Letter from Emma, Healing Centered Leadership

We are identifying a new generation of religious and faith leaders to be healing-centered leaders. This week’s letter to the future comes from Auburn’s President, Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson. Read her vision for healing-centered leaders below.

Friends of Auburn,

What is Healing Centered Leadership?

Healing ascends with truth-telling,
a look in the mirror,
a courageous and honest consideration
of the strength of one’s internal scaffolding
a check of one’s deepest values against one’s life.

Is this the world we want?

The one where bullet-ridden classrooms daisy-chain the land, generations of student-survivors carry remembrances of fallen friends, powerful thoughts and prayers drop on cue, and the beat goes on?

Never a nod to the national birth defects that have marked us – the violent taking of lands, the enslavement of human beings, the degradation of generations.

Is this who we want to be?

Practiced in showing up to battlefields whacking deep-rooted problems with hand shovels?

“Hey, what’s that stacked out of the way on the sidelines over there? Your spiritual resources? What will inform your struggle, your action, your being? Are you shelving the power to even imagine yourself included in your own hopes?” (John Thatamanil on the exhaustion and depletion experienced by those fighting for justice without spiritual grounding. Shared on Twitter, February 2023.)

Loving justice but worn out and empty? Working until the light flickers out? Disconnected? Never supported for the long haul, never funded to win.

That hunger for internal transformation is carried into our day-to-day efforts to transform the world.

Down may fall the barriers to equitable healthcare, housing, employment, education, opportunities, and the plethora of injustices that break our hearts and plague our people. But healing arises only in the transformation of our fears, our scarcity, our division, our distrust, our isolation, and our alienation. Transforming values, spiritualities, stories, theologies, and healing diseased roots with the tools of trust, vision, wholeness, and humane relationships – that’s the work of healing-centered leadership. (Shawn A. Ginwright, “Healing Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation.”)

Building and leading with love.

Transforming ourselves as the world is transformed.

Healing-centered leaders invite the people to heal. Healing-centered leaders rehearse new stories among the people. We tell and instigate the re-telling of old stories.

We mourn, lament, and create space to feel and attend to the weight we all carry from the things that have been done in our names. We know that truth hurts and can be weaponized. We remind the people that another world is wholly possible because it is wholly possible for us to be more than the greatest credible threat to our future.

We hear the people when they tell us that our future is still being born. We are bound to one another, holding a vision that inspires others to hold possibility for healing, too.

Calling all community-building, divide-bridging, justice-pursuing, and healing-centered leaders to be grounded, equipped, and connected, and to lead with love.

We are enough.

We have the power to dismantle the heavy artillery we have aimed at each of our futures. We can withdraw our precious cooperation from the powers of death. We can build legacies of care. We can imagine a more perfect union, a more just and joyous world, and a healed planet. We can gather up our peoples to go on a world-changing journey to a place none of us can go alone. We’ll build each other’s courage to be healers.

We’ll make wholeness and justice for children irresistible and compelling in our lives.

Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson

President, Auburn Theological Seminary