In keeping with today’s topic of religious TV theme songs, here’s the theme song for the not-at-all presumptuously titled “Leadership Network“:
The Leadership Network is hosting a conference on leadership for leaders, featuring lots of leading leaders talking about leadership. (Because that’s how that works.)
The conference, called “The Nines,” features more than 100 leading speakers. Almost six of them are women.
Well, almost five, actually.
OK, four. Four of them are women. Maybe three. But there are at least three women out of the more than 100 speakers at this event.
That’s not a joke. Well, that is a joke — it’s laughable — but the folks at the Leadership Network don’t seem to understand why, in 2013, they’ve made themselves a laughingstock.
And when Rachel Held Evans pointed out that they’d dug themselves into a rather ridiculous looking hole, conference organizer Todd Rhoades grabbed his shovel and started digging furiously.
“More than 100 speakers and only four of them are women. This is not what the church looks like,” Evans wrote on Twitter.
Rhoades wouldn’t be dumb enough to respond defensively by blaming women for not aggressively pursuing the opportunity to speak at his conference, would he?
Yes, yes he would.
“We asked quite a few women that didn’t respond to our speaker invites @rachelheldevans // just in case you wanted to ask :)” he responded, just in case you wanted to ask if a guy hosting a conference with more than a 9-to-1 male-to-female ratio was patronizing toward women.
But Rhoades wasn’t done. He kept digging.
“Oh look. A woman. :)” he tweeted.
And then followed that up with, “A female leader adds new perspective on important female specific topics such as pregnancy, abortion, and marriage.”
Sensing that their boy was doing further damage to the bro-tastic reputation of the conference, the father figures of this “leadership” movement stepped in with the most patronizingly paternalistic pater noster I have ever seen, cloaking themselves in the pious garments of “unity” while simultaneously dismissing Evans’ concerns as a “meltdown” from some kind of feminist “industry” clashing with his “ministry.”
Not cool, bro. Kinda douchey, dude. (Is that how “leaders” talk? I was never in that frat, so I’m not sure.)
That prayer for “unity” somehow failed to convince Rhoades to pull his foot from his mouth and for God’s sake just stop talking.
Rhoades explained to CT why the fifth Nines event has a lower ratio of women speakers than past years.
Rhoades said that speaker invitations are driven by each year’s theme. Given that this year’s focus was “what’s working in churches,” The Nines focused on inviting senior pastors. “No matter what your view is on women in leadership, this is still a largely male role in churches, whether that is good or bad,” said Rhoades. “We [at Leadership Network] work with a lot of great women leaders. Unfortunately, not very many are lead pastors.”
It’s almost like he’s reading flashcards from a deck labeled The Worst Things To Say: Lowlights From Five Decades of Disastrous, Disingenuous and Destructive Responses From the Old Boy’s Network.
Whether that is good or bad.
These people purport to be experts on “Leadership.” They charge others for conferences on the subject. They sell their “leadership” advice in the form of books, magazines and VHS tapes. (I’m assuming they still do VHS, because everything else about them is still stuck ca. 1983.)
Shouldn’t experts on “leadership” be aware that this entire debacle is just a re-enactment of an incredibly predictable, easily avoidable script that’s been replaying for decades? Shouldn’t they be aware of how many “leaders” have tumbled from their pedestals for just this kind of clueless, patronizing behavior?
I have no idea what the literature in the field of “leadership studies” looks like, but I’m fairly sure that somewhere in there must be something that warns against hosting a conference touting “leadership” that features only a handful of women out of more than 100 speakers. And somewhere else in there must be something that warns against blaming women for that disparity. Or against belittling women as prone to emotional “melt-downs.” Or against suggesting that women are nothing more than wombs with legs, only capable of speaking to “female specific topics such as pregnancy.”
Yet clearly, if you’re looking for leadership in how to organize a meaningful conference, or how to respect others, or how to respond to criticism, you won’t find any such leadership from the Leadership Network. What you’ll find instead is a clown show that looks like an HR training video on what not to do if you want to avoid getting sued for creating a hostile workplace environment. Disrespect, ineptitude and an evident lack of awareness of conversations that have been going on for years and years do not heighten my regard for these folks’ claims to “leadership” expertise.
That Christianity Today piece quoted above isn’t much better. The headline — “The Nines Explains Why So Few Women Are Among 100-Plus Speakers” — seems to accept and to bless Rhoades’ making-things-worse excuses as a legitimate “explanation” that CT finds satisfactory and that ought to also satisfy those uppity women having a meltdown.
But the good news is that CT has to contend with those women. The article quotes Rachel Held Evans and it quotes Sarah Bessey. Who? say the leading leaders of the Leadership Network. And they may never understand the answer to that question.
Who are these women? They’re leaders. I don’t call them that because they’re proclaiming themselves to be leaders, or because they’re demanding that others follow them, or because they’re trying to sell me expert advice on leadership.
I call them that because that’s actually what they’re doing — leading.
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