Servant Leadership

Last week I had the opportunity to sit in on the final presentations of students who took part in the Butler (University) Summer Institute.  This year there were 29 young scholars, representing every college on campus and a wide variety of majors, who spent over two months researching under the direction of a member of the faculty.  Many of them will take that summer research and turn it into either a departmental or university honors thesis.  As I have told several people since BSI came to a close, it was by far one of the most enjoyable (and varied) academic "conferences" I have been to in a very long time.

For the purposes of this little blog of mine though, one of the presentations stood out.  It was on servant leadership in the United Methodist Church by Brittney Stephan, a rising senior at Butler.  Brittney has been interning with a local congregation (with the approval of the Indiana annual conference), studying the topic of servant leadership (for more, see the following) and what both laity and clergy mean by the term.

Like the other presentations, it was interesting and well done.  Perhaps it struck a chord with me though because of my work on the Mainline.  While I did not look at servant leadership, the idea that there might be a disconnect between the different levels of a denomination (top level bureaucracy, clergy, laity) over terms, ideas, or pronouncements was hardly surprising.  That there has not been more study of these kinds of issues is surprising.  Perhaps in the future, there will be.

"Set our hearts at liberty"

My friend and fellow historian, Thomas Kidd, wrote earlier this week about his "top five forgotten Founders," a timely and topical post to be sure, since the United States celebrated the 238th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th.  And though I was on vacation (and doing a little research for my next book project), I was thinking about writing about one of my favorite forgotten founders, Francis Hopkinson--signer of the Declaration from New Jersey, member of Christ Church Episcopal in Philadelphia, lawyer, writer, and first federal judge of what became the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.




His story is an interesting one.  His home was raided by British troops (but an officer, or so the story goes, refused to allow it to be burned to the ground because of Hopkinson's impressive library), he was an advocate of the Constitution, and though he died shortly after assuming the federal bench, his son Joseph Hopkinson was later appointed to the same position, and enjoyed a long tenure as a district court judge.

But, I changed my mind.  Perhaps it was because our vacation had taken us to Walt Disney World (where there was little time and even less inclination, to write a blog post).  It was not as though we lacked for patriotic stimulus, Disney has maybe the best fireworks displays for the Fourth of July (which tops their usual fireworks) you will ever see and hear.



It was very special to get to experience it with my family.  But it was also fun to get to witness it along side with thousands of others, not just from the United States, but from around the world.  And that got me thinking about the patriotic message that Disney was proclaiming and what it meant not just to me, but to all those other people--in particular for those who were not American citizens.  What did they make of all our red, white, and blue patriotism? 

I don't have an answer for that question, but I was pondering it a bit this morning while waiting for church to start.  While flipping to the first hymn, I paused for a moment on Charles Wesley's "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," where I came upon the line that offered up the title for this post: "set our hearts at liberty."  And that got me thinking about what those Founding Fathers (whether forgotten or not) meant by "liberty."  It does not have the same meaning as "equality" (the great buzz word of both modern America and the French Revolution) not even akin to "equality under the law" since they knew laws might change.  It does not have the same meaning as "freedom,"with notions of doing whatever one wants.  No, I think when the Founders spoke of liberty I think more often than not they meant it was the ability (indeed the responsibility) to do what was right.  It came with a set of implied moral precepts that today we either to often take for granted or don't even recognize.

It is true, of course, that Americans don't always live up to the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that Hopkinson signed.  It is good to recall them, and not just on July 4th.  We can only hope that God will continue and continually "set our hearts at liberty," while also offering up the prayer included in Katharine Lee Bates hymn "America the Beautiful," may "God mend thine every flaw."