I finally finished Making Room for Leadership: Power, Space, and Influence by MaryKate Morse. I’ve been working on this for about 4 months now. It was a slow process not because it was a struggle to read the book, but because my reading margin for things I want to read has been very minimal.
This is one of the only books I’ve come across that begins to attempt to lay out the issues pertaining to power in ministry and group dynamics. There are chapters that are very helpful. From my reading, I can tell the author has read in some of the arenas that I have dabbled in – congregational systems and she’s done some helpful cross-cultural work.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last few years thinking about power in systems – whether it relates to positional leadership, gender issues, cross-cultural dynamics, or other forms of marginalization. This book brings a lot of ideas of I’ve gleaned in many places and synthesizes many of them into a fairly easy read. There’s some helpful new insights I picked up from some of this as well.
This book doesn’t get into some of the nuances of power that I’m chasing down now when I have the time, but I really appreciated the read and it’s a great resource for various things that I’m working on.
I’ve been reminded this week how foreign thinking about power dynamics in groups is for those that haven’t been exposed to it. This is a great intro book for people who want to take some steps to consider how to understand power in their environments and to gain insights to how to steward their own individual power for the greater good.
This will be a resource for me for years to come.
