Fueling Social Change Through Spirituality, with Reverend Kathleen McShane

Join me and my guest, Reverend Kathleen McShane, as we explore one of my all-time favorite questions: "What occurs when spirituality serves as the driving force for social change?" Kathi introduces us to the Changemaker Initiative, a potent program designed for laypeople that harnesses the power of compassion and the example of Jesus as a changemaker to inspire social entrepreneurs in their quest for change. She also delves into her upcoming book, "Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire," which takes a critical look at traditional, masculine, pyramid-style leadership models and paves the way for innovative leadership approaches.

Kathi imparts profound insights about the two indispensable qualities a leader must possess, especially in the wake of a global crisis: humility and curiosity. Finally, we discuss the importance of self-compassion and self-care for leaders, recognizing them as inherent and unavoidable steps in all impactful and influential change-making efforts.

For Kathi's full bio, read here.
The Changemaker Initiative: https://thechangemakerinitiative.org/
Kathi's upcoming book (co-written with Elan Babchuck):  https://www.pickingupthepiecesbook.org/

Thank you for listening to Women Rise. Sign up for my distribution list so you never miss an episode. Learn more about the Women Rise leadership program for women change-makers on my website. If you'd like to be considered to be interviewed on this podcast, please write me directly or take this survey to find out if you're a good fit.

Transcript

Claire: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Women Rise, a podcast about women changemakers that explores the emergence of a new leadership paradigm, which calls us to lead from within. I'm your host, claire Molinares, and I live and work on the island of Corsica, in the south of France. I'm a holistic coach and therapist. I teach and facilitate developmental programs for conscious women changemakers, helping them move from depleted and disconnected to resourced and interconnected. Every week I meet with other women leaders and we explore the inner game of leadership and how, in this time of emergency, we are being called to our unique self-emergence to co-create a world that works for everyone. Hello and welcome to Women Rise.

Claire: 0:53

I have the pleasure today to welcome Reverend Kathleen McShane on this episode of Women Rise. Kathy is a serial intrapreneur. She's always pushing the edges of faith-based institutions and organizations toward more creativity, risk-taking and attentiveness to the unbounded, liberating movement of the spirit. Kathy co-founded the Changemaker Initiative, which began in Silicon Valley and is now a small national movement of churches committed to empowering laypeople to become compassion-driven changemakers. That work has led her toward multiple projects that are reimagining leadership for a church faithful and agile enough to find its place in God's hope for creation, always just beyond our view. Kathy is also the co-author of a book co-written with Elon Bapchuk, picking Up the Pieces Leadership After Empire, which I can't wait to hear about. Kathy, welcome to Women Rise.

Kathi: 2:02

Thank you. It's good to be with you, Claire.

Claire: 2:08

In our short discussion while preparing this podcast, we came to a shared realization that we both shared a belief, a core belief, that the heart of changemaking lies in strong spiritual faith, and I'd love for you to tell us how you came to this conclusion in your journey.

Kathi: 2:34

My life has been a windy road, so there are many places where I have turned toward this understanding or consciousness, I think, but I can tell you about a few of them. My first career was as a lawyer, and I was one of those lawyers who was regularly unhappy in my professional life. But every few years I would cycle through a time where I thought I don't think I want to do this work for the rest of my life. It was always interesting and it was successful in many ways that we measure that in our culture, but for me it was not deeply satisfying work, and so I would cycle through times when I thought I just have to do some different job. I now look back on that time and recognize what I was feeling as spiritual longing. It was for something deeper than a different kind of job, but it sort of exhibited itself in my life as that restlessness and dissatisfaction with my work. So that's one of the ways from my own life I have seen that spiritual hunger sort of looks different on the surface than sometimes we think it's supposed to look like. And that often happens, doesn't it? That what's deep, most deep inside of us comes out sideways looking like something else. So that's one thing.

Kathi: 4:06

I also spent some time doing administration at a theological school where students came to be prepared Sometimes for ministry in a church, sometimes for deepening their own grounding in a religious or theological tradition, and many of those students came out of a commitment to social justice work. They'd been activists perhaps in their 20s and they found themselves burned out in not very many years, and so I developed sort of a hypothesis in that work that I have seen sort of affirmed again and again that what we need in order to sustain the good and purposeful work we think our lives are about is deep, deep rootedness in and what I think is really a larger story than our own internal personal sense of purpose is really often not enough to carry us. If we want our work to be long and persistent and committed to something, we need to ground our work in a larger story, and I think that's what both religion and spirituality are about.

Claire: 5:31

Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I came to the same conclusion in my work with the changemakers as well. I saw so many women burn out because they were fighting for change without being rooted in a deeper source of being in a deeper story, in a larger story, as you say. And it's interesting how both the narrative in which we ground and the source from which that narrative is rooted provides the energy, the fire or changemaking. And when that is lacking, there is burnout because it's impossible to fight for change. And even that word is reflective of a distorted narrative. We don't fight for change, we act for change, we live for change. Yeah, so there's so much to say about that. But yes, I recognize I shared that perspective with you that being grounded in a narrative that can grasp the whole impulse for change comes from deep sense of injustice. And when we look at it and follow it all the way to its source, it's impossible not to come to a bigger narrative than our narrative. Yes, yes.

Claire: 6:52

In our lifetime. Life is not fair.

Kathi: 6:55

Yes, and I think for me, coming from the Christian religious tradition, I also the narrative is about sort of an equally powerful, more powerful, perhaps parallel force in the universe. That is about goodness and that the impulse that we have toward justice, as you say, and toward activism is actually it is not mine alone. Right, I don't have to carry this. It is sort of tapping into a movement for creativity and justice and goodness that is already at work in the universe.

Claire: 7:34

Yeah, and here you say that my heart can rest in that larger story. And regardless of whether I'm Christian or from any other faith, it's not the best. The point is that field for goodness, that field of truth, that field of justice is so much bigger than any religion.

Kathi: 7:54

It is so much bigger. I've come to think of my own attachment to my religious tradition, as it is the story among many that gives. The particularities of that narrative are what are valuable, useful, familiar to me in making meaning of my life and sort of embedding my story as part of and as you say, it's so much bigger than that one tradition. Right, the movement in the universe is big, it's immense and way beyond our comprehension. I think for me it has had value to find the story that most makes sense of my life. It's a story I've known, it has its place.

Claire: 8:45

It's like being identified to a culture, to a country or to a certain language. It all has its uniqueness and its flavor, and there is value in that deep value. Yes, it's a fact. When we don't have any roots, in attachment to any of that, it might be more difficult to find one's source.

Kathi: 9:11

I absolutely agree, claire, and it also strikes me as a necessary humility in us to recognize that we can't think big enough in universal truths, right, we're just not capable of that, and to imagine that we are is to sort of make ourselves, to try struggle really unnecessarily to make ourselves bigger than our humanness, right? So if I can attach myself to a story and also, I think, to understand that I am not making this up from scratch as I go, I am walking in other people's footsteps, there is relief and rest in that. That allows me then to have enough energy and sustenance for what I need to live my everyday life in a way that I hope is generous and loving and all those things. I want it to be kind.

Claire: 10:19

Yeah, and it can also fuel your activism as a changemaker. When things don't work as fast or as well as we want to see them, and in a world where we both know how complicated it is to drive change and the increasing complexity of all the life-threatening crisis that we are facing, our activism needs to be grounded in such a deeper source such that we can carry on the work.

Kathi: 10:53

And not have to be heroic about it. Yes, we are part, and it's taken me years I think actually of aging and growth and all those things that come with getting older and doing this work for a long time to know I am not uniquely responsible for making this work change.

Claire: 11:14

That is so important. I love that we are coming to similar conclusion from such different angles. None of us is uniquely responsible for driving the change. We just were responsible for doing what's ours to do right.

Claire: 11:29

And that illusion that I have to do it alone is such a trick of the ego because that's actually a good excuse not to even start Exactly. It's not so big that you know who am I to do it, or it's a sure journey to burnout and despair and unhappiness and failure. So my observation of working with women and helping them rest in a source I call that source, so I don't call it God, but just a very neutral term Women will rest in source. We're all part of that same oneness, and so the responsibility to drive the change does not rest in me. I can rest in source and with source I can do my part and you do your part, and I trust others to do their part. And so that's such a relief when one can not just understand this with their mind but actually embody that sensation of resting back in source and that can carry a long way.

Kathi: 12:37

Yes, it can. And it also makes change making possible for everyone. You know we started this change maker initiative work really for people who see their faith, and particularly a Christian faith, as a source of activism, of sort of passion and activism in the world. What we realized quickly was that that sounds really good. It's very appealing to people who are, who have energy, youth, you know, physical capacity, you know, and initiative, something that they want to do. But what does it look like for someone in their 80s to be a compassion driven changemaker in the world? Or someone who is busy raising children or who has, you know, many different cares in the world?

Kathi: 13:37

And I read in a book by a theologian named Gregory Ellison a story about from his growing up, about a conversation he had with an aunt of his. He said from a very young age, I want to change the world. And his aunt said to him I don't know how you change the world, but I can tell you you can change the three feet around you. And I quote that often to say we are all capable of changing the three feet around us and it is enough for us to participate in this movement for change in the world If that is all we're doing, we don't have to feel incapable because of the constraints of our lives. Right, those two are part of our work in the world. We just have to have to live in, whatever arena we're living in, whatever the size of and scope of our responsibility as people who are free to bring newness and hope and change into the world.

Claire: 14:47

It's a change of perspective. It really is. Can you tell me more about the book that you are about to publish, because I think it has to do with what you just talked about about how, by learning to lean into what's mine to do and trusting that there is a larger movement for change that it can be part of, regardless of how much power I have to change, the collective change happens by me entering this dance rather than being focused on my power.

Kathi: 15:22

Yes, yes, a dance is a great way to think about it, because I think it's being focused not only on my power, but that everyone else has this power too, and as leaders, it is. As a leader, it is my responsibility to nurture and bless really other people's power. We start from that in the book and again the title is Picking up the Pieces Leadership After Empire. We start from this image of a pyramid which has this very solid, stable, triangular shape to it. It's why we like pyramids. Right, they don't go anywhere. We think about the pyramids in Egypt that have been there for thousands of years, immovable. We've adopted in Western culture that same model for almost every organization religious, governmental, institutional, business. Think about it. Almost every organizational chart looks like a pyramid. Right, there's room for only a small number of voices, maybe one at the very top, and then, as the pyramid gets wider at the bottom and there are more people at the very bottom levels, the power just seeps out a little bit at a time, so that in the middle and lower sections of the pyramid people have very little power or, say, or agency in setting direction. They're not invited to use gifts that they bring. What they do is very circumscribed and limited, and that's all we want from them.

Kathi: 17:09

We're arguing in this book. My co-author is a rabbi who is 30 years, almost younger than me, and so we get this millennial, very culturally savvy young rabbi with an MBA and me as a baby boomer retiring Christian minister. We together sifted through not only our own experience in religious organizations, but we do a number of interviews with people who are trying to lead differently and really are arguing for a different structure of organization, where leaders are about inviting others into their own contributions of power and agency and voice in the way we lead. We call it mosaic leadership, but it's a more generous model of leadership. The reason we call it mosaic is we trace the story of Moses through the wilderness journey and the story of the Exodus.

Kathi: 18:15

Moses who, historically, we talk about as one of the great leaders of the world, but he grew up in an Egyptian court. He learned how to be a leader from Pharaoh, who sat at the very top of that pyramid and didn't let anybody else do anything, and he was like that too until he had really hit 40 years in the wilderness, just like his Israelite people did, and he got bumped up against and put down and failed over and over again before he finally learned that his job as the leader was to bring out the best in everyone else there, to invite them to choose for themselves and to make decisions for themselves and to have fullness of life and agency. And so we talk about that as the evolution of Moses as a leader and honestly, maybe I'm projecting because it traces my own journey as a leader. That's beautiful.

Kathi: 19:18

I think for much of my life in leadership I also adopted the norms of the culture and I'll say male norms, right, I thought I had to be the person in the room who knew more than anybody else if I was the leader and I could do anybody else's job if I were asked right. And there is a humility that has come with aging more consciousness of the mistakes I've made, more willingness to let others sort of take the lead at some time. It's like it's the dance that you mentioned earlier.

Claire: 19:57

Yeah, well, I love what you say. There's a few words that come to mind. One is collective leadership versus individual leadership, pyramidal leadership, a more masculine model of leadership, so this collective leadership, which leverages the unique gifts of everyone in the organization, and so, of course, that would lead to a different reality.

Claire: 20:21

Yes, and in these times where we're really hitting on the limits of what pyramidal leadership can bring us, there's definitely an invitation by reality to be more creative with our leadership. So and I love what you say about how you came to it through your own mistakes, through playing the game that culture has taught you, and you probably were a great leader in that old model. I'm sure you were, but you had the humility to question where what this one is leading to, and I think humility is a huge and important quality for a leader.

Kathi: 21:00

Yes, I do too, and I think for me, especially in the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, I've really come to think that the two most important qualities probably for everyone, but certainly for a leader are humility and curiosity. And it's just this willingness to look and say I don't understand that completely, this is different than what I know. So what is it? Rather than to impose my sense of order and certainty and stability on the organization I lead, or the people around me, or the world in general, yeah, curiosity is the quality of being open and having one's cup empty.

Kathi: 21:47

Yes.

Claire: 21:49

I think I had a question about your change initiative programs regarding the participants in the program. Were they all people of faith already?

Kathi: 22:02

Yeah, we started in a church that I led in Silicon Valley. The idea for it started as I looked at these people in my congregation who were working in the tech field and their lives were all about making impact in the world, big impact, and that's what they wanted for themselves and for their children to do, things that made a difference in the world. And there they were, in church, right, so they were people who had some quality of faith in their lives, but those two things were largely disconnected from one another. Right, their faith wasn't what made them have impact in the world, and their impact in the world didn't really require their faith. It's like we hadn't I'm going to say the church religion, christianity, had not made a connection that made sense to those people. So I was familiar with the work of social entrepreneurs already the organization Ashoka, which was one of the first social entrepreneurship organizations in the United States and I knew that when they talk about innovators for the common good, change makers in the world, they think that the first and most important quality that they can see from an early age in those people is empathy, the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes. Well, christianity's word for empathy is compassion and I am pretty sure Jesus was a compassion driven change maker.

Kathi: 23:37

So the change maker initiative started with a project, a one year partnership between the church I led and Ashoka. Seeing, what could we learn about how you actually make change in the world from social entrepreneurs who know how to make change in the world? The church doesn't? And what if that work were deeply grounded in the stories of compassion that are in the center of our religious tradition, the stories of Jesus? So we did that work.

Kathi: 24:11

For a year we invited into a fellowship 25 people. They ranged in age from 11 to 74. They were not, by and large, people of deep faith. We chose people who had kind of been at the edge of the church for a long time, like they were quite sure they wanted to do church. Maybe they would did it if they had time and it worked for them. But they really had not found what they were looking for in church.

Kathi: 24:38

And we said to them, to each of these people, what do you see in the world that is not working, in the place you work or where you go to school, or in your family or your neighborhood? And what is that wanting to make change that you are passionate about, and then we made that their project and we asked them to think about that work as if they were a compassion driven changemaker like Jesus. So it's a combination of design, principles and, again, deep immersion in these stories of compassion, and it was the most transformative work I've ever done in the church. So I think of that work now as almost like a new translation of Christianity, for this time, and certainly in that place and in Silicon Valley.

Kathi: 25:34

I don't know that it would work everywhere. We have now received foundation funding to experiment with it all over the United States and it is working slow. It's slow build as a movement. But I back to your question. I really think it is not necessarily for only deeply religious people. It's about empowering people to see that they too can become changemakers and that the work can be inspired and sustained by a religious narrative, as you and I were talking about earlier.

Claire: 26:14

One of the things that I learned in working with women and helping them ground their changemaking in something bigger than themselves was that if I could help them turn around the same compassion they had for the world, turn it around towards themselves, that initial move of tapping into a field of compassion and turning it around, that move is in itself a huge leverage, Because often activists feel compassion for the world but they haven't learned to feel compassion for themselves and for people who don't come with faith or a religion that they are grounded in. Discerning compassion towards oneself is actually an interesting starting point to begin cultivating a deeper capacity for compassion that starts inside and then can be given back to the world, Because where does self-love come?

Kathi: 27:17

Yes.

Claire: 27:17

It's rooted in love itself. Right.

Kathi: 27:20

It makes sense to me, right, and it's sort of paradoxical, I think, claire, because part of what my faith tells me is that to be other-centered rather than self-centered is what allows us to be loving and generous and have the kind of ability to see what's happening outside in the world and to feel ourselves, know ourselves, sort of called to this work of justice-making and change. And I do believe you just reminded me of this. I do believe the journey toward the center of ourselves, knowing ourselves, it's really the same thing as knowing God. Right, that's how we get there, it's a bridge, it is, it is and I think-.

Claire: 28:10

Yeah, it's not about being self-centered or self-indulgent.

Kathi: 28:14

Or self-indulgent or anything like that.

Claire: 28:16

It's self-indulgent, and there is a bridge there. It's a psychological bridge that's needed and unnecessary. We don't stop there, otherwise we would just be taking care of the ego and creating a more healthy ego maybe, and it's a necessary bridge to tapping into the deeper source of love that I found, and I think it's also buried in there.

Kathi: 28:44

what you just said is an acknowledgement that all the things that keep us from tapping into that source or from acting on our love for the world right, they also come from inside of us. So unless we are attending to those things, we can't do the work that needs to be done right. And that's what that self-care, I think, allows for us to acknowledge that we too are pain and we have needs that need to be attended to. You know, my teacher in my religious tradition really is Richard Rohr, who says I would transform people, transform people. And he also says unless you transform your pain, you will certainly transmit it to other people. So that's how I hear that in what you're saying about sort of attending to ourselves. Yes, yes, it's necessary.

Claire: 29:51

Totally. And that brings us back to the humility you were talking about as a leader. If I don't acknowledge my pain, my hurt, it's going to be very difficult to be a good leader for others who have pains and limitations, and to change the world with all its pain and limitations.

Kathi: 30:10

Yes, yeah, and you know, I think, our traditional models of leadership, they don't allow much for that. So you have to have no expression of vulnerability, or if you do express it, you do it in a very calculated way. So you're conscious about the impact of fact You're leaving on other people and that it is advantageous to you. So that's a very little sort of spontaneous openness and unprotected vulnerability. We're always worried about protecting and preserving our power.

Claire: 30:46

Traditional yeah, and that's one of the biggest issues that I encounter with women who work in humanitarian organizations, For example. They deal with refugees all day long and they have to be strong and there's no place to acknowledge their own struggles and that dealing with people who are in such pain every day affects them. It's a paradox to me. In many of these organizations there is no recognition of the struggles of the people that are driving the organizations.

Kathi: 31:23

Yes, and it feels to me like that leaves a wide open space, for I want to say women, but I don't want to be that narrow. It's not just women, right, but people of sensitivity and vulnerability and humanness, to say really the way we are going to change the world is human to human connection, not rising above our humanness and pretending we don't feel the things that are being us.

Claire: 31:52

Yeah, totally, kathy. My sense really is that this is the invitation today, in this era and this times, is really to bring that perspective through women and men who are leading. And I agree with you, it's not about women leading, it's about feminine qualities that we need to bring in leadership, together with healthy masculine qualities. You know, we need both healthy, healthy masculine and healthy feminine qualities. These particular qualities of vulnerability, humility, compassion, which are attributed more to the feminine, we need them so much in leadership today and my sense is that they need to enter the organizations that are driving change today, like the UN, the High Committee for Refugees, all these big organizations which carry such beautifully written mandates and these qualities might be on paper, but at the core of their organizational hierarchy they are not embodied.

Kathi: 33:01

One of the reasons for writing our book is that, as you say, these ways of thinking, they're there on paper.

Kathi: 33:10

People have been saying, arguing for different models of leadership for a long time, but what happens to most organizations whether it's the United Nation or a for-profit company or a school or church, whatever it is is that when the organization gets stressed by the need for efficiency or productivity or profit, it just snaps right back into that pyramid shape, because we're afraid that if we've left things open, we can't control as many things as we hope for.

Kathi: 33:43

And so what I think it's going to take, if we are capable of change in our culture, is a long-term, sustained experiment that shows that, even when you operate with the kinds of values you just mentioned in the United Nations and that we're arguing for in this book, that it can be effective. I think people are so afraid it's not going to be effective or efficient or productive, and it can be, but I think it's going to take a long commitment and experiment to really show that. And so what we're arguing for is who better to offer and sustain that experiment than organizations that are not profit-motivated churches, nonprofit organizations, values-based organizations that can offer this to the world for the long-term good of humanity.

Claire: 34:49

Absolutely, and the more of these initiatives sprout in the world, the more we can bring this into the collective. So it's not one organization that's going to solve it somewhere on the planet, but many organizations, many islands of coherence in different places that carry the same values.

Kathi: 35:13

Margaret Wheatley calls those islands of sanity. Yeah, yeah.

Claire: 35:17

It gives me a lot of hope, because I know that this way of thinking and these initiatives are spreading in many places in the world and we hear of a few and we're happy when we meet each other. Yes, but I trust that this is happening. Will it happen fast enough, in a big enough format that it can actually shift the consciousness?

Kathi: 35:42

Hopefully, yes, I want to believe, I think we have to believe the horizon is way out there.

Claire: 35:47

We don't have a choice. We need to be hopeful. And we also see the multiple existential crisis and how AI is speeding that up, because we haven't found a way to instill those values in AI yet, and this is also a very important domain where changemakers have their work to do. Yeah, the complexity is enormous and bigger than you and I can grasp.

Kathi: 36:13

Yes, we can only hope and do the work. That is three feet around us, exactly.

Claire: 36:17

Yeah, thank you so much for this conversation. We pulled a lot of threads and touched on a lot of topics. Is there anything else that you want to touch on?

Kathi: 36:29

Not in particular. I just want to say I think these kinds of conversations are part of the work of making change in the world and I'm so grateful to have had this one with you and yeah, and to be in the conversation. I think that and we all can do that.

Claire: 36:52

Yeah. I love that to be in the conversation. I'm also grateful that we are in this conversation together.

Kathi: 36:59

Thank you so much, claire, really.

Claire: 37:15

Thank you so much, Kathy. Thanks again and see you soon on the Woman Rise podcast.