January 3, 2012 | The billionaire businessman, a devout Christian, told the denominational executive that the denomination's leaders needed to be more visible and bold. They needed, the businessman said, to ask more of laypeople like him. 

The executive, unsure, hesitantly asked, "How would you like to be more involved in the church?" 

But the businessman had already "done his time" serving on church committees to fill a slot rather than accomplish a purpose. 

The businessman was imploring the denomination's leaders to demand more about how he lived his discipleship in the world -- and not by prophetically criticizing the wealth he had accumulated while regularly turning to him to support capital campaigns or building maintenance (a common experience among the wealthy). 

When I witnessed this exchange, I interpreted the word "ask" as a request. 

The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations. 

More recently, I have become aware of a deeper interpretation of the businessman's plea: we can discover what is in laypeople's imaginations only if we focus on what it means to "ask" in the sense of inquiry. The businessman was seeking holy conversations with church leaders, hoping that church leaders would ask more of him by asking more about him. 

What are the issues he is wrestling with as a business leader? How might his faith inform his responses to management challenges and his thinking about leadership? How should his faith help him decide how to schedule his time? Nurture his personal and professional relationships? 

Inquiry is a central activity for Christian institutional leaders in cultivating teams and discovering innovative possibilities for an organization. 

It is also crucially important for developing deep, personal relationships with people on their own terms rather than just fitting them into "our" contexts. Christian institutional leaders often engage with empathy when laypeople come to us for spiritual direction or in crisis -- but we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions. 

Why do Christian institutional leaders forget to practice inquiry? 

Perhaps we believe that our role is to provide expertise, to offer answers to life's questions. Or maybe we feel insecure around people who have been better trained, and have more experience, at leading and managing organizations. So we become defensive and assert that our work is different and somehow better, more pure, because we run not-for-profit organizations. 

Or perhaps we believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived. Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.

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