Emerging Models of Leadership in Practice

Starting from the Periphery

The importance of listening and its transformative power were common threads woven throughout the Catholic Partnership Summit. Each thread led participants to the final panel, where leaders considered Emerging Models of Leadership and Faith in Practice and how being responsive to the Holy Spirit and the needs of the Church is already building a synodal Church.

Led by moderator British Robinson, panelists Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, John Cannon, Bruno Spriet, Vicente Del Real, each shared their organization’s unique work within the Church and how it affirms, furthers, and supports the synodal way of being Church.

Restorative Justice: A Synodal Path to Healing

When the Catholic Church began its synodal journey in 2021, those who minister through restorative justice started hearing their long-used vernacular becoming more mainstream.

Within months, the global Church was talking about encountering one another and engaging in listening and discerning together, even with those outside of the Church.

“Synodality speaks about listening, encountering, and discerning, and we recognize these as restorative practices,” said Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network an organization that seeks to promote restorative justice practices in the Church. Restorative practices utilize an approach where crime and harm are understood in terms of the people and relationships impacted, rather than solely the law or rule that was broken, Murphy explained. It seeks to repair harm through transformative encounters that model Jesus’ reconciling way.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) synthesis of the synodal conversations held in the U.S. revealed many wounds are still deeply affecting the body of Christ from the sex abuse crisis to the polarization and marginalization of many Catholics. For those not steeped in the work of restorative justice, its approach can seem radical justice found through victims and perpetrators actively encountering, listening to one another, and discerning collectively to repair the relationship that was harmed.

“Each of these areas, though, need certain capacitybuilding in our Church because frankly, these ideas are radical in our culture today, in our culture that's about dehumanizing, about othering, about canceling,” Murphy said. “So the fact that we draw people closer to listen, to truly encounter, and then to discern — it's a different way of being.”

Listening, encounter, and discernment are not only common elements of restorative justice and synodality, they are antithetical to the division prevalent today, Murphy shared.

Listening, Discerning, Taking Action

When it comes to utilizing emerging models of leadership and putting faith into practice, Vicente Del Real who founded the ministry Iskali to serve young Latino adults by providing faith formation, leadership development, and mentoring encouraged leaders to lean into listening as a critical first step.

“Listen to your people,” Del Real said. “You know, the answer is right in front of us. We just need to listen to them and serve them. The Church must serve the people that are in front of them.”

Del Real founded Iskali to meet the needs he continually encountered in the young adult Latino community of the greater Chicago area.

In the United States, nearly half of practicing Catholics identify as Hispanic or Latino. Yet only about 3 percent of ordained ministers and only 10 percent of lay leaders are Latino. Latino young adults face particularly difficult challenges and struggles with their faith, del Real shared.

“And so you have to be confronted with this question and say, ‘What is God calling me to do here?’” Del Real said. He challenged those in attendance to further consider: “What is God calling you to do here?”

A recent Iskali retreat revealed that about 40 percent of young adult Latinos have attempted to end their own life, del Real shared. In addition to mental health, many young adult Latinos also struggle with addiction, and the barriers they face to education and earning living wages have led to only 17 percent of low-income Latinos who enter college actually graduating.

For del Real, he said he felt the Holy Spirit calling him to do something.

So Iskali began providing a scholarship for students to help them get their degree. To address the community’s struggles with addiction and mental health, Iskali began hosting retreats, and now 80 percent of those who attend a retreat will leave an addiction, he said.

When confronted with the community’s struggle with health, Iskali began offering after-school sports for a small fee to both promote physical activity and to Bruno engage the young adults in a community.

“We cannot wait for nobody to resolve this for us,” he said. “We need to do it ourselves.”

Including Diverse Voices

Pope Francis called on the global Church, as part of the Synodal journey, to listen to as many Catholics as possible about their experiences, particularly those who have been marginalized by the Church.

Throughout the 2022 Catholic Partnership Summit, leaders returned to the question of who was missing from the conversation, who was missing from the leadership tables. Moderator British Robinson, a member of Leadership Roundtable's Board of Directors, asked the panel to consider who was missing from the leadership tables in their communities.

Del Real said young adults in particular are left on the sidelines and excluded from leadership.

“From Genesis, you see that God has a preferential option for young people,” he said. “Mary herself was a teenager. Jesus was a young adult. And that is not reflected in the Church. We need young people leading.”

Bruno Spriet, global programme manager for Porticus, shared that when it comes to synodality and synodal leadership, there is another group missing from the conversations: those who fear or are skeptical of the process.

“I think there's a tendency to unconsciously exclude those people,” Spriet explained. “It's important to invite them to the table and to let them talk about their fears and their criticisms of the process. Because if we don't understand and give those fears and concerns a place, you'll not be able to find a response to welcome them and to deal with it.”

Many people still have doubts and issues with synodality, Spriet noted.

“We think ‘where is this going? Is it going to work?” he said. “It’s requiring a mentality shift in the Church. It requires new policies, new ways of working.”

Supporting New Ways of Leading

There are many people in the Church who are actively working to live synodaly and put synodality into practice, Spriet said.

John Cannon, founder of SENT Ventures, discerned in his time in Carmelite formation that he needed to leverage his early career in finance and business to create a ministry that supports those seeking to live out their faith and serve those around them.

Throughout Church history, there are examples of leaders who identified needs around them and answered the call of the Holy Spirit to find a way to meet those needs including Mother Teresa who founded a new religious order out of her work to serve the poor on the streets of Calcutta, Cannon said.

Leaders like Mother Teresa are in their own way entrepreneurs, he explained, and there are many in the Church today seeking support and creative ways to meet the needs of others in their communities.

And while there are massive ecosystems that support entrepreneurial leaders in other sectors, Cannon said very little support exists for those seeking to minister in innovative ways in a faith context.

That is where SENT Ventures comes in. Cannon said SENT Ventures seeks to fuel Catholic entrepreneurs to address pressing human and spiritual needs through integration of world-class business insight and deep spiritual practice.

“I begin thinking, well, who are entrepreneurial leaders today? Who are addressing needs in the world, but bringing God into it, bringing the Holy Spirit into that work? And how can they be supported?” Cannon said.

To date, SENT Ventures has worked with hundreds of faith-based entrepreneurs to support their work and their spiritual formation.

“The leaders we work with are hungry for more spiritual integration in their life,” he said. “People, I think, are hungry for spiritual formation. A lot of us didn't get it growing up or we didn't get enough of it.” Among the leaders who come to SENT Ventures for support, Cannon said there is a need for mentorship that is both grounded in their field and in their faith.

Taking Root in the Margins

Often the work to build emerging leadership models, meet community needs, or bring faith into greater practice occurs outside the structures of the Church, Robinson noted. Iskali, Catholic Mobilizing Network, Porticus, and SENT Ventures all work outside the traditional structures of the Church to bring individuals, who find themselves on the outside, into deeper faith and greater communion as members of the body of Christ. Robinson encouraged leaders and Leadership Roundtable to consider other ways to partner with universities, schools, and others to help acculturate emerging leadership models into the structures of the Church.

Murphy shared that restorative practices, in particular, often have to be more subversive, exposing people in small ways until they begin to see through their own experience that something is different.

Cannon encouraged leaders to find hope in the fact that many faith movements begin on the margins and not let it discourage them from offering their support. Even Jesus began his ministry from the periphery, outside the Jewish structures at the time, he noted.

“It often is how the Holy Spirit has worked historically in the Church,” he said. “New movements in the Church that are fruitful, often happen in the charismatic, happen outside of the traditional structures of the Church — whether it's the birth of the Franciscans, the monastic movement, or Mother Teresa, you know, starting by herself with a habit on the streets of Calcutta.”