For Abraham himself there is the promise that God will bless him and that he himself will be a blessing. This is what I wish to concentrate on for a little while: the leader as one who receives blessing in order to be a blessing and bless others.
Utterly central to this is the relationship with God. The life of faith might be seen as a dynamic, God-centred ecology of blessing. God is the source of all blessing, and then it circulates in all directions: God blesses us and all creation, we bless God, we bless each other, creation blesses God, we bless creation. To become a leader is to be blessed in particular ways, and each of our traditions has developed procedures through which we try to discern whether particular people are or are not blessed in ways that suit them to bear the responsibilities of leadership.
Perhaps part of our conversation might be about the different modes of discernment through which our traditions choose leaders — this has been one of the most controversial matters among Christians of different churches. God is the ultimate source of these blessings, but mostly they come through other people. The journey towards religious leadership usually leads through key relationships, often with parents, friends, spiritual guides and teachers. I wonder what your journeys have been like.
One way of looking at a chain is as a lineage of blessings being passed on across the generations. I am sure most of you could tell of people in such chains who have been formative for you and have been a blessing to you. This is what often gives the deepest motivation for taking on religious responsibilities: gratitude for the blessings received from others, kindling the desire in your turn to be a blessing.
I would go so far as to say that one requirement of being a religious leader is to be part of such a person-to-person lineage — we cannot be formed only through the internet, through books or even through being taught in classes. This evening in the Grand Mosque I will speakof the elements required for Christian theology to be wise and creative today, and all that will be said then is relevant to what is required for Christian leadership.
I take it for granted that Christian leaders need to be formed in those four aspects of good theology, and I will be interested to hear how far you think that these coincide with the essential areas in which Muslim leaders should be formed. So, first, Christian leaders should aim to be wise interpreters of scripture and tradition, understanding how to draw on the treasures of the past.
Second, therefore, they should also constantly engage in the present with God in prayer and with what is new in our changing world. The past is not to be simply repeated, and God is drawing people towards a future that is very different from the present.
So every day there are fresh discernments, judgements and decisions to be made about what in the contemporary world is to be rejected, what is to be welcomed, and what is to be criticised and transformed.
Fourth, the leader has to be able to communicate effectively, and so far as possible to listen attentively and to speak and write well. Those four requirements are not of a sort that can ever be fully met — a leader can always communicate better, think more wisely and creatively, engage more deeply with God and with our world, and understand scripture and tradition more adequately.
So more important than having actually achieved them is the dedicated, passionate desire for them, which I name the desire for wisdom.
That is the foundation for the most important thing of all: the leader being a blessing in each situation. Indeed, I am not completely happy with the concept of leadership itself, which is probably best understood as a form of responsible and accountable service, inseparable from being a good follower.
But what I have in mind is far broader than that and not only specific to Christianity. When a community is deliberating over a course of action and the leaders agree to it, this can best be seen as them giving their blessing to it. That is different from having thought it up or being a main supporter of it or being responsible for carrying it out. Likewise, the withholding of blessing rejects or delays following a particular course. The same is true when individuals seek guidance.
Most Christian leaders do not have power to enforce spiritual, ethical or political advice. Their power is better seen as the power to grant or withhold their blessing.
It is perhaps in the matter of whether to support particular people, groups and causes in the wider society that these blessings arouse most concern — one thinks of the great importance attached in American elections to the backing of religious leaders.
A great deal in our world, therefore, can be affected by the blessing given by those with religious responsibility. This is evident in shaping their own communities, in guiding individuals, and in their contribution to the wider society. It is also worth remembering what I called the second type of religious leader - the one who is not the public face of his or her community but whose responsibility is exercised in government, business, education or some other sphere of society.
For all of them their vocations as leaders might be summed up as centring on questions of whether to bless, who to bless, what to bless, when to bless, how to bless and what content a blessing should have. I also do this work believing that my generation inherited the unfinished business of the civil rights struggle, which includes the ongoing struggle to protect the right to vote as a sacred and vital one and in the process help transform our democracy.
At their best, faith communities often serve as the conscience of the state and a source of resilient hope—providing both moral vision and organizing infrastructure to protect the most vulnerable and empower the most marginalized. Sheila Katz is the CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women NCJW , which is recruiting volunteers to call friends and people of voting age to register them to vote and is mobilizing its followers to ask Congress to prioritize expanding voter access in November.
There are countless examples of Judaism calling on us to promote justice, equality, righteous work, and the recognition that every person has inherent dignity. My faith grounds me in the fight to keep our courts fair, expand voter protections, support reproductive justice and access to abortion, and ensure that religious freedom is only used as a tool to protect and never to discriminate against already vulnerable communities.
People of faith have a proud and storied history of advocacy and activism in this country when it comes to fighting for a free and just society we all believe in.
E—Mobilizing, Organizing, Registering and Educating. It is also committed to challenging voter suppression and protecting the right to vote. Theoharis is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA and has spent more than two decades organizing with low-income communities in the United States.
I was raised to see that faith must be linked to doing justice and holding those in power accountable to the people. Throughout history, it has been movements led by those most impacted by injustice and poverty, with faith communities and moral leaders as standard-bearers involved, that have fundamentally transformed society.
Mohamed Gula is the national organizing director for Emgage, which educates and empowers Muslim Americans. Gula runs its nationwide campaign to turn out 1 million Muslim voters in The Million Muslim Votes campaign is meant to bring together Muslim communities in support of the largest voter mobilization effort in history. In addition to his previous experience as an organizer and advocate for social justice, Gula co-founded the Islamic Center of Peace in Dayton, Ohio. I am driven by the idea that the prophets were community organizers.
They energized their communities to become more active members of society. I also believe that faith communities are important in the work of building a more inclusive democracy because they provide a moral framework that revolves around building community and promoting justice and understanding that goes beyond partisan lines and the political tribalism that has created the division we see today. Under her leadership, Voto Latino has already directly registered hundreds of thousands of new voters and is in the process of achieving its goal of registering , voters in the election cycle.
She told the authors:. Equity and justice are driving principles of my faith, and they inform my work for a more just world. Giving someone agency to determine who represents their most basic needs and addressing systemic inequities allows us to strive for fairness. It is this motivation I have in making sure people are adequately represented and cared for and that no one is left behind or discarded when it comes to matters of equity and accessibility.
We all have an obligation to care and look out for each other. That belief is driven by my Catholic faith but also my faith in people. Amy Sullivan is strategy director at Vote Common Good and the founder of This Is My Story, an initiative to empower and equip Christian women to make voting an act of faith. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Sullivan is a veteran journalist who has covered religion and politics for Time , Yahoo! Toxic theology has shaped our politics for too long, and women will be the ones to disrupt its hold on voters.
Faith communities understand the power elections and politics have on the common good. They are respectively based in Oakland and Los Angeles.
At their best, faith communities are engines of liberation and revolutionary love. It will be too much to expect from the currently popular interfaith dialogue movements that they will eventually resolve the fundamental theological differences between different faiths.
No, this is not going to happen unless different religions unequivocally decide to withdraw their truth claims about their own fundamental beliefs. What we can realistically expect from the ongoing dialogues between the leaders and followers of different faiths is a better understanding of each other, an environment conducive to peaceful coexistence, an articulation of common values and concerns and, above all, a willingness among leaders of different faiths to work together for issues and causes that are common to all religions; that is, helping the poor and the disadvantaged, eliminating poverty, fighting crimes and drug addiction among the youth, strengthening the institution of family, fighting domestic violence, protecting our physical environment from pollution, creating political space for policies that promote social justice for all, and fighting together against ethnic, linguistic, religious and sectarian biases, prejudices, discriminations and conflicts.
This is spirituality in its most essential, fundamental and urgent sense. The modern world has presented us with issues that were simply inconceivable for humanity a century ago —— or even a few decades ago: economic and cultural globalization, new technologies of communication and information dissemination, the emergence of social media intersecting the boundaries of the private and the public, global warming and environmental decay, introduction of the weapons of mass destruction in warfare.
These are some of the most important issues that have definite ethical and moral implications which the religious leaders cannot afford to ignore. Religious leaders today are naturally being called upon not only to respond to these issues but also to provide leadership to their followers on how to cope with them. Faith leaders in several traditions have been seriously engaged in articulating their positions on these complex issues in recent decades. Unfortunately, however, Muslim religious leaders have lagged behind in addressing these issues and formulating policy positions from an Islamic perspective.
There are some individual efforts in this regard but these efforts have been mostly haphazard, inadequate and often without a deeper understanding of the complexity of the issues. No Islamic religious leader or, for that matter, any religious leader in the modern world can afford to remain oblivious of these issues and still claim to be relevant. It is, therefore, imperative that our madrasas and other institutions of higher Islamic learning should incorporate a well-informed study of these issues in their curriculum so that their graduates, in their future careers as religious and community leaders, can deal with them effectively from the perspective of an Islamic worldview.
The modern world has also brought into sharp focus the question of the relationship between the state and the church, or politics and religion. I will not go into a detailed discussion here about the specific historical experience of Western societies that eventually culminated in the separation of the matters of religion from the affairs of the state.
However, a few pertinent points in this connection do need our attention. First, the specificity of the historical experience of Western societies regarding the church-state relationship cannot — and should not —— be elevated to a universal norm.
Different societies have undergone through a variety of experiences in negotiating the balance of forces of both established religions and the state. Even in the Western societies we witness today a wide variety of arrangements that define the relationships between the church and the state. Second, while in most Western societies a sharp analytical —— and legal-constitutional —— distinction does exist between the private religious and the public state spheres, in actual practice certain developments in recent years have not only blurred this distinction but have tended to erase the boundaries between the private and the public.
Third, the political, ideological and intellectual environment in which religion and politics —— as distinct from the church and the state —— were seen as strangers to each other is changing.
This growing interpenetration of religion and politics even in those Western societies that subscribe to the idea of the separation of church and the state opens up new avenues of both a challenge and an opportunity for religious leaders: the challenge is how to articulate a genuinely moral position on issues of public policy without getting bogged down in partisan politics, and the opportunity is to reaffirm the relevance of religious values to the problems of public life in the modern world.
These challenges and responsibilities for religious leaders take a totally different dimension, however, in many Muslim societies where the state is not a neutral actor in matters of religion; in fact, it embraces Islam as a religion of the state.
As a consequence, the state apparatus is directly involved — in degrees that differ from state to state — in providing religious education, managing religious endowments, administering Muslim family laws, operating religious courts and, in some cases, implementing Islamic criminal laws. Among the Muslim societies that have functional democracy, there exist multiple Islamic political groups, headed by both the lay Muslim leaders and the traditional ulama. The role of Islamic religious leaders becomes especially critical in societies where Muslims are a minority.
They have to play a dual role here: to provide leadership in religious and social affairs to their own community, and convey the interests and concerns of Muslims to the majority community and its leaders. Tell us whether you accept cookies We use cookies to collect information about how you use the National Careers Service.
Set cookie preferences. There is a problem. How to become Explore the different ways to get into this role. How to become a religious leader You can get into this job through: a university course an apprenticeship applying directly University You may need a degree or postgraduate award for some leadership positions.
Entry requirements You'll usually need: 2 to 3 A levels, or equivalent, for a degree a degree in any subject for a postgraduate course More Information equivalent entry requirements student finance for fees and living costs university courses and entry requirements. Entry requirements Employers will set their own entry requirements.
More Information guide to apprenticeships. For many religions the process might include: study at a college or religious training centre intensive study of your faith's teachings and writings time alone in contemplation or meditation experience of working with people in the community mentoring and supervision from an experienced leader of your religion In some religions, there are rules on who can become a leader and what duties they can carry out.
Career tips Becoming a religious leader is a serious commitment that can be seen as a calling as much as a career. What it takes Skills and knowledge You'll need: knowledge of philosophy and religion sensitivity and understanding customer service skills leadership skills the ability to work well with others patience and the ability to remain calm in stressful situations the ability to use your initiative knowledge of teaching and the ability to design courses to be able to carry out basic tasks on a computer or hand-held device.
What you'll do Day-to-day tasks Your day-to-day duties will depend on your faith. You may: pray and study your religion encourage commitment to the faith lead regular religious services or ceremonies conduct services and ceremonies for religious festivals, holy days and events such as births, marriages and deaths explain the meaning of your faith's teachings educate people who are converting to your faith support people at difficult times in their lives represent your faith within the community be a role model for your followers meet representatives of other faiths and communities fundraise and do admin tasks.
You may need to wear a uniform.
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