I have recently become sensitive to the use of the first person singular possessive pronoun by leaders in church and academic life. Perhaps it is altogether innocent in most cases, but “my church,” “my board,” “my college or seminary,” “my faculty” often makes me cringe. I wonder if the speaker is asserting a tacit ownership which sooner or later might hamper his or her capacities as a leader.
My discomfort may stem from the ambiguous way in which we use the term ownership in the first place. On the one hand, we often use it to underscore a quality of allegiance and engagement which is not only worthy but necessary to the welfare of any institution or program. We appropriately speak of the need to encourage a constituency to claim responsibility for some worthwhile endeavor as their ownership of the project. We clearly need dedicated volunteers and interested participants in any number of good causes. It is then encouraging have someone say that this is my home church, my alma mater, my personal benevolent commitment. That sort of ownership is necessary for leaders and followers alike.
On the other hand, ownership is also a term we use for possession—my book, my coat, my house, my car—and to be sure, it is usually an appropriate term for identifying things that belong to me. Leaving aside for the moment the appropriate debate about possessions to which scripture directs us ever and again; it is a fact of human life that most of us assume that there are certain things which are ours and nobody else’s. Most of us are entirely convinced that we do own certain things, be they great or small, and we are more or less comfortable with the idea of personal possessions.
The problem comes for me, I suppose, when I hear people imply that they own things of which they should more properly understand themselves to be stewards. We have been appropriately reminded in recent days—pray not too little and too late!—that we are stewards of this world in which we live. It is ours to use but not to abuse; we are here as tenants or sojourners, with no right to leave things in worse state than we found them. We have a mandate to care for the world around us, to husband its natural resources, to improve the environment, to do as little harm as possible and to do all we can to repair the damage that we and others have done. In fine, we are called to be good stewards of things that ultimate do not belong to us.
Is it possible that the same thing is true in the realm of leadership in church and academy? When we come to positions of leadership, we should look for ways in which we can affirm, both for ourselves and for our constituencies, that we have no pretensions to personal ownership or possession of the church our the school. One way to show stewardship would be to avoid the first person singular possessive pronoun whenever possible. We could replace it with the first person plural—our church, our college, our seminary—or if that tends too much toward the imperial or pontifical “we,” perhaps we should just say “the church, or college, or seminary which I have made a commitment to serve.”
John W. Kuykendall is President and Thatcher professor of religion emeritus at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. He is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
