Know Your Story and Lead With It ─ The Power of Narrative in Clergy Leadership

Knowing your story is an essential component of effective leadership, but finding your story among the myriad narratives that fill your life isn't a simple task. Richard L. Hester and Kelli Walker-Jones have offered a path to finding your own story amid the powerful family and cultural narratives that may be obscuring your vision. The aim of this book is to show leaders how to explore their story of reality, tell it to other group members, and consider how it can be used as a resource for leadership. This narrative perspective holds that because there's always more than one story about a situation, we have choices about which story we will embrace. After more than six years working with groups of clergy, the authors have woven these stories together to create the fabric that is the backdrop of narrative clergy leadership. The book is an account of their pilgrimage. As you read you will have a sense that this is your pilgrimage, and it will encourage you into narrative ventures of your own.

Richard L. Hester is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project at Triangle Pastoral Counseling in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has previously served as a pastor and as a professor of pastoral theology in two theological schools. Kelli Walker-Jones, an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, is co-director of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project on which this book is based. She has also served as minister to several congregations and as associate director of field education and admissions at Duke University Divinity School.