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Sarah Drummond: Lead Systems. Lead Change. And Be Funny.
83 Plays2 years ago
Is empathy in leadership overrated? Is it possible to lead gracefully in the face of annihilation? Is there anything that clergy can learn from stand up comedians?
Sarah Drummond, founding dean of Andover Newton Theological Seminary at Yale, led a campus relocation from Massachusetts to Connecticut, then led the comprehensive redesign of the seminary coursework, then led the school through COVID.
Dean Sarah gets real about how hard it was to foster community, protect her staff and students, and keep campus stakeholders engaged — from behind a web conference screen, then from behind a mask six feet away.
And, a frank talk about the future of Christian churches in the American spiritual landscape.
With lots of laughter and chat about stand up comedy along the way.
Content Warning: impacts of COVID, Christian hegemony, explicit language, white supremacy and medical racism, depression
Buy Sarah's most recent book: https://amzn.to/3IZSNw3
Check out Andover Newton Theological Seminary: https://andovernewton.yale.edu
Check out Sarah’s Medium site: https://sbdrummond.medium.com/
Check out Sarah’s website: https://www.sarahbdrummond.com/
Follow Andover Newton on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andover_newton/
Subscribe to Yale Divinity School on YouTube: www.youtube.com/YaleDivinitySchool
Check us out on Instagram and TikTok: @uncommongoodpod
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@uncommongoodpod
we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity.
We are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
thanks for joining us on the journey of (un)common good!
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Transcript
Power Dynamics and Boundaries
00:00:00
Speaker
When you have power, you need to protect the person over whom you have power through the use of appropriate boundaries that are correct for the imbalance. And when you're talking about systems in particular, you can't bring about life-giving change in a system if you're not simultaneously aware that
00:00:28
Speaker
the invisible force that's keeping those interlocking triangles. Remember those emotional triangles? I do. The physics of those triangles has everything to do with who has more and less control of a resource.
Introduction to 'Uncommon Good'
00:00:51
Speaker
It's Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. My name is Paulie Reese. Fam, I am delighted to bring to you today the Reverend Sarah Drummond.
Leadership Forms and Insights
00:01:05
Speaker
This conversation is so incredible. We talk all about
00:01:10
Speaker
leadership in so many various forms, and that might be because Reverend Sarah is the founding dean of Andover Newton Theological School at Yale Divinity.
00:01:25
Speaker
She has such an incredible pedigree of so many different positions of leadership. We talk about leadership of systems, leadership of systems in transition, leadership of churches and nonprofits, leadership of educational system, the limits of empathy in leadership.
00:01:47
Speaker
leadership through COVID and change.
Sensitive Topics: Racism and COVID
00:01:51
Speaker
Quick content warning off the top, we do talk a little about the impacts of white supremacy and racism on all of these systems. We talk a lot about the challenges of depression through COVID. So as always, if these things are not right for you to listen to, please feel free and switch this one off and we will catch you in the next one.
00:02:12
Speaker
Moving on from that, I am so delighted for you to hear this conversation. Please enjoy.
00:02:19
Speaker
Are there any particular things that you would consider yourself an advanced beginner in the culinary world? In the culinary world? Not one thing. I grew up in a family of amazing cooks of the Lebanese ancestry. A really good Lebanese meal takes about three or four days to prepare. And I wasn't allowed much latitude in those kitchens.
00:02:47
Speaker
I did not know the Lebanese connection. Just my mom. Okay. Not just my mom. My mom is Lebanese American. Yes. That side of the family. That's right. That's right. So outside of the culinary world, what are the things that you consider yourself an advanced beginner
Personal Insights: Hobbies and Work-life Balance
00:03:03
Speaker
for? Okay. Well, I have some hobbies.
00:03:09
Speaker
I've been more of a workaholic than any other kind of holic in my life. Well, when you're a dean of a school, it's so multidisciplinary that you never really have a rut you need to get out of because the job just changes so much even over the course of an ordinary day. Like at some point in this conversation, if I just walked you through an ordinary schedule based on today, there were probably three things that I did that I'd never done before. So you don't really need hobbies under those circumstances.
00:03:39
Speaker
But insofar as I enjoy activities outside of work, I love my pets. Very, very, very passionate about my pets and taking care of them and spending time with them. I love to read fiction. Reading fiction is something that I do for an extended period of time every single day, and I wouldn't miss it for anything. And I have been kind of in and out of really being very focused on fitness.
00:04:06
Speaker
Because that's a way that I mean I was joking earlier about my energy levels. It really is for me my fountain of youth when it comes to maintaining an energy level. And then finally one thing I've always enjoyed is teaching myself how to do new things, especially learning new languages and occasionally learning new instruments.
00:04:29
Speaker
In talking about the work of keeping up this level of energy, I
Pandemic Challenges and Leadership Empathy
00:04:33
Speaker
can't imagine that the pandemic made that work any easier. No, no, it was awful. Yeah. Tell me more about what the work of being you was like, how the pandemic impacted that.
00:04:52
Speaker
It was a miserable, miserable time. And if I had known upon entering that time how very long it was going to go on, I think I would have felt really hopeless. But lucky for us, we kept thinking it was just about to be over.
00:05:09
Speaker
So I didn't have to process that we were going into this hole and needing to stay there. So out of all of the challenges of the pandemic, many of which were purely administrative in nature, few of them were
00:05:30
Speaker
unexplored areas for me because, as you might remember, Polly, we had just gotten here. Right. And over and over moved here as a school officially in the fall of 2017. Right. So it's not like we had all of these patterns and procedures that we had to adjust. We had, the cement was still soft. Yeah. On all of it.
00:05:54
Speaker
And because we had just had to rethink everything, rethinking it again wasn't that big of a stretch. But the truly miserable part was that our students were so disappointed and they were so unhappy. And anybody who's called to educational administration is striving for satisfied students.
00:06:19
Speaker
And I'm not talking about happy students. I'm not talking about customer service mentality. We're talking about students finding meaningful fulfillment in their education and finding a deep sense of community and being challenged by people who they really believe care about them.
00:06:36
Speaker
losing that and seeing their student's disappointment, receiving at times their disappointment when it was really directed at me and people with whom I work who were pretty easy targets because we were trying so hard. That was just awful and I
00:06:58
Speaker
found actually, if I were to name the point where I went into a situational depression, it was last January around Omicron because I felt that sense of, I can't go back
Healthcare Disparities in the Pandemic
00:07:12
Speaker
there. I can't do this again. I can't do this again. So it was a very sad time. And the reason I'm going on and on about what a sad time it was is that I'm still trying to process it.
00:07:24
Speaker
And so much of our culture is just saying, well, let's just move on. I'm like, I am moving on. No question I'm moving on in a very joyful and hopeful way. But the damage was done, and it's not going to repair itself. There was a lot of disappointment, and there's going to be a huge amount of grief that we've just begun to account for in all of the work that we're doing in preparing clergy. Lost generation.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, lost generation, lost everything. I had a chat to another person who was saying, we're just now starting to understand the ramifications of the 2008 recession.
00:08:07
Speaker
Like the impacts to economy, we're starting to see the ripple effects of that in meaningful ways with inflation, et cetera, what have you. And the thing is with the 2008 recession, we now have a sense that there were faulty models at work. So credit default swaps as a model for underwriting the housing market was just wrong. It was a fake, wrong thing.
00:08:34
Speaker
And at the time, we didn't know it and we were incredibly confused. I suspect that 10, 12, 15 years from now, we're going to have a sense of whatever, quote unquote, trust we'd had in our leaders to make good decisions that keep people safe. We're ill founded, especially as relates to economics, race and public health.
00:09:03
Speaker
And because of the fact we're just starting to get our heads around it, we are still pointing to factors that really just don't matter. Yeah. Is there a way that we can proactively get better at pointing to misdirected or less relevant facts? Or is this always going to be a sort of like history repeating thing for whatever the next sort of thing like this will be?
00:09:28
Speaker
Well, right now, I think that people are just too tender. There is not enough, if time heals all wounds, we haven't had enough time.
00:09:40
Speaker
We people who work in religion and education are still just incredibly anxious about what the future might hold.
Managing Professional Anxiety
00:09:48
Speaker
I had already gone through an existential crisis leading a school that almost went out of business to know that feeling of oblivion on my watch as a real possibility. Most of my colleagues had never been through anything like that before.
00:10:03
Speaker
Not to say that it was so easy for me because of it, but let's just say I could recognize what was happening, which was the kind of anxiety that comes when professional oblivion
00:10:18
Speaker
oblivion of that which I hold most dear. I kind of know what it felt like so I knew that this too shall pass, right? But let me give you an example of the kind of misdirection I'm talking about that just people aren't ready for yet. George Floyd was brutally murdered by a police officer and all of us saw it over and over and over again.
00:10:43
Speaker
and police violence toward black Americans is not as acute as the disproportionate effects of COVID on the black community, meaning thousands upon thousands of people died due to systemic racism of the pandemic, but it didn't have a focus.
00:11:13
Speaker
And so we all rallied around police violence and hardly anybody was talking about disparities in health care. Medical racism is even a term that I don't know if I've ever heard it before right now, Polly. Like we were not talking about it, but
00:11:35
Speaker
I, in my daily life, was in touch with my colleague, who is the senior minister at Union Baptist Church in New York, and I was in touch with my colleagues at Southport UCC. Brian Scott buried 30 people in 2020 of COVID. 30 people. Southport had one person even catch COVID.
00:11:57
Speaker
So what I'm saying is that those are the kinds of topics that are just really hard to talk about because for me, especially as a white person, to say anything that suggests that George Floyd's murder wasn't the most important thing that's ever happened in history suggests complete cluelessness. And so it's not a good topic to address in those ways. But when it comes to systemic change, I work for systems. I am Systems Inc.
00:12:28
Speaker
That's my job. So when I see and hear about systems that are having these disproportionate effects, it's hard for me to know when you start actually looking at the deeper underlying problems. What scope is reasonable for where your ministry context is? Like, to know when to say,
00:12:55
Speaker
this is the work that I can do and that my place in the system I'm equipped to make meaningful change for without an undue level of risk to self, where the cost is right, to go back to systems, the cost benefit analysis language, and to know to where
00:13:16
Speaker
I'm not the right person to make
00:13:31
Speaker
question that you're posing about where I see myself having an impact or not having an impact could be addressed without really meaningful consideration of the concept of role. What's my role in this problem?
00:13:46
Speaker
What am I contributing to this problem? What's my role in the crafting of a new way forward? And how do I identify the perimeter around that role and then identify my partners? So with that,
00:14:02
Speaker
You asked the question about where do I see us finding a way to address some of these issues, perhaps of grief or of disappointment or ongoing anxiety about how shaken up we all are.
Community Building During COVID
00:14:20
Speaker
In this context, in the Andover Newton at Yale Divinity School context, I feel like we're just beginning to get to the point where we administrative leaders can direct students to think about the future. Direct them to saying, how can I be a part of this, as opposed to, why can't you fix this for me?
00:14:46
Speaker
So let me say more about this. We attempted during last year to bring our students together as much as we could. But the most important essential tools in our toolbox were not available to us. We were basically, if we had a toolbox, we were missing our hammer, our screwdriver, and our wrench. And so we were trying to put up buildings with spoons and forks.
00:15:12
Speaker
Yale did a really good job insofar as they could protecting classroom learning. But so much of learning for ministry takes place in the worship context and in a fellowship context. And those two forms of gathering for the sharing of wisdom, for the testing of ideas,
00:15:34
Speaker
for the challenging in a context where there's already a relationship there, so it's not some random stranger challenging you, it's somebody who actually really cares about you, gone, gone, gone. And our community, the Andover Newton community at YDS, really suffered for the fact that we couldn't
00:15:55
Speaker
gain access to what we were used to using, we tried all kinds of creative ways to engage people with one another. But one of our real struggles was that particularly our first year students really didn't understand why it was that we weren't finding that sense of closeness as a community.
00:16:14
Speaker
because they didn't have anything to compare this to. So I'll give you an example. I had this interaction with a student who, in a group context, said, well, no wonder we're having these misunderstandings that crop up, these tensions that crop up. You never bring us together. I mean, we're never able to get together for meals. We're never able to get together and just pray together and be in worship. My response to the student was, I totally agree with you.
00:16:41
Speaker
A lot of this has to do with COVID protocols that we didn't create, but we have to respect. And the students respond to me, well, now you're just making excuses.
Student Agency in Learning
00:16:55
Speaker
Well, technically, I guess you're right. Yes, I am. So what I'm saying is the students were just very depressed. And I'm not talking about depression in the clinical sense of the word. They were just in a typical depression. They're not enjoying anything. They're not enjoying things that they would ordinarily enjoy.
00:17:12
Speaker
And they couldn't brighten the outlook to save their lives. So even in the beginning of this year, any attempt that we would make, like maybe say September or so with returning students to say, so what do we want to do together? How do we want to be together? How do we want to be together in community? It was really hard for them to find the hope
00:17:38
Speaker
within themselves to even answer that question. And in some cases they heard it as, what is it, toxic positivity or manipulation, whereas we were very much of the mind that at some point we do have to start moving forward. And the question that we're asking, how do you want to do this, is really meant to signal that we're not going to do it for you.
00:18:08
Speaker
We're not going to do it for you. That's such an important observation, right? Because that's
00:18:15
Speaker
That's the lead a horse to water thing. Provide the convening power that is educational administration. Provide the context where the questions can get asked and answered. Provide the context where the relationships can form and nurture those relationships. Sure, all of those things, all really good things. And ultimately, anybody who's ever worked with adult learners knows that
00:18:42
Speaker
they're going to get out of it what they put into it. And the extent to which you take their agency away is the extent to which they'll abdicate responsibility for their own learning. Treat them like children that act like children. When I'm treated like a child, I act like a child. I could come up with many examples. I'm going to take my ball and go play in somebody else's basketball court. Exactly. Yeah, sure.
00:19:12
Speaker
I wonder, so when I hear what you've, all of these things that you've just said, all of this language goes back to really good systems thinking and adult learning, which, I mean.
Boundaries in Leadership
00:19:24
Speaker
It's kind of my jam, Polly. That's your thing. Yeah. I had the privilege of doing directed study with you about this thinking in parochial context myself. But I think a very buzzwordy thing that that could be framed into as setting good boundaries.
00:19:41
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Setting good boundaries is what I talked with my students about in class yesterday. We're moving in my class on leadership and change from a unit on systems theory into a unit on liberation theology. So we're moving from emotion to power.
00:20:02
Speaker
And boundaries really falls at the elbow of those two topics because best understood boundaries are that which we use to moderate for power differentials. When you have power, you need to protect the person over whom you have power through the use of appropriate boundaries that
00:20:31
Speaker
that correct for the imbalance. And when you're talking about systems in particular, you can't bring about life-giving change in a system if you're not simultaneously aware that the invisible force that's keeping those interlocking triangles, remember those emotional triangles? I do. That the physics of those triangles has everything to do with who has more and less control over resources.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yes, I need for there to be a modern audio book of Friedman of generation to generation because I feel like that's, I don't know that I actually need more podcasts on systems thinking. I think I just need to have that book in audio format so that when I'm out running on the trail, I can just be having those reminders, like family systems, administration systems.
00:21:31
Speaker
emotional systems. So I want that too and what I want is to have whoever is cast or reading the voice to have a really thick New York accent and has to be an octogenarian Jewish man. Because I really feel like for generation to generation is Friedman's classic, the book that his kids edited for him after he died, A Failure of Nerve.
00:21:58
Speaker
was such an embodiment of a person who was just so done. He'd been a rabbi for 40 years at that point, he had seen it all, and he was so tired of people fucking up their lives that he retired with this sense of, ugh, what's wrong with you people?
00:22:17
Speaker
And you can hear that in reading the book. That's why I assign a failure of nerve to students now, as opposed to generation to generation, because it elicits such good conversations. So for instance, one of the things that, like clockwork, seminary students have so much difficulty accepting is what Friedman teaches about the fallacy of empathy.
00:22:41
Speaker
He thinks empathy is a crock. He thinks empathy is manipulative and irresponsible. And seminary students just combust at the idea that empathy does more harm than good. But you know what? You start getting into it and you think, oh, you're onto something there, Rabbi.
Empathy in Leadership: A Double-Edged Sword
00:23:03
Speaker
You are onto something there. And watching students go from being
00:23:07
Speaker
armed resistance to the idea that empathy is not real, that it's not appropriate for a leader. Watching them go from being so offended by that to, meh, you know, you got me there, Rabbi, is one of my favorite moments in teaching and it happens every time I teach freedmen.
00:23:31
Speaker
He's, there's, yeah, I mean, from personal experience, I can just say that it was, that was transformational work for me, certainly. I have no reason to suspect that I have so many learning differences or career trajectories that would make me different from another student, so yeah, I would assume so.
00:23:54
Speaker
I want to pivot a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about the circle of people that you run in that we apparently have so many folks in common.
00:24:15
Speaker
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the circle and also what was in the water when this incredible circle of leaders were coming together and could tell me what it is like to learn as co-learners among such incredibly strong, powerful, mostly women.
Influential Colleagues
00:24:38
Speaker
Oh, thank you for that question, Polly.
00:24:41
Speaker
In the musical Hamilton, the song I'm Not Throwing Away My Shot, where Alexander Hamilton meets all these people who end up being really important to him. So John Lawrence, Hercules Mulligan, Aaron Burr, he meets them in this bar, right? And they're drinking and they're crowsing.
00:25:06
Speaker
I only found out upon reading the libretto of Hamilton that those five or six men actually met years apart and not in one day. So not that I assumed that the bar scene was exactly accurate,
00:25:27
Speaker
But it really heartened me to know that it's possible to meet a number of colleagues, not at the same time, but actually have a sense of the circle of wise people, even if they don't know each other. So I have worked with some of the people that you've worked with too, Steph Spellers being one of them. She and I went to seminary together.
00:25:52
Speaker
I've worked very closely with Sharon Kugler, who I met years and years after that. I worked for and with Peter Gomes at Memorial Church at Harvard, off and on for about 15 years. And there are certain people that I find just kind of circle back into my life that, as I said, they don't know each other, but I feel like they occupy the same kind of turf. So just a couple of examples.
00:26:21
Speaker
This past weekend I was in Houston. I was preaching at First Congregational Church of Houston in the pulpit of a dear friend named John Page. Now John went to YDS, but I had first met him when he was a first year student at Harvard. I was his academic dean when he was a first year student at Harvard. Then he came to Yale Divinity School and then he came back to Harvard to work at Memorial Church. So that's where I got to know him.
00:26:48
Speaker
I hadn't really known him when he was a first-year student. I assigned his housing, but he was not problematic, so I never saw students who weren't problematic. So I was with John this past weekend, and there was this moment where I looked over at him in the chancel, and I just felt like I had been in that same spot with him yesterday. But the last time we had shared a chancel together was 2007. But here's the thing. There is this meeting point.
00:27:17
Speaker
this crux between people who love ministry and people who love education. And the pattern that I've discovered over the years is that we always end up finding each other.
Building Relationships: Commitments vs. Spaces
00:27:29
Speaker
Most people don't find a job like I have where I'm sitting at the crux. They usually find themselves on one or the other side of it alternating back and forth.
00:27:39
Speaker
But the people who gravitate toward that particular nexus point just make complete sense to me. They're people who complete my sentences and I complete their sentences. So if I were to just walk through who is in my circle of confidence,
00:27:59
Speaker
All of them, except for maybe a couple of exceptions for my college years, really anybody that I met from seminary and onward, really can't imagine themselves being in something other than education and ministry. And I'm not saying education and religion. You notice I'm here. I'm not leaving for AAR. I'm not packed for SBL. I don't go to that shit, man. I'm a ministry person. I am not a religion person. I am not that interested in religion.
00:28:28
Speaker
It's not that important to me, but ministry is everything. For me, ministry is everything. So that's a good question. And I think a follow up that I would love to make that distinction for how much of that work of
00:28:42
Speaker
finding, it almost feels like what you're describing is finding your tribe along the continuity of time. Sure. How much of that work is helped by the benefit of position, of being in education administration to where that component is a part of place, and how much of that work is
00:29:07
Speaker
comes from the self-knowing of what sort of people am I looking for and how do I go and find them? That's a really wonderful question. I'm sure you're hearing that a lot in these interviews. Certainly I am self-aware enough to
00:29:29
Speaker
have very few friends. And what I mean by that is that I enjoy being by myself. I'm as extroverted as they come, but I enjoy my own company. And I don't need to just hang out with people. I have very, very dear friends who add a lot to my life. I have people to whom I am so deeply loyal.
00:29:57
Speaker
that I don't really care whether I like them or not. I'm just loyal to them because we have these shared passions and shared commitments. I don't even think about whether I like them or not. I don't have time, really. So when you ask the question about does it come down to kind of the shared space or the shared commitments, I would say that it probably has more to do with the shared commitments.
00:30:23
Speaker
because those really do transcend any one time in my life or any one space where I've been in ministry. That said, since I've moved to New Haven again, so I lived here when I was an undergrad and then I moved back as a grown-up, I've made two friends, like I have two friends, and I feel like I've won the lottery that I have two friends that I've made since I've been here. Wow! And they have times of people I care about.
00:30:46
Speaker
No question, but I think about, like you said, my tribe, like my circle of people, I think about those relationships in the context of both mutual and reciprocal kind of relationship, where they tell me their problems and I tell them my problems, whereas many of the other relationships I have are
00:31:06
Speaker
They're mutual, but they're not necessarily reciprocal. They're the person who, like, when they come, like, the friends are the ones, if I were hospitalized, God forbid, if I were hospitalized, I don't care if they see me puke. Whereas the other ones who are coming to see me as like a pastoral visit, I'm really trying not to puke while they're in the room. I'm really trying to kind of usher them out before I do something really, you know, colorful.
00:31:34
Speaker
It's wonderful to hear you laugh though, Polly. Laughing is great. I mean like half of the work of this podcast is finding moments of levity in the midst of like talking about really difficult and sometimes grave or at least heavy if not necessarily difficult things.
00:31:57
Speaker
So maybe that's important and maybe we should lean into that a little bit because there's something that I've enjoyed in my tutelage with you and this is my experience. You have a capacity to deliver very, I would not necessarily emotionally difficult but conceptually
00:32:16
Speaker
complex and nuanced content with levity. And I don't see that in most of my colleagues, certainly not speaking ill of any of our colleagues here at Yale, not that levity is
00:32:33
Speaker
is the goal or necessarily a requirement, but I do notice it and I do know some of the science around how humor impacts our capacity to learn. So I wonder if you can speak more about how you use humor and levity in pedagogical techniques.
Humor in Teaching
00:32:52
Speaker
I'll narrow a little bit more. Is that intentional or is that something that has
00:32:59
Speaker
that just sort of comes naturally from personality. Oh, that's a wonderful question. I have always appreciated people with a good sense of humor. My father was very, very funny. And I have found that laughter is an anti-anxiety medication that we all really need sometimes.
00:33:26
Speaker
The best comedians are ones who simply say something that's true that we never thought of before. Something that's true and ironic that we may never thought of before. So you ask the question, is this intentional on my part or is it just something that comes really naturally? I think that my respect for humor is something that's very intentional because I think that there are some really ironic
00:33:55
Speaker
downright weird dimensions of being a person of faith, trying to be a good person in community. It's just kind of hilarious when you think about the just outlandish notion that we should get together and sing songs and talk to a mysterious force.
00:34:20
Speaker
and stand up and sit down. It's just weird, really. And if we let it be a little weird, we can let it be a little bit wonderful. And if we decide that being weird is not within our comfort zone, then we run the risk of becoming totalitarian, saying, this can't be weird, so I have to make it normative. I have to make it what everybody needs.
00:34:45
Speaker
And that's not OK, right? So the first time I ever got intentional about humor, I took a class on humor writing when I was the summer between my first and second years of college. And I took it because I wanted to take a writing class, and it sounded like a good kind of framework for me. And one of the things that we did in that class was we watched a ton of stand up.
00:35:06
Speaker
And I think stand up is so similar to preaching that I would say that there are certain things that have influenced my preaching none more. Well, the first thing that most influential thing that's affected preaching for me is that I taught aerobics for a long time. Yeah.
00:35:23
Speaker
and teaching aerobics gets anybody over stage fright because you literally have to keep talking when you can't breathe very well and you're physically so exposed but you're focusing on what they need not yourself
00:35:40
Speaker
And when you're focusing on my students back there because the mirror is here, you're so focused on helping them to enjoy the process of finding a version of this class that's fun and fit making for them that you kind of get over yourself. And that really helped me to be a very non-anxious public speaker. I wouldn't say confident, but non-anxious.
00:36:08
Speaker
But the second biggest thing was really watching a ton of stand-up. Because stand-up comics like the really brilliant stand-up comics just tell true stories in a way that doesn't try to correct for their weirdness.
00:36:24
Speaker
So Eddie Murphy, who I actually think, I mean, complicated person, of course, but Eddie Murphy is, I think, in a class by himself when it comes to stand-up. And all of his early stand-up, he even talks about this, I think it was in Delirious, which was I think his second album. He talks about how all of his early stand-up was about pooping.
00:36:44
Speaker
And all he did was as like a 10 and 11 year old was described pooping in really graphic detail and people were falling down laughing because of just first of all his unflappable descriptions as a younger person and second they just are laughing at the familiarity of it. So when I am for example giving a talk about leadership
00:37:14
Speaker
and describing patterns of human behavior that are just silly. They're just kind of ridiculous. And yet I'm not saying in a way that's dismissive of other people because I'm doing the same thing. If people don't find it funny, they're going to find it depressing because it's so intractable. So I'll make some kind of generalization like, oh, yeah, here's an example. Oh, yeah.
00:37:44
Speaker
Trustee board in most churches is made up of people who have retired, are on a fixed income, and they are so anxious about their own retirement savings that they play that out in the church setting, saying we can't ever spend money on anything ever. And when the pastor wants to go to the meeting to talk about how it actually would be really good for the mission to make some changes to the space, they say that the pastor's not invited.
00:38:14
Speaker
Now, you say yes. I say this in a context of people who are in ministry already, and they thought they were the only ones whose trustee boards did this. Like, do you know one that doesn't do this?
00:38:30
Speaker
or the church custodian or the church musician, where I'm not making fun of them, I'm saying there are patterns. And systems people, systems people are so far into the realm of accepting that there are patterns, that there's no offense intended. Saying that, for me as a woman to say, there are certain things that you can expect that a woman will say or do, it doesn't mean that I don't respect women, it's that I believe in systems.
00:38:59
Speaker
and that there's intergenerational transmission of behaviors that doesn't mean you're being sexist or ageist or in any way dismissive of the humanity of another person. It's just that there are patterns. I want to do a little bit of a speed round of top four things.
00:39:20
Speaker
This was not on my original Top Four Things speed round that I wrote for you, but since the conversation is moving in this direction, we're just gonna lean into it. I mean, I'm trained in improv more than stand-up, so that's where following the energy comes from.
Patterns in Church Systems
00:39:34
Speaker
Top Four Things, observable patterns of behavior in church systems that you think are more hilarious now than ever.
00:39:43
Speaker
meaning that they're so extreme? Yeah. Okay, so top four. One, the failure to recognize that when the world is changing, you have to change too. Yeah. That would be number one. Yeah. Number two,
00:40:02
Speaker
the tendency to think that going back to normal is necessarily good even if normal really wasn't that good to begin with the expectation that ministers have a secret playbook we do exactly the secret playbook where we know exactly how to handle it when an
00:40:27
Speaker
unprecedented series of events takes place, we know we're just not going to tell them about it. And fourth, the notion that only the minister has a ministry
00:40:41
Speaker
and that the congregation can delegate the leadership of their spiritual life to that person. Those four things are just hilarious. I also, because I really do understand emotion as something that is shared, it's not owned by any one person.
00:41:02
Speaker
that I have a lot of hope for those, I have hope for redemption and patterns that are unhealthy. But I also know that just like Christians, okay, theologically, I really believe that Paul the Apostle was right in framing following Jesus as
00:41:31
Speaker
a better option than the other options available. Namely, die to this world and rise in Christ because it beats the other alternatives. In other words, if we're going to think of the yoke of following Jesus as a disciple or the yoke of Christianity, the yoke is heavy.
00:41:55
Speaker
But all of us are going to be yoked to something, all of us. So if I'm going to be in a dysfunctional family of people trying like crazy to follow Jesus and often blowing it,
00:42:14
Speaker
I'd really rather be in a church setting where at least people have come together around a higher truth than say a money making scheme or a worshipfulness of beauty kind of coming together, worship of material objects, worship of attention.
00:42:40
Speaker
Like, if I'm going to be in a dysfunctional family, I'd like you to be a family that stands for something I believe in. And I believe that Jesus, you know, I said that I'm not that into religion. The reason why I follow Jesus is I think that Jesus's teachings about the nature of God were true.
00:42:56
Speaker
And we're correct. And as compared with other religions, I think there's plenty of valid pursuits of truth, but this idea that God is love and God wants us to love each other, that just works for me. And so I...
00:43:14
Speaker
would rather be in a group that gathers around that fire trying to warm its hands, trying to keep that fire burning for the next generation. If I'm going to be in a dysfunctional situation no matter what, as long as I don't live in a yurt in Uzbekistan in the middle of nowhere, yeah, I'll take that, I'll take that flavor of crazy. That flavor of crazy tastes just fine. That yolk is comparatively easy compared to like the crushing hand of the Roman plutocracy.
00:43:42
Speaker
compared to the crushing hand of idolatry, greed, selfishness, oppression, instrumentalization.
Appreciation for Stand-up Comedy
00:43:55
Speaker
Basically all the successors to the Roman Emperor. There you go. I've got another top four for you. Top four standups and why.
00:44:09
Speaker
Well, I already said Eddie Murphy. I love Tignotaro because of her dryness. She tells a story about introducing her wife to her family that I've probably heard it maybe 15 or 20 times and
00:44:26
Speaker
I never laugh less with each succeeding one even though I know exactly what's going to happen next with her barefoot family picking them up with beer in Alabama in the airport. It just absolutely annihilates me. I really
00:44:44
Speaker
comedian who was in The Big Sick. Camille Nanjiani. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think his stand-up is absolutely brilliant. And then the guy who plays the couch surfer, evangelical Christian, he had an HBO series for two years. Oh, P. Holmes. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Those, I think they're brilliant.
00:45:02
Speaker
Kumail Nanjani has an affectation that I really appreciate, where he just, you get the sense that he's watching everything from a distance. And I'm never able to do that. Like, I am so in it. I am so in it. So, and then as I said with the other two, there's just a kind of a truth-telling honesty. I mean, Tig Notaro and Pete Holmes just tell stories. Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker
I want to pivot a little bit towards the future. One of the things that we talked a little bit about earlier today with our colleague Andrew McGowan is the future, the work of theological higher ed in the future. Very broad question. Feel free to take it what direction you'd like. What do you see as the unique work of Andover Newton at Yale
00:46:00
Speaker
in the broader scope of theological higher education in a world that has just survived COVID, or is continuing to survive COVID rather?
Theological Education Post-COVID
00:46:12
Speaker
Well, because I think about that question from the minute I wake up until the minute I go to sleep most days, I always have to be selective of my metaphors. So the metaphor that I would lift up for Andover Newton right now is that of the midwife.
00:46:28
Speaker
So my colleague Susan Beaumont, who writes about emergent leadership in churches, she's written about lots of other things too, but Emergence is her more recent topic, writes in her, she has this new book, it's not that new anymore, it came out I think 2017, 2018. It's called How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going. And it's a book about emergent leadership or leadership in between times. And in that book, what I really took away was that
00:46:58
Speaker
We are in a liminal season where that which was before is over, but that which is to come is not yet formed. And we might not live to see it formed. So the biggest mistake we could make would be to fall back on old ways, try to retreat back to that which is over,
00:47:27
Speaker
just because it feels safer, a huge mistake. But the second biggest mistake would be rushing to premature answers, diagnoses, closure, because we don't know what God is up to yet. So the question then becomes, how do we hold this liminal space and allow that which God is creating in this space to,
00:47:54
Speaker
come into some sort of cohesive form rather than trying to force something that just isn't ready. That's just not ready. Not ready for us, not ready for prime time, so to speak. So my most recent book, which came out this past summer, which is called Intentional Leadership, was very much inspired by Susan's admonition that we've got to figure out what we're going to do in this liminal space. So it's called Intentional Leadership in Between Seasons.
00:48:23
Speaker
And what I name in that book is that Jesus is coming. Look busy. We have to be active in this space without trying to establish some imaginary plumb line or some imaginary horizon that might be something that is of the world and therefore a figment of our imagination, not our calling, not our calling.
00:48:50
Speaker
So what I'm really thinking about when we're building curriculum and educating our students here at Andover Newton is how do we prepare ministers who have the competencies that are needed to hold the space and allow God to do that work of forming
00:49:10
Speaker
and then deliver that forming without ever mistaking that forming for themselves. I mean, one of the reasons I teach our students so ardently about systems theory, for example, is that ministers who think that it's all about them can't do the job. They just can't do the job right now because they need to be attentive to what's becoming formed in the community. So we teach them, we actively teach them how to not make things all about them.
00:49:40
Speaker
We have a competencies-oriented curriculum that a person would look at the competencies that we educate for and say, yeah, that's pretty much what ministers do. Well, it's easy for you to say now because you're seeing that we came up with it. But those competencies emerged out of a data set to die for where we had very active input from people who are doing the work every day and telling us what they're seeing.
00:50:10
Speaker
So the way that you educate people that are not going to be able to be faithful and goal-oriented at the same time is very different from the way you would teach somebody how to run something.
00:50:25
Speaker
When people say, oh, we need to teach our students how to open a church and close a church, that is bullshit. We need to teach them how to be present to what God is doing now and help usher it forward. The results are not something that our students are prepared to claim to know.
00:50:49
Speaker
They need to have the kind of education that will make it possible for them to speak and to listen and to share a vision. And then God will help us figure it out. Can you imagine if I'd been hired in 2011 to be the dean or 2005 when I joined the faculty, saying at some point we're really going to want you to move the school to New Haven, Connecticut. No, it's not like that. The job isn't like that.
00:51:15
Speaker
And the piece of being present is certainly one of the central tenets of comedy, like read the room, right? Read the room. That's right. One of our competencies that we teach for at Andover Newton is perspicacity, which is a fancy $5 word for read the room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:36
Speaker
No, it's an important one. It's paying attention to what's going on, telling people the truths that they already know, but might not necessarily have given themselves permission to say themselves, or might need, because there is moral authority and power tied up in preaching and in proclamation, might need someone who has moral authority to tell them it's okay to think and say.
00:52:00
Speaker
Well, some of the most compelling stand-up comics are ones who have been marginalized because they can see what's happening inside the corridors of power, but they're never going to be invited in. So they have a perspective on it that is enviable. Like, Margaret Cho is a great example. Do you like Margaret Cho?
00:52:21
Speaker
Yes, race and ethnicity demands that I do. But yes, I also love Margaret Cho. But Margaret Cho, when she talks about being a performance artist in San Francisco as a young person, all she has to do is tell the story of what she was doing. And you just see that she really lives in a different world than those who control resources in our culture. And so she sees everything. She sees everything.
00:52:49
Speaker
And she's gross, and she's wonderful. I remember one of my favorite lines, I heard her live once, but I've seen her recorded 15, 20 times. But she has this, I love the way she describes her critics, where she talks about how somebody said, why do you always have to talk about menstruation? And her response was, it happens so often.
00:53:18
Speaker
Which is just true, but for some reason it's all the funnier because it's just true. I want to pivot a little bit more. The thing that I think that all of us who have worked in caring spaces that also happen to be forced into doing systems work as well, hope and
00:53:44
Speaker
Our friend Ian down the hill, Ian Oliver, told me that I'm no longer allowed to use the word resilience because so many people are tired of hearing it. Oh, I've heard this. I've heard this from his colleague, Sharon, too, that students just hear it as, I don't know, some kind of cop-out. Like, I don't need to make things better for you because you're so resilient.
00:54:06
Speaker
It's a dog whistle. It's really become that by this time. But the piece I think that's important is, I'll use the language of tending the wellspring.
Self-Care Strategies
00:54:15
Speaker
Our friend and collaborator, Shane Claiborne, talks about tending the garden. I wonder if you can talk with me, in addition to the work of physical wellness, what sort of things, what sort of practical things you do to tend the inner wellspring that keeps you going. Because it definitely seems like there aren't a lot of people in our world to think that the world is headed in the right direction.
00:54:36
Speaker
What are those things for you? Well, when it comes to what direction I think the world is heading in, I honestly sometimes have to just actively work to let go and say the direction the world is going is in many ways none of my business. I can only work within this membrane, this cell, C-E-L-L, and try to make it as
00:55:06
Speaker
healthy and contagiously beautiful as I possibly can. And I really relied on authors like Adrienne Marie Brown who I can tell you love Adrienne Marie Brown in thinking about just the completeness of tending one's
00:55:23
Speaker
responsibilities and stewarding them really well, because if you start thinking in such global terms, when it can't get discouraged and possibly even less effective in that fractal unit that you're responsible for. So with that, we're going the right direction, we're going the wrong direction, we're going to hell. Who knows?
00:55:42
Speaker
Here's what keeps my well full. One is that I read this acronym. I was going through a really tough time, and I read this beautiful acronym in a book that I don't remember what the book was. I don't even remember what the book was about. But it was an acronym NURSE, which stands for nutrition, understanding,
00:56:02
Speaker
rest, spirit, and exercise. And so it was some kind of prescription for mental health brain care, like just kind of basic, basic brain care. So I take those five steps very, very seriously. I try really hard to eat well.
00:56:24
Speaker
I don't eat. I'm not like crazy. I mean, I like some processed food. I like food a lot. Understanding, meaning seeking out, whether it's therapy, whether it's talking with a confidant at rest, I'm vigilant about sleep.
00:56:40
Speaker
My sleep hygiene is immaculate. Spirit, like, worship life and exercise. So that kind of first aid, that kind of mental well-being keeps my well very full. I'm quite sure that reading
00:56:58
Speaker
because it gives me so many new ideas, is filling my well all the time. And as for what keeps me hopeful is that I really believe in what I do. I really believe that the church, even as it is now, is a setting in our culture of moral reasoning and meaning making.
00:57:27
Speaker
The society that lacks moral reasoning and meaning making makes terrible mistakes, makes terrible mistakes. So the church is doing that now, poorly. And yet, I actually don't mind the idea of dedicating my career to holding a shell
00:57:52
Speaker
keeping it healthy enough that when God makes this next thing happen, whatever it might be, that there is some kind of faithful remnant there. There is an ember upon which somebody could blow. Kind of like how the Irish saved civilization, that book, The Irish Saved Civilization, by keeping the art that made the Renaissance possible, I feel like a learned clergy,
00:58:20
Speaker
serving faith communities is so worth it, is so worth it, that I don't get the discouragement one would feel of throwing all my energy at something that doesn't matter. There's so much wisdom in that, so much self-awareness in that, that is incredibly refreshing. We have just one more question left. The question that we ask everyone that we end on is, what do you want the world to look like when you're done with it?
00:58:52
Speaker
Oh wow.
Vision for a Joyful World
00:58:55
Speaker
I just preached this past weekend on the true nature of joy.
00:59:01
Speaker
And I was preaching, it was a passage from Third Isaiah, the one about how you build the houses and live in them and take spouses and make babies with them and anybody who lives to be less than a hundred, that's going to be the big shocker. So in any case, Isaiah is painting this really, this utopian future to
00:59:29
Speaker
Babylonian exiles who've just come home and found out that Judah had kind of moved on without them. For the listener who doesn't have a lot of experience with academic theology, the book of Isaiah as it appears in the Bible, we believe with a fairly reasonable level of historicity that it was written in three, it was actually three different things that were written and then sort of
00:59:56
Speaker
smooshed together, but please continue. And written to three different types of audiences in this particular audience. So the last part of Isaiah is written to people who had been told that they would return home and everything would just be perfect and they've gotten home and it's not.
01:00:14
Speaker
So the thing that I zeroed in on in this sermon is the fact that as Isaiah is making all these promises of what is going to get better,
01:00:26
Speaker
The first thing that he promises is that you will have joy. Then food, then shelter, then long life, then healthy babies. Those things all come after. And the reason it's on my mind is because I was struggling with this passage. I was wrestling with this passage all week. And where I found a framework that really helped me is of all places. And I can't believe I'm saying this out loud. But in George Marsden's biography of Jonathan Edwards,
01:00:55
Speaker
So Jonathan Edwards, and if your listeners don't know who Jonathan Edwards is, you're in very good company. But he was an 18th century, really probably the person who evangelical Christians and progressive Christians both claim with caveats as a preeminent American theologian, perhaps the most important American theologian if you look at the whole Western canon.
01:01:25
Speaker
So Jonathan Edwards was known for being really stern. His most famous sermon was entitled, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. But what really distinguished his work in the very, very early days of the Enlightenment was that he didn't set intellect aside.
01:01:47
Speaker
but rather found God through intellect. And he framed all of God's work in terms of beauty, beauty. Now there's this whole field called theological aesthetics about which I know absolutely nothing, but I do
01:02:04
Speaker
believe that the idea that our lives are a response to the beauty of God's creation and the way Marsden describes Jonathan Edwards theology was to say that our response as faithful people first is to love that which God loves.
01:02:27
Speaker
Coming back to your question about just my eschatology. When I'm done with it, what do I want to see? I really believe that this notion of God's ever ongoing creation, ever expanding creation, were it to be recognized with the wonder it deserves,
01:02:52
Speaker
There would be peace. There would be peace. I mean, I've joked many times that if everybody got eight hours sleep a night, there would be no war anymore. Because if everybody were able to be that present and that lucid, they would realize the futility of violence.
01:03:10
Speaker
But I'd like to think that everything that we do to cause people to love what God loves and to acknowledge and respect the beauty of God's creation, if every little bit that we do has that butterfly wing around the world effect, I'll feel like I've done enough.
Closing Remarks
01:03:33
Speaker
Um, Dean Sarah Drummond, thank you so much for the chat today. Thanks, Polly. I feel this has been so cathartic. You asked so many questions that made me feel so interesting. My thanks to my guests, the Reverend Dean Sarah Drummond. You can find out more about Andover Newton Theological School, the Yale Divinity School, and her work as a leader for ministerial education in the links below.
01:03:59
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Pauly Reese. This program is produced in Southwest Philadelphia on the unceded land of the Leni Lenape tribe and the Black Bottom community. Our associate producers are Willa Jaffe and Kia Watkins. If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support us by leaving us a five-star review and a comment and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find us.
01:04:25
Speaker
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01:04:45
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, wishing you every uncommon good to do your uncommon good to be the uncommon good.