Christian Women in Leadership

follow the yellow brick road

read Dorothy on Leadership

Some quotes, "At first glance, Dorothy is all wrong as a model of leadership. She is the wrong gender (female) and the wrong age (young). Rather than being a person with all the answers, who knows what’s up and where to go and what’s what, she is herself lost, a seeker, often bewildered, and vulnerable. These characteristics would disqualify her from modern leadership. But they serve as her best credentials for postmodern leadership.

...When you think of Dorothy, the picture is so different. Basically, instead of sitting pretty in a control booth, she’s stuck in a predicament – still a little dizzy from the tornado, lost, far from home, needing to find the way. As she sets out on her journey, she finds other needy people (actually not people exactly, but you get the point), one in need of courage, another in need of intelligence, another in need of a heart. She believes that their varying needs can be fulfilled on a common quest, and her earnestness, her compassion, her determination, and her youthful spunk galvanize them into a foursome (five, with Toto) singing down the yellow brick road together. Dorothy doesn’t have the knowledge to help them avoid all problems and dangers; she doesn’t protect them from all threats and temptations. But she doesn’t give up, and her passion holds strong, and in the end, they all get what they need. Maybe one of the film’s many enduring delights is hidden in Dorothy’s unwizardly leadership charisma. Maybe people in the 1940’s were just beginning to yearn for a way of leadership that now is becoming ascendant – a post-wizard kind of leadership

... know, you’re thinking, why take a silly kid’s movie so seriously? You’re right – it’s just a movie. But I find the film’s repudiation of more traditional modern leadership to be fascinating, maybe an early expression of a cultural shift that we are more fully experiencing today.

And ultimately, of course, I find in Dorothy’s way of leadership many echoes of our Lord’s. After all, you can never imagine the great and terrible Oz washing his subjects’ feet, or his voice booming out, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.”

Maybe some of us are trying hard to be something we’re not. Maybe we’re imitating styles of leadership that are becoming outdated, inappropriate. That’s not to say we don’t have a lot to learn, but maybe the best thing that could happen to us would be to have the curtain pulled back to reveal us not as XXL superheroes, but regular size-M men and women. Maybe then, with the amplifiers turned off and the imaged dropped, we’ll hear Jesus inviting us to learn new ways of leading in his cause."

posted by the princess @ 2/06/2010 07:51:00 PM