Who Is the Pope?" by Eamon Duffy.

This excerpt especially captures not only what I love about Pope Francis, but confirms why I love my local stake president, who leads with love and understanding and isn't blinded by his own authority:

In a series of interviews and speeches, Francis has deplored clergy who “play Tarzan”—church leaders too confident of their own importance, moral strength, or superior insight. The best religious leaders in his view are those who leave “room for doubt.” The bad leader is “excessively normative because of his self-assurance.” The priest who “nullifies the decision-making” of his people is not a good priest, “he is a good dictator.”  

Bergoglio has even said that the very fact that someone thinks he has all the answers “is proof that God is not with him.” Those who look always “for disciplinarian solutions,…long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists” have “a static and inward-directed view of things,” and have turned faith into ideology. And so the experience of failure, of reaching one’s own limits, is the truest and best school of leadership. He has declared himself drawn to “the theology of failure” and a style of authority that has learned through failure to consult others, and to “travel in patience.”