As the Pendulum Swings

Steve Hayner has been the national president of InterVarsity® since 1988 and will be leaving that role this summer. He’s had a lot of experience in leadership roles since his days as a chapter president, and so Student Leadership journal interviewed him to find out what he’s learned.

SLJ: Steve, you’ve been in some kind of leadership capacity since your student days. Through all of those years, what have you learned about leading?

SH: One of the greatest lessons is that leadership is always done in a context, and you don’t always get to choose that context! You get what you get. When I first came to InterVarsity, I found that I had landed in a more “corporate” setting than I was used to as a college pastor. I also found very quickly that I wouldn’t be as close to the front lines with students as I would like. Sometimes, you get to be part of creating your leadership context, such as when you put together and lead a small group, but even that isn’t always how it works. You may be handed a list of students. And beyond chapter life, there is the larger context of your campus life, and again there is little choice in the people you’re around. So you may not get to choose the people God will give you. Yet God calls you to lead.

Leadership is about exercising a caring influence in any context. The challenge is to say, “Lord, what do you want me to do here? What is needed here, right now?” The question is not what do I want to do, but what’s needed? And that may change dramatically from place to place and time to time.

One of the things I learned quickly upon coming to InterVarsity was that I-V didn’t need my successful college ministry and, in some ways, not even my philosophy of ministry or my skills. Some of the things I was good at simply weren’t needed at the moment. Now, God never wastes anything from your background; at some point it will benefit your context. But it’s also not the case that you walk in and say, “Here I am, this is me, take it or leave it.” Nor, “This is the way they did it at my old church.” After a while that kind of phrase gets really old to the ones you’re serving. A leader has to say, “Well, what’s needed here right now?”

This takes learning a new set of questions to help us evaluate the condition of things as they stand, the positives we’re inheriting and what we have to learn from the situation. That means a lot of listening and observing.

SLJ: What are some things you’ve learned about yourself as a leader?

SH: I’ve had several difficult periods, including some I would call those dark nights of the soul. One thing I’ve learned is that all along the way God calls us for his own purposes. I certainly participate in making choices, but eventually God puts me where he wants me to be. For example, when I was asked to speak at Urbana, I wasn’t eager to do it. That’s not my thing—not what I like to do or am skilled to do. But it was the strong feeling of the planning committee that I ought to be speaking for a particular talk. So sometimes you don’t have choices about those things. You have to say, “Okay, God, you have put me here and called me to this. I will give everything I have to it.” Then it’s up to the Holy Spirit to use those things—or not. It’s not up to me.

My task as a leader is to live and perform to an audience of one. And that One isn’t me. Playing to an audience of one means that God alone is my judge. My only judge. He is the one who, according to the words of Scripture, made my mouth, my mind and my heart, and wove together the experiences of my life [Psalm 139]. It is God’s business how he chooses to use me, and yet I can still be very hard on myself. I’m a perfectionist; I often have to stop and say, “No, God knows what he’s doing. I’ve been faithful, and therefore, it’s good enough. I’m going to move on.”

SLJ: When you run across tired, discouraged or even burned-out leaders, is it because they’ve lost sight of this idea of playing to an audience of one?

SH: That’s one of the most frequent causes of burnout in leaders. There are several other things that also get to leaders. Perfectionism is one, a drivenness to be seen as competent by yourself and other people. Another is a need to be liked and appreciated, affirmed by the people around you. So you play to a broad audience and the bigger the task or position, the more audiences there are to play to and please. It becomes impossible to satisfy everyone, and so you are never satisfied with yourself.

The best leaders are those who know who they are and whose they are. They have a deep sense of internal security and, being led by God, they simply go forward and do what they believe is needed. They don’t worry too much about the consequences. They’re learning, and they’re teachable all along the way. They don’t spend a whole lot of time needing to “log in” to get the approval of themselves or anybody else. They’re less aware of self and more aware of people and God’s activity.

SLJ: Between school terms, chapters do a tremendous amount of evaluation and goal setting for the next term or academic year. Is there a danger that leaders might confuse those goals with God’s plan once the year begins? What if the leadership team walks back onto campus in the fall and finds that the context on campus or in the chapter is not quite as expected?

SH: Those are genuine concerns. Picture a chapter as having a number of pendulums that are always swinging slowly year after year, and not all in unison. Things about chapter life will change every year, too, cycling back and forth.

As Max DePree puts it, the leader’s primary responsibility is to define reality. The reason is that you can’t lead if you don’t know what’s really going on in the group, helping them face reality too. It’s still about learning to ask the right questions. In InterVarsity, we offer students a few hooks to hang their priorities on, such as the ones from our purpose statement—growing in love for God, God’s Word, God’s people, and for God’s purposes. Those are examples of fundamental, non-negotiables of the Christian life, and we can evaluate the chapter’s life from several angles based on those.

No chapter will be perfectly balanced, so the pendulums will be in different positions. For example, we may find that we really love each other, but we’re not really living under the Lordship of Jesus, not really caring about God’s call on our lives. We’re cozy. We have work to do in coming to love God. Likewise, we can get into such a heady view of God’s purposes that we forget God or one another or what the Word is all about, and then we start doing God’s purposes in very secular ways, rather than in biblical ways with the powerful, sustaining love of God. We get ticked off at people who aren’t doing things our way. Leaders will be constantly checking those balances and asking how to bring the pendulums back toward center.

Learn to ask these few, simple questions: “What are the needs here?” “What is God calling us—and me in particular—to do in helping meet those needs?” “Where should we go next with these people God has entrusted to us?”

Now if you really know the people God has given you, and those are the questions you’re asking from the start, you’re less likely to run into surprises. It’s when our first question is “What should we do?” that we get into difficulty. If you come up with a detailed program at a planning camp that seems like it ought to work in the fall, but then go back and the needs have changed, you have a huge problem. You have people who have planned in detail for the program and who have tied their enthusiasm and even their personal identity to it. That severely limits flexibility back on campus. Asking the right questions all along will help keep the right parts of it somewhat tentative, and yet still workable and exciting.

That’s why you have to understand where you’re going to start in your understanding of leadership. Will you start with plans or people? I always start with people. Jesus died for people, not plans or events or goals. Be aware of the real needs of people. As Jesus pointed out, the great among us are really those who are servants of all, those who are sensitive and attentive to the needs of people in our midst. You’re there on campus to help people take steps toward Jesus.

SLJ: This concept of reading the pendulum swings implies that it’s crucial to know a campus and it’s culture well, not just the chapter members. And asking the “need question” seems to require that a chapter be open and inviting to the rest of the campus.

SH: Leaders have to work in the biblical context of God’s overall vision for a redeemed people. So another good question is, “What do people who are alive in Christ and maturing in faith look like?” At the same time, look at the broad campus community in the classrooms, the dorms and the apartment complexes and ask, “Where are these people in relationship to what life could be like for them?” Then comes the question, “What can I bring to bear in the lives of these people to move them a step or two closer to Jesus?” That’s the task of the leader, to begin to pull these things together. And you have to be asking these questions all the time.

As we plan various events for our chapters, it’s good to ask where we are in meeting the basic human needs of people—the need for love, for acceptance and worth, for new experiences. We can ask where we are in terms of a whole-person model—mental, spiritual and physical. By asking which of these needs are the ones we want to get at in our events, some plans can begin to gel.

But sometimes even the best planning falls through. One time, in Seattle, we had spent about two months planning heavily for a weekend event. The bulk of it was working on the “needs” question, because those are the hardest to discern. Clever programming is easy, but praying, discerning, listening and loving your people enough to dig down to the real needs is hard. We got to the weekend with pages and pages of all this stuff for the program.

The first night we did the first volley of events and it bombed very badly. Why? A different group of people came to the camp than we had anticipated. We had a whole bunch of non-Christians there and we just ­hadn’t thought about that. All our music, the skits and even the talks were designed for somebody else! People were uncomfortable and disengaged. Leaders were running around asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” We had missed some of the clues that would have shown us who was coming.

At ten that night, we sat down for three hours and completely redid the whole weekend—after having planned it for two months! These things happen, and we have to move on.

SLJ: Did your team get discouraged or down on itself because they had missed the audience?

SH: Well, of course a little bit, but we recovered well as we asked what happened. Rather than look on this as a failure, we saw that God was able to interrupt our plan because he wanted to do something in the group that came, and we were at least open to asking the right questions and focusing on people. We were right in line with Jesus who often changed his plans depending on the crowds and the individuals around him. We moved on and were able to redeem the weekend, and say, “Thank you, Jesus!” He helped it work out, and we learned a lesson.

SLJ: Back to the pendulums you mentioned earlier. If leadership is assessing and responding to the various pendulums, where do leaders learn how to do that?

SH: We really do need to learn how to assess the needs of the people around us. It’s not all that hard, but we’re not used to it. We generally forget that we’re playing to an audience of one, and so we are caught up in ourselves—what people are thinking of us, whether we are successful, how we compare to others. It’s as though we’re standing in a little circle of people who don’t know each other and are about to share who we are with each other. Most of us spend so much time thinking about what we’re going to say when it’s our turn that we can’t remember the names of the four or five people who’ve just taken their turns. What does that say? It says something about the focus of our lives, that we live life focused on our needs, our desires and our abilities, and we spend very little time focused on others’ needs and issues. You can pick up a tremendous amount of good insight just by focusing on another person. It takes work, putting all our antennas up, but I think it’s a skill we can learn as we center on people, watch the pendulums swing around us and start to ask the right questions.

Steve Hayner > attended Whitman College (1966-70) where he was president of a Christian group that soon affiliated with InterVarsity. He went on to Harvard, receiving a Master’s degree in Semitic languages and literature in 1972. From there he went to seminary and soon became the university pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington. While there he earned his Ph.D. In 1984, he became Seattle Pacific University’s Vice President of Student Life. God called him to InterVarsity in 1988. Steve lives with his wife, Sharol, and one of his sons, Drew, in Madison, WI. His daughter, Emilie, has just completed college, while his son, Chip, is finishing his first year away at school.