“Don’t waste a good crisis,” admonished Winston Churchill during World War II. A crisis suspends the status quo and makes possible what wasn’t possible before. A crisis reveals ways of operating that worked in the past, but which are no longer relevant in the new circumstances. At the Shalem Institute, where I serve as executive director, we wondered what we might be able to do in the crisis of COVID-19 that we hadn’t been able to do before. We wondered which of our old ways needed to be shed in the new circumstances. We knew the Chinese character for “crisis” meant both “danger” and “opportunity.” What was the opportunity hiding in this crisis for us? What was the danger? We continued to dive deep and listen, going beneath preoccupation with our own fears and discomfort to the bedrock of God’s abiding presence and guidance. We waited and listened and watched….
In the end, the crisis of COVID-19 allowed us to break through barriers that had confined us: expanding the Group Spiritual Direction program, doing significant leadership development and expanding and diversifying our team of program leaders, manifesting the next incarnation of a program for personal spiritual growth, moving our files to the cloud, making the Shalem Society gathering of program graduates affordable and accessible, and strengthening working relationships within our administrative staff, not limited by geography.
Another second crisis, that of police killings and subsequent protests, a time of racial reckoning for our country, put the United States’ original sin of racism front and center. Again, we at Shalem were called to ask, “What is ours to do?” What was the invitation for Shalem in this crisis, both internally and externally? For years Shalem, a predominantly White organization, had been working toward more diversity on its board and staff, with limited success. The time was ripe to work more broadly toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We took a number of steps to begin to address this issue. We still have much work to do and we have begun to look at next steps we can take toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organization. The crisis of police violence and the related protests in the United States have provided Shalem with the opportunity to step up and do our work. This second crisis allowed us to break through our complacency as a White organization and name the ways that we were complicit in racism and begin to take steps to become more anti-racist. We have begun a long journey, and I pray that we will have the courage and perseverance to continue.
The admonition to “not waste a good crisis” has served us well. Crises provide important opportunities. May we all have eyes to see the invitations contained within them.
This blog is an excerpt from Crisis Leadership by Margaret Benefiel, adapted and used with permission of the publisher (Morehouse Publishing, 2021).