CHAPTER 19
Back to Spirit

In November 1972, during a visit to help out after the birth of Lisa’s son Giles, Esther confided to her daughter that she was not feeling well. She was soon diagnosed with juvenile diabetes (type 1, insulin-dependent), a highly unusual disease in an older person, and a shock to a woman who had devoted so much attention to healing and natural foods. This development got the Greenleafs thinking about how they wanted to invest their remaining life energies and ensure that they would be able to have Esther’s medical needs seen to. Besides, they were both nearing their seventies, and the New Hampshire winters were not getting any warmer. They thought about moving to California but decided on Crosslands, a Quaker retirement center in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and moved there in 1977. Bob once spoke with his friend Malcolm Warford about the decision. “Bob figured out what the equation was between shoveling to get through a New Hampshire winter and life expectancy,” said Warford, 298“and he chose life expectancy, even though he and Esther loved being there in Peterborough.”²

Their cottage at Crosslands was pleasant and offered a lovely natural setting. Soon after moving in Bob decided to reduce his traveling. He would invite others to visit him, “if I think they are serious” he told one correspondent, but he was beginning to feel the weight of age. Many visitors to Crosslands experienced moments like those remembered by Susan Wisely of the Lilly Endowment.

Because he believed in the transformative power of listening and reflection, Greenleaf’s style was not much different when he presided over public workshops. A Catholic Sister told a friend that she heard Bob was giving a two-day workshop hundreds of miles from her home in Indiana. Eager to meet one of her heroes, she signed up, hopped into the car and drove to the site. “But I was disappointed,” she said. “He sat there and hardly said anything, mostly just asked questions and listened.” The friend responded, “So, I guess the workshop was a bust for you.” Her 299eyes brightened and she replied, “Oh no! It changed my life! One of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.”

During his final years at Crosslands, Bob increasingly concerned himself with more universal issues, especially spirituality. (Bob usually preferred the word spirit over spirituality, but he did write an essay in 1982 titled Spirituality as Leadership.) When Teacher as Servant was published in 1979, he still believed universities could be the major leavening force toward a more caring society. Within a few years he gave up that idea. “My efforts to get universities to work on leadership development with students, principally at Ohio University, failed,” he wrote Bob Lynn. “As long as new money was pumped in there was a little stirring. But when the money stopped, the effort stopped. It did not take root as an effort the university would commit resources to.”⁴

He looked elsewhere for a molding force for a more caring society and discovered seminaries. This idea was a shock to some of his oldest friends, especially seminary faculty and administrators who knew that their beloved institutions could be as hidebound as any on the planet. They wondered where the idea of seminaries came from.

As usual, it came from multiple sources. Through the years, Bob Lynn had spoken frequently with Greenleaf about theology and the structure of religious education. Greenleaf already knew a great deal about religious organizations, having consulted with dozens of church-related groups, from councils of bishops to parish study groups. Then too, he had known some prominent religious leaders and thinkers: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, theologians Joseph Fletcher and Gerald Heard, religious historian Rufus Jones, ministers Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale. In addition, Bob had taught a few sessions at Harvard Divinity School. Still, the evidence is that he had not thought deeply about the potential of seminaries as institutions until his prolonged contacts with Bob Lynn, beginning in 1974.

In March of 1979, Greenleaf was the lead presenter at a Washington, D. C. workshop on “The Bishop as Leader” attended by an equal number of Roman Catholic and Episcopal bishops. They were meeting to discuss ministry from a functional point of view, not from a theological or doctrinal perspective.⁵ During one of the breaks in the meeting, Bob left the room to make a phone call. When he came back one of the bishops said, “We were just discussing whether you believed in original sin.” Bob had 300decided not to get into any theological arguments with the group. He shot back, “I don’t know whether I do or not. I don’t know what it is.” Another bishop quipped, “If you would join the church, you’d find out.” Bob answered, “I don’t want to know that bad.”

The exchange made Bob think about how he could better communicate with the bishops in their own language. The next day he said to them, “I’ve listened to you fellows talk for two days. You’ve talked a lot about managing and administering, but I haven’t heard anything about leading, and that’s what you were convened to discuss.” They were stunned and asked what he would have them do to lead. That was the question he had been waiting for. “Well, there are probably a lot of things, but one that comes to mind is that part of the problem of our society today is that the churches have not evolved an adequate theology of institutions.” They spoke about what that could mean and Bob promised to write a paper on the idea when he got home and send to it them.⁶

It was typical of Greenleaf that a presentation was not ended simply because it was over. He saw each event as the beginning of ongoing dialogue with participants, a way to sharpen his own thinking and challenge theirs; so, he went home and wrote a paper called “Note on the Need for a Theology of Institutions” and sent it out to the good bishops.

The phrase “theology of institutions” is nearly as startling as “servant-leader” because it brings together two ideas that are not normally joined. Theology is “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.” It is a theory or system, like Thomism, or a “distinctive body of theological opinion.” An institution is “a significant practice, relationship, or organization in a society or culture. . . an established organization or corporation.”⁷ In his paper, Greenleaf does not bother to give his own definition of theology but uses it as a word to point to the ultimate meaning of institutions to individuals and society. He had been doing that kind of theology all his life: prodding AT&T to consider how their actions and policies affected individuals and society, preaching to universities on their responsibility to nurture leaders, writing the line, “The work exists for the person as much as the person exists for the work.”

As for the transcendent aspect of theology, that remained a private matter for Bob, not a question of belief in any specific doctrine. Revelation was ongoing, mediated through the quiet universe inside each person, and he remained ever content to stand in awe before the ultimate source 301of that revelation. In this sense, he was never a traditional theologian, nor did he claim to be. He always maintained that each person should be his or her own theologian.⁸

“Note on the Need for a Theology of Institutions” pulls together themes Bob had written about before, most of it embedded in his own “creed” that begins the paper.⁹

Greenleaf goes on to write that biblical theology is a “theology of persons” and that even “corporations get their legal status from the willingness of the courts to construe them as persons. . . I do not believe that the urgently needed fundamental reconstruction of our vast and pervasive structure of institutions can take place, prudently and effectively, without a strong supporting influence from the churches. And I doubt that churches as they now stand, with only a theology of persons to guide them, can wield the needed influence.”¹¹

One bishop wrote Bob, “What does occur to me as being very much needed is some work not only on a ‘new’ theology of institutions but some delving into what the ‘old’ theology of institutions is or has been.”¹² The bishop was onto something. Theology, at least in its traditional sense, must begin somewhere, with a tradition or at least a statement of belief that is useful. “I believe in God” is a beginning, and so is, “I don’t believe in your God, but here is what I do believe.” Those who have taken seriously Greenleaf’s call for established theologians to develop a theology of institutions have found it necessary to work from some tradition.¹³ While Greenleaf called for a theology of institutions, there will likely be many such theologies if the call is taken seriously, each from its own tradition. In the end, Greenleaf’s concern was that places of worship take concrete steps to prepare followers for servant-based action in organizations.

Bob Lynn also put Greenleaf in touch with a universe of outstanding men and women who were doing ministry differently. Two of them were Hoosiers—Phil Amerson and Phil Tom—who related their faith traditions to grass-roots service in local institutions through direct action and trusteeship. Rev. Phil Amerson was a United Methodist minister in Evans-ville. He and his wife Elaine founded Patchwork Ministries, which asked participants to sign a covenant committing themselves to the support of ministries in the nearby inner city neighborhood. Decision-making was by consensus, and leadership was shared. Phil Tom was the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian, an inner city in Indianapolis. People who attended Westminster were expected to participate in community boards in order to make Indianapolis a more serving community. Along with their doctrinal ministries, both churches were, in effect, training trustees. For years Bob had known Gordon Cosby, founder of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D. C., and had stayed in touch with that remarkable serving institution since its founding. These real-life laboratories proved that it was possible for churches to perform a leavening function in their communities. Churches could train people in the arts of persuasion, primus inter pares and consensus decision-making, listening, and the other skills that are necessary to servants.

In 1982, Bob put all these influences together in an essay called The Servant as Religious Leader. In that work, he offered more careful definitions of religion and theology. Religion is “any influence or action that re-binds or recovers alienated persons as they build and maintain serving institutions, or that protects normal people from the hazards of alienation and gives purpose and meaning to their lives.” Theology is “the rational inquiry into religious questions supported by critical reflection on communal concerns.”¹⁴ Few theologians would agree with these definitions, because they make no mention of God, or of the nature of the “purpose and meaning” toward which one strives. Greenleaf insisted that religious leaders should “strengthen the hands of the strong by helping them, while they are young, to acquire a vision of themselves as effective servants of society,”¹⁵ and suggested that too many churches “have put too high a priority on preaching and too low a priority on being.”¹⁶ Churches and seminaries needed to be about the task of preparing people to lead, by persuasion and prophecy, through their churches and communities.

In the spring of 1982, Greenleaf sent The Servant as Religious Leader to a group of United Methodists for advance reading before he met with 303them about leadership in the church. The group included three bishops, three seminary presidents, assorted lay people, and church bureaucrats. They caucused on the essay before Bob met with them at a Ramada Inn near Crosslands. Bob wrote Jan Erteszek about what happened next.

Greenleaf continued trying to find language to make his point. In 1983, he published three essays, written over three years, under title of Seminary as Servant. In it, he completed the logic of his change model and the role of seminaries in it. Seminaries have the opportunity to provide strong leadership to churches, which provide it to individuals and operating institutions. And who controls seminaries? Trustees, of course.¹⁸ Seminaries should be engaged to develop servants and the skills that support effective servanthood in society.

Not many—if any—agreed with Greenleaf about the potential role of seminaries. Bob Lynn, who had the advantage of being a historian, thought Greenleaf was ignoring history.

“I thought the odds were totally against it,” said Mac Warford.

Whatever his thoughts about the theology of institutions, or the philosophy of seminary mission, Greenleaf had one down-home rule for all practicing ministers. “They should wait until they have something to say and then ring the bell and tell everybody to come.”²¹

_______

Bob was always fascinated to hear stories of how people were implementing his ideas. One day he got a call from a man named Bill Bottum in Ann Arbor, Michigan who said he just had to meet with him. Bill had been given some of Greenleaf’s essays and, after reading The Servant as Leader, told his secretary, “Find Greenleaf. So many of my other heroes died before I could meet them.”²² Bill was CEO of Townsend & Bottum (T&B), an international family of companies that specialized in constructing power generating plants. He was also a fellow seeker who, by the time he called Bob, had spent thirty years reflecting on the Sermon on the Mount and translating it into language that was accessible and useful for corporations. Before flying out to Crosslands for a visit, Bill sent Greenleaf some of his writings.

“I hadn’t been there five minutes before Bob said, ‘One thing I’d like to tell you is that I disagree with you about Gandhi. I think he was coercive and we ought to convince people by persuasion.’ Then he told me about John Woolman. We trusted and understood each other. It was like 305talking with an old high school classmate.”²³ Bill became a missionary for Bob’s work, passing out pamphlets to airline pilots, ministers, corporate moguls, and whomever he thought could benefit.

Bill was especially interested in primus inter pares as a governing model and asked Bob where he could go to see it in action. “In this country, I’m not sure,” said Bob, “but there are several places in Europe.” Bill launched into a series of experiments, ranging from eliminating executive parking spaces to establishing training on consensus decision-making through newly-formed councils. Every so often, Bob would call him up and ask, “How’s it going? Is that council working out?” That was when Bill realized that not all of Bob’s ideas were proven in the field, at least not in detail. Bill was helping to prove them, and they were not always successful!

In 1982, T&B was a juicy target for a hostile takeover, and Bill worried about the effect it could have on his employees. He spoke with Bob about it frequently, trying out creative ideas. Bill could only see one way to protect T&B: eliminate all common stock so there would be nothing for a raider to buy. Bottum transferred common stock to a “trusteed corporation” owned by the Townsend & Bottum Capital Fund, later the T&B Family of Companies. Mr. Bottum then had a company with no stock, no proprietor or partners, and a board of trustees that controlled the Capital Fund.²⁴ He did not do this to make money; he personally lost money on the deal. He did it to protect the business that nurtured its employees.

“We put the ‘promotion of servant leadership’ in as one of the bylaws for Townsend & Bottum Capital Fund,” said Bill, “but later a bank’s lawyers made us take it out, for fear we were going to commit ourselves to treating people humanely, I suppose. About that time I asked Bob if he thought we should have an age limit for trustees to serve on the board and he said, ‘Yes, seventy-five.’ It’s interesting that he was older than seventy-five at that time, so he gave me an answer that would have disqualified his own participation. He saw that as part of the life he was finished living. There were things appropriate to each stage of life.”²⁵

Bill Bottum eventually served on the Greenleaf Center Board, where he met another one of Bob’s memorable friends, Sister Joel Read, President of Alverno College, an all-women’s school in Milwaukee. Bob once called Sister Joel “a true servant-leader, even though she is not seen by everybody as that. She did a remarkable job of building that remarkable institution.”²⁶ For four years, from 1969 to 1972, Sister Joel and her 306colleagues engaged in intense discussion about how they could they assess and develop their young charges once they reached campus. Better assessment would lead to more effective education. They decided they wanted to evaluate “knowledge in action,” which meant evaluating people in situations close to the reality in which the knowledge was to be used. Pencil-and-paper tests would not suffice for such an ambitious goal.

In their quest for useful evaluation methods, they discovered AT&T’s assessment centers and were able to observe an assessment process. They realized that AT&T used assessments for identification; a person was either qualified or disqualified for hiring or promotion as a result of assessment. Alverno could not send unqualified prospects back to high school. What they needed was a developmental method of assessment, one that offered not only judgment but opportunities for growth. Along the way, one of the Alverno faculty members discovered Douglas Bray’s book Formative Years in Business and saw that it was dedicated to Robert K. Greenleaf. When they discovered that this was the same Greenleaf whose essays they had been reading, they traveled to Peterborough and spent many hours in conversation with Bob.

Eventually, with the help of four to five hundred volunteers, Alverno did create a novel assessment method to support “knowledge in action,” and many observers credit the school as a pioneer in assessment methods for higher education. “Oh, some would give us credit for that,” said Sister Joel. “Others don’t even know our name. It’s not something you copyright.”²⁷

Alverno invited Bob to the campus several times. The last time was by video, when he delivered the commencement address to the class of 1984 titled, Life’s Choices and Markers. In the preface to the printed version he wrote, “What I wanted to convey in twenty minutes… is that ideas nurture the human spirit that determines how one comes out of life, and that one chooses, among all the ideas one has access to, which will guide what one does with one’s opportunities. And that that choice is crucial.”²⁸

Bennett J. Sims, Episcopal Bishop of Atlanta, was another person who profited from knowing Robert Greenleaf’s writings and the man behind them. He had been a bishop for only two years when a friend from Harvard Divinity gave him Greenleaf’s little essay The Servant as Leader. The timing was providential, because Dr. Sims was struggling with the 307deeper meanings of leadership. He got in touch with Bob, who “gave me the direction and the way to lead by inclusion rather than dominance.”²⁹ His first impressions of Greenleaf were lasting ones.

Power was an ongoing concern with Bishop Sims. His own faith tradition gave him some power, but in the Episcopal Church in America, the bishop’s power is circumscribed by many American-style checks and balances. Two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were Anglican (Episcopalian), including James Madison, George Washington, and Patrick Henry. When the time came to draft the Protestant Episcopal Church’s constitution in 1789, its framers were not about to give bishops more power than they gave the U.S. President. Bishop Sims was forced to operate by persuasion, and he saw servant leadership as a restatement of the earliest ethic of the church, one that had been distorted over two millennia.

The Bishop’s views are laid out in detail in his gracefully written book Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium.³² He wished to recover the original truth implicit in the life and ministry of Jesus, to rescue the ser-vanthood of participation from the clutches of the imperialistic church. So he voluntarily gave up his power as a bishop, retired early, and started the308Institute for Servant Leadership in Hendersonville, North Carolina, where he holds classes and conferences.

Greenleaf thought the Institute was a noble idea but “would never fly.” “Actually,” said the Bishop, “he gave me a combination of encouragement and realism. Encouragement in the sense that he wanted me to do it, but he was realistic in predicting that it would have a very hard go. He had a very strong suspicion of the church as an institution.”³³

Bennett Sims once asked Bob the same question Bob Lynn asked him. “I wrote him and asked, ‘How can you advocate servanthood without it having a deeply spiritual base?’ He wrote back and said, ‘You can’t.’ So he was very clear about the fact that there is no way to do this apart from a belief structure, that this is the way that God works.”³⁴

Until his death, Bob remained an interested bystander in the Institute for Servant Leadership. “I talked to him from time to time,” recalled Bishop Sims. “He kept pressing me to develop a theology of institutions, and I told him I went way beyond that because I was working on the theology of the most basic institution—the universe. We joked about that. He said, ‘That’s too much. I’m talking about the practical stuff. You’re going off on a tangent.’ We had a very congenial relationship.”³⁵

_______

The 1980s were years of spirit writing for Bob. He wrote dozens of papers and short notes on the responsibilities of religious organizations, theology, and the life of the spirit so essential to a servant-leader. He authored five essays on spirituality-related topics, hosted scores of friends at Crosslands, and wrote hundreds of letters in which he wrestled with the ways people of faith and their institutions could inspirit society. He did not show all of these writings to friends. When many of his later manuscripts on religious leadership were published in the book Seeker and Servant in 1996, even Bob Lynn was stunned at their quantity and range.

Bob and Esther certainly had had a lifetime of exposure to varieties of religious thought: the Methodism of Bob’s childhood, attendance at Unitarian churches and the Ethical Culture Movement, many Sundays at Riverside Church in New York, membership in the Quakers, and exposure to the more cosmic systems of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. Ed Ouelette, Bob’s lifelong friend from Carleton, spoke frequently with Bob about the latest trends in theology, so he was not as uninformed as he would have had some believe. Bob and Esther had even looked into Buddhism.

Their son Newcomb, who became a practicing Buddhist, says, “I learned about Buddhism from my parents originally. They were very much into Allan Watts and D. T. Suzuki and others in the 1950s. At the time I thought it was sort of strange; nonetheless it was my first introduction to Buddhism.”³⁶ After Newcomb became a serious student of Buddhism, Bob told Ed Ouelette that he wanted to know more about it. In the summer of 1977, while Newcomb was working as a teacher at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Bob and Esther—ever the learners and adventurers—signed up for the Naropa Summer Institute and had a grand old time. Newcomb went on to write about and conduct workshops on the connections between Buddhism and servant-leadership, of which there are many.

At Crosslands, Bob spent long periods alone in quiet meditation. He considered meditation his most important “work” in his later years. One wonders: During those periods, what did he see that was unseeable, unspeakable, and unwriteable? Did he ever have the privilege, while he was alive, of entering into that mystery, that awe about which he spoke and wrote so often?