Know Your Story and Lead with It: The Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership [Paperback]

Richard L. Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2009

Knowing your story is an essential component of effective leadership, but finding your story among the myriad narratives that fill your life isn't a simple task. Richard L. Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones have offered a path to finding your own story amid the powerful family and cultural narratives that may be obscuring your vision.

The aim of this book is to show leaders how to explore their story of reality, tell it to other group members, and consider how it can be used as a resource for leadership. This narrative perspective holds that because there's always more than one story about a situation, we have choices about which story we will embrace.

After more than six years working with groups of clergy, the authors have woven these stories together to create the fabric that is the backdrop of narrative clergy leadership. The book is an account of their pilgrimage. As you read you will have a sense that this is your pilgrimage, and it will encourage you into narrative ventures of your own.

Editorial Reviews

Review

On the basis of wise experience and anecdotal accounts from their research, Hester and Walker-Jones weave a new pattern of pastoral leadership. Given the inadequacy of any top-down leadership, they model and exposit a relational way of leadership based on acute self-awareness, whereby pastor and people together walk into the unknown with freedom and intentionality. Their study reflects not only an awareness of old failed patterns, but a recognition that newness is dawning in the church that bespeaks healing, engagement, and the generativity of trusting collegiality. --Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary

Know Your Story and Lead with It brings alive the power of personal narrative in shaping ministry. Many clergy, in an effort to live up to the multiple and conflicting expectations of their congregation, lose themselves in stories that others have created. Kelli Walker-Jones and Richard Hester beautifully describe how clergy can re-write their own narratives and in the process reclaim authentic and effective leadership. --John A. Fenner, Program Director, Courage to Lead for Clergy and Congregational Leaders

God's story is woven with divine care in our stories. The wisdom in this book will help you mine your story and lead with it. Gather wisdom from the cutting floor of your memory. Explore the spaces between memory and the telling of it. Celebrate what you discover. Nurture your community into the rich life of curiosity and not-yet-knowing. --Hope Morgan Ward, Resident Bishop, Mississippi Conference, The United Methodist Church

About the Author

Richard L. Hester is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project at Triangle Pastoral Counseling in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has previously served as a pastor and as a professor of pastoral theology in two theological schools.

Kelli Walker-Jones, an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project on which this book is based. She has also served as minister to several congregations and as associate director of field education and admissions at Duke University Divinity School.

Product Details

• Paperback: 170 pages
• Publisher: The Alban Institute (August 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566993881
• ISBN-13: 978-1566993883
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #748,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CLERGY GROUPS ARE USING THIS BOOK, November 10, 2009

By 

Keith Herron "Keith D. Herron" (Kansas City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Know Your Story and Lead with It: The Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership (Paperback)

It's hard to imagine being a steward of the gospel story unless one is willing to be a steward of one's own story. That's the assumption of "Know Your Story and Lead With It, the Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership," by Dick Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones. The book is designed to encourage ministers to mine their own experience as a method to clarify and strengthen their own leadership as ministers. The book talks about how to assist a minister in leading a congregation out of problem-saturated stories into alternatives of hope.

The book encourages ministers to lead out of curiosity and the position of "not-knowing" and thus engaging the congregation in appreciating their own stories. This kind of leadership relieves clergy from the burden of having answers to problems as they help people discover the wisdom embedded in their own life stories.

Peer-learning groups comprised of minister colleagues provide a forum by which one can tell their stories and explore their meaning. Ministers spend years in seminary preparing to teach and preach the gospel story but typically spend little time or effort exploring their stories. Ministerial success or failure can often be attributed to one's acceptance of the world of experiences from childhood forward including one's family of origin. This book is a tool peer learning groups of ministers can utilize to help them find purposeful meaning in their stories.