4 Spiritual Rhythms to Strengthen Your Leadership from Ruth Haley Barton

Have you come to the place in ministry of feeling just flat out exhausted—on the inside? Popular author and presenter Ruth Haley Barton knows what becomes of ministry leaders who have come to the end of themselves. How does one recapture the deep-down sustaining presence and power of God in life and leadership?

I asked Ruth what’s needed to cultivate genuine, lasting spiritual health, regardless of where a leader is (and wants to be) with Christ.

The Challenge: What’s Wrong?

For 20 intense, illuminating minutes, Ruth gave it to me straight. Much of her work with countless top ministry leaders through a two-year retreat-based experience called The Transforming Community boils down to this:

“We’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in our own soul. Most of us enter into leadership believing it’s our gifts, skills, competencies, and training that other people are looking for. While all of these are important, the most important thing we bring to leadership is our own personal, transforming self. Whatever is changing and transforming to the glory of God will find its way to the edges of our organization. But here’s the sobering flip side:

“Whatever is dysfunctional and untransformed within us will also find its way to the edges of our organization and eventually affect everything. You will wind up bringing pain and deformation to the culture and thus the organization instead of the light of Christ.”[/callout]

Ruth speaks from experience, recalling a time in her ministry life when she hit a wall that inevitably awaits all leaders. “Sooner or later, in our 30s, 40s, or even 50s, we reach a place where our skills, gifts, and abilities aren’t really going to carry us to where we need to go in leadership.”

“What does a leader do then?” I asked. She didn’t sugarcoat her response.

New Approach to Spiritual Leadership: Needed Work

Ruth offered these thoughts for us to help examine ourselves:

• Check Your Ambitions: “As leaders, is our ambition filled with very high ideals and desires to make a difference for God in the world, or is it more about us?”
• Know Yourself: “The dangerous subtlety is that our Gospel ambition falls prey to our ‘false self,’ which includes ambitions and motivations to be successful, perform and prove ourselves, thus relying on our human energies rather than God’s resources.”
• Live Your True Self: “We can move our souls away from the things that harm and wound our leadership to where we fully live into the joyful will of God and experience our true self. And that happens through the spiritual practices and rhythms that can open one to the sustaining, transforming presence of God in our lives.”
• Practice Solitude and Silence: “In solitude and silence with God, you let your desire to be successful for its own sake, fall away. You can just be you in the presence of God in a very humble, freeing way — in a way that’s profoundly transforming.”

4 Rhythms to Bring Your Transformed Self to Leadership

Inspirational leadership—in which a leader authentically demonstrates the fruit of the Holy Spirit—is one of eight essential elements of a flourishing workplace culture. This goes hand-in-hand with the need for the kind of personal spiritual transformation Ruth believes is possible for every Christian leader.

So how can a leader begin to create her own spiritual practices and rhythms to feed the soul of his or her leadership? Ruth says to consider these four natural time frames:

1. Daily: Give your best time of the day to God. Whenever you feel most awake, alive and alert, listen for God through silence, solitude, Scripture, and prayer.
2. Weekly: Make one day your Sabbath and keep it faithfully.
3. Monthly or Quarterly: Take a personal retreat in which you pay attention to what is going on inside and allow God to replenish and nourish you in the process.
4. Annually: Consider an extended time that leaves work behind and allows you to pursue your deeper life with God.

Suddenly, there’s an oasis in view to refresh and renew the soul of your leadership.  And it can start today.

Additional Resources

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