A NON-ANXIOUS PRESENCE:
How a changing and complex world will create
a remnant of renewed Christian leaders
By Mark Sayers
Moody Publishers. 208 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978 0 802 428 578
That ours is a disorienting and confusing cultural moment is something few, if any, would dispute. That it creates challenges for church life, evangelisation and discipleship is, likewise, a widely held idea. Yet for all the agreement many of us have about those points there is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the moment’s confusion, no small amount of discord, division and rancour over how to respond to this moment.
The nature of our moment, described as a ‘gray zone’ by Mark Sayers in his essential new book A Non-Anxious Presence, is such that virtually all of us are floundering about in the dark, trying to find something steady to grasp, something on which our feet can find some kind of purchase.
The dark side of this uncertainty is not hard to see: it is the ideological capture endemic in much of the Western church today and, especially, on display in the American church. Here we see one group yoking itself to an increasingly explicit reactionary movement that sterilises the gospel by silencing any parts of it that would undermine right-wing conservatism. We also see a movement that would simply assimilate the teachings of Jesus into a broad progressivism that abandons orthodox notions of sex and gender, of authority, and of the human person, amongst other things. These are the errors. Fortunately, there are other options before us and for an articulation of one such option I can think of few better books than Sayers’s latest.
Sayers is a pastor in Melbourne, Australia. He was involved in various church-planting movements there that would overlap with ‘alternative worship’ movements or ‘emerging church’ movements elsewhere. Sayers learned virtually every good lesson one could learn from involvement in such spaces while also avoiding their excesses. It makes him a uniquely compelling voice who weaves together high-level cultural and technological analysis with a keen eye for how that analysis interfaces with questions of evangelisation and discipleship.
The problem
Sayers’s thesis, in short, is something like this: the 20th-century neoliberal consensus sustained by the Pax Americana is over. This consensus, with its emphasis on individual achievement and potential, our capacity, even duty, to self-designate ourselves as we encounter and civilise frontiers of various sorts, is at an end – and that’s largely for the good, since that consensus produced no small amount of anxiety. What has replaced it?
There are several ways of answering that. The world of institutions has been replaced by a world of digitally mediated networks, which is both far more brittle and moves much more quickly. The complicated world of the long 20th century that required efficiency to navigate has been replaced by a complex world which requires adaptability. And as our world becomes more inter-connected through these complex networks, we become more aware of our many conflicts with our neighbours and our own limitations and weaknesses, both of which lead to a heightened sense of anxiety and insecurity.
The antidote
What is the antidote? Enter ‘the non-anxious presence.’ What does that mean? Sayers, with an assist from Edwin Friedman: ‘We imagine that someone is suited to leadership because of their charisma, drive, intelligence, training, or achievements. Instead, Friedman argued that the most vital attribute to lead, especially in anxious human environments and systems, was a non-anxious presence. Thus, the leader’s chief tool of influence is their presence.’
It is the leader who offers a sense of calm wedded to sober judgment and shrewd direction that is elevated in a gray zone moment.
Sayers continues: ‘The fundamental principle was to remain present within the unhealthy environment while enduring the sabotage, backlash, and undermining that leaders inevitably face when trying to act as non-anxious presences in anxious social systems.’
The means
But doing this is, of course, dreadfully difficult. So how can it be done? Sayers spends the last portion of his book answering that question, but the abridged version is that non-anxious leaders recognise that wilderness seasons, such as the one we are currently in, are times of preparation for future growth:
‘To grow, and lead others into growth, you must abandon the myth that leading will always feel good. Comfort zones insulate us against growth; gray zones activate us into spiritual growth when we say yes to God’s invitation to grow with Him.’
In short, leaders operating in gray zones are being called into the wilderness by God to meet Him there, in a land that seems dry and barren. But it is there that God shapes the leaders who will sow seeds of renewal as a result of their encounter with God in the wilderness.
The key to renewal, then, is an openness to God’s voice, a response to His call to hear the gospel and repent, and a desire to follow where He leads us, accepting exile when that is His gift to us, but also knowing that hard ground is made holy by the presence of God.
Those of us who wish to avoid ideological capture will all benefit immensely from Sayers’s careful study of our moment, and would do well to heed his call to follow Christ outside the city gates, knowing that it is in exile that the seeds for a new world are first planted.
