Tag: leadership

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Clubs, by Phillip Hoyle

For me clubs have always been about responsibility: treasurer, president, secretary, vice-president, committee chair, on and on. I am sure I learned this from the outset when we neighborhood boys formed the Ark Club. But that was play, kind of like Cowboys and Indians or Army but with paperwork. Then adults began to organize us in a moral effort to control kids and their activities: Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, choirs, and youth groups. These clubs attracted me for their activities but not their group pride, personal recognition, or promised advantages. I don’t say this as a matter of criticism but simply as a description of my introverted preference and deep independence. I liked having things to do if they matched my interests, I got along well with peers, and I was respectful to adult leaders. Often I became some kind of leader although I didn’t seek such leadership preferring simply to help and to enjoy. I didn’t care to beat a drum for attention. I could tolerate
responsibility for short periods of time, but mostly I wanted to learn and to experience.

Around age thirty, my career was on the line demanding of me a choice between doing church work and teaching music history. I gave myself six months to figure out which way I’d go. In so doing, I realized I needed to give the church career a better chance. So I attended some religious education events, first, an intense training program organized by the Regional and General levels of the church and second, the meeting of a professional association of religious educators. Over-all the groups did not do much for me, the former seeming too much related to the status quo of congregational life, the latter seeming just a bit too embarrassing to me to make a strong identification. Still at each of these meetings I met some nice people and at each event a couple of very impressive individuals. Furthermore I observed interactions that attracted me, not relationships I wanted but ones that revealed these leaders were as complicated as I was and as bright or brighter. Certainly some of them were living life rather largely (a term I will not address in this story).

I compared these religious educators with the professors I knew, that other professional group I was observing, and found as much or more creativity among the church educators. Plus for me, I realized, I needed the stimulation of working with people of all ages rather than the small age range of undergrads in college. Church offered more freewheeling educational leadership opportunities. I opted for a career in congregations.

Some years later I was recruited to run for president elect in the professional association, a group that still slightly embarrassed me. Beyond the embarrassment I had friends in the group and annual meetings had become an important time away from work and family. I thought over the offer and realized it came with a four to five year sentence: attendance at annual meetings for running for office, serving as president-elect, serving as president, serving as immediate past president whose responsibility it was to oversee the next elections, and my requirement to show up at the following meeting unlike almost every past president I had known in the group. Did I really want to do this? I thought I saw an opportunity to help the organization become less an in-group and more open to the paraprofessional educators most congregations were hiring to organize and oversee their programs. There were fewer and fewer full-time jobs for seminary-trained educators on the horizon. Still the nomination promised mostly a bunch of work.

I did that work and stayed through my sentence. I didn’t regret it and learned so much during the five years, but I also got too close to the bared emotions of people for whom such a position was seen as a great honor that took them on a power trip. Yuck. This work was important—okay—but to take oneself so seriously in its execution seemed hopeless to me, too much like what I observed in some pastors, preachers, and evangelists. Worse than embarrassing!

Clubs: for the most part, I’m not interested. Still today I am leading a program and attend several gatherings of artists, writers, and storytellers. And I go out with a gang of guys for happy hour every Friday night. But the real attraction in these groups is the interesting people I see and the new things I learn as we write, read, tell stories, and make art together.

Denver, © 30 March 2015

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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One Monday Afternoon by Phillip Hoyle

One Monday afternoon with a folder of
stories in hand, I made my way to The LGBT Center in the 1100 block on
Broadway, the place with the purple awning that I had visited often to borrow
books from the Terry Mangan Memorial Library. My friend Dianne had looked at
The Center’s website and called me to say they were offering art programs and a
weekly storytellers gathering. She thought I might be interested, and she was
right. For quite a few years I had been attending a writers group, a monthly
gathering of men and women in which I was the only gay, but now I thought I’d
like to read my gay-themed pieces to an LGBT audience to see what response I
would receive. Excited by the prospects I entered the building, climbed the
stairs, registered my presence, and made my way to the library where the group
was to meet.
I knew the storytelling was part of
SAGE, a seniors program, and wondered how I’d compare with other participants.
I was younger except for Jackie who was the group leader. She was quite a bit
younger than I, a graduate social work student at Denver University who had
started the group as part of her internship with SAGE. Jackie’s warm and
friendly personality attracted me, and she was just funky enough and humorous
enough for me to relate to her. Two or three other men attended my first Monday
afternoon with the group. We introduced ourselves to one another and the
storytelling began. Since I’d never attended before, I had no story about the
topic, but I did have a couple of stories about my experiences as an older man
who came to Denver some years earlier to live his life as an openly gay man. Two
participants told stories extemporaneously, sharing interesting events in their
lives. Jackie read her story, something about one of her boyfriends back in New
Jersey. The other participant read his story in a thick Alabama accent.
I knew I had come to the right place. Thus began my tenure with The Center’s
SAGE of the Rockies “Telling Your Story” group, a storytelling relationship
that has endured over three years.
The next Monday afternoon one of the
extemporaneous storytellers surprised us and himself by reading a story.
Somehow the experience of putting his feelings on paper moved him deeply,
reading them aloud nearly devastated him, and hearing them read nearly devastated
the rest of us. What was this group? I suspected our times together might
become more than any of us anticipated.
Over the ensuing weeks—April through
June—we told our stories to one another; sometimes asking questions for
clarification, sometimes responding with our own similar experiences and
feelings, and always appreciating the candor and depth of the sharing. But
Jackie broke into our satisfaction by announcing the end of her internship; she
had received an assignment at another setting for the final months of her
academic program. Michael piped up to say we already had our next leader. We
looked around the room and then a realization hit me. I felt like I was again
in church; I was being volunteered. When the truth of it was clarified, I
agreed only to consider convening the group. The Center would be closed for a
month while the programs moved into the new facility on East Colfax Avenue. I
suggested that on the first Monday afternoon of opening week we come together
with stories on the topic “Beginnings.” In the meantime I would confer with
Ken, the acting SAGE director, about the possibility of leading the group.
I did volunteer to lead the group, an
experience of great importance and meaning for me. Prior to accepting the
responsibility I had gone nearly twelve years without leading any kind of
group. In fact, I had rarely attended any meetings for over a decade. I
reasoned perhaps it was time I re-entered group life and asked the participants
to brainstorm several topics we could use for the next meetings. We did so and
since then have generated so many topics we’ll have to meet weekly for
several years to use them all. The LGBT makeup of the group has presented no
particular challenges because of the personalities of group members and their
dedication to building community that features a broad spectrum of human
experience. But the most important thing I discovered in assuming this
leadership was that the group barely required any leadership, barely needed it.
It’s the easiest group I ever led, and I had led many, many of them in a church
career that lasted thirty years. Also, I never before led a group with such a
high average IQ or so much creativity and talent, both raw and trained. And
still after many months I never can imagine what to expect each week. Such fun,
such humanity, such diversity, such community. It all began for me one Monday
afternoon.
© Denver,
2013
About the Author
  

 Phillip Hoyle
lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In
general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two
years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now
focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE
program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs
at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com