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(RNS) — Good leaders are often told to play to their strengths and hide their weaknesses.
That has never really worked for disability activist and nonprofit leader Joni Eareckson Tada. Paralyzed from the neck down, she can’t disguise what many people perceive as a weakness. And, ultimately, that has been pivotal to her success, says Tada, 74. She wasn’t tempted to pretend she could do it all herself and she has always been well aware she needs help.
So when Tada, an author and artist known mostly as just “Joni,” took the stage at this summer’s annual Global Leadership Summit held at Willow Creek, a Chicago-area megachurch, she told the pastors and other leaders gathered that if they want to succeed they are going to have to admit their imperfections.
“The most effective leaders do not rise to power in spite of their weakness,” she said. “They lead with power because of their weakness.”
That lesson is a day-to-day reality for Joni, who was paralyzed at age 17 more than 50 years ago. As a result, she relies on others for the most mundane of tasks. And with that help, she became a best-selling author, a popular speaker, an artist — she paints by holding the brush in her mouth — and leader of Joni and Friends, a nonprofit with a nearly $40 million-a-year budget that assists families living with disabilities.
She spoke with RNS in late August about her speech to the Global Leadership Summit, her latest book, and what she has learned in four decades as a nonprofit leader. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joni Eareckson Tada addresses the Global Leadership Summit at Willow Creek Community Church on Aug. 9, 2024, in South Barrington, Illinois. (Photo © Joni and Friends)
The speakers at the Global Leadership Summit are often folks who have had unprecedented success and tell stories focused on winning. But that’s not exactly your message, is it?
My speech was mainly about how God delights in recruiting people who don’t naturally shine with their giftedness. He delights in using their weakness to get things done. The whole point was to talk about how God loves to leverage weakness and minimize power. That’s not the way the kingdoms of this world work, but it is the way of what many call the upside-down kingdom of the Bible. You have to be poor in order to be rich. You have to be weak in order to be strong. You have to be humble in order to be exalted. Those kinds of things.
Those things are not necessarily considered leadership skills or leadership tactics.
Most gifted leaders tend to rely on their own strengths without relying on the strengths of others — and especially the strength of God. I think leadership is a spiritual gift. So if leadership is a gift from God, then he is the source of the strength, the ingenuity, the passion and the vision that leaders have.
You are a successful writer and speaker and have an ability to connect with people. You lead a thriving nonprofit. And yet, you also have to rely on others for the simplest of things. What have you learned from that?
I have to rely on people just to help me with the most menial tasks — bathing, dressing, getting me up in my wheelchair. There are countless times when I must rely on others — and that teaches you to be grateful and to admit I can’t do this by myself. I’ve got to ask for help. And when help is provided, I better be grateful.
A lot of those things have translated into the way I lead. I surround myself with capable leaders, people who are more gifted than I am — people whose ideas I welcome. Just because I’m the CEO does not mean that I hog the spotlight. It’s always a team effort.
That’s why it’s called Joni and Friends.
Joni and Friends has been around for 45 years. Have you seen things change in how churches deal with disabilities during that time?
I think churches, for the most part, have been woefully behind our society in many respects — I helped draft the original Americans with Disabilities Act — and we have gotten rid of discriminatory policies that prevented qualified people with disabilities from getting jobs, and barriers have been removed. But the church is exempt from a lot of that, and so the church lagged behind for many years.
My campaign for the last 45 years has been to help the church see that God thinks people with disabilities should be treated with special honor, and they should be embraced and welcomed. The church is stepping up to speed now. We are excited to see so many congregations across the country developing effective outreaches to those with disabilities, putting people with disabilities in places of leadership, and accommodating more people.
I wanted to pivot for a second and ask you about your book about Brother Lawrence, the monk who wrote about finding God’s presence while doing mundane tasks like working in the kitchen. Why revisit that book now?
Well, I read that book back in the ’60s, when it was very popular, and everybody seemed to be reading it. Then when COVID occurred in 2020, and we were all sequestered and reading everything we had on our bookshelves, I pulled it down, reread it, looked at it, and thought, “Oh, my goodness, this is the way I live.”
“The Practice of the Presence of Jesus: Daily Meditations on the Nearness of Our Savior” by Joni Eareckson Tada. (Photo © Joni and Friends)
I practice the presence of Jesus every single day. Except I’m not working among pots and pans in a kitchen. I’m working with wheelchairs and battery chargers and leg bags and bedpans and things like that. It was an interesting journey looking through it and thinking, “Wow, I can write something a little more current,” but yet, at the same time, introduce a whole new generation to Brother Lawrence, in hopes that they will pick his work off the library shelf as well.
RNS does a lot of reporting on the changing religious landscape and the way that the loss of influence has made religious people very tense and worried. What do you say to people who worry about losing cultural power?
Culture is not changed just because you vote somebody into office. It begins with your own life, the way you relate at the grocery store, the way you relate to your neighborhood. If everybody who is worried about losing influence would just start influencing for good the people in their neighborhood — the elderly person down the street, the mom with a special needs child — we can make a difference. That’s where culture happens.
When we care for people in our neighborhoods, in the grocery store and in the marketplace, we invite other people to care, and we invite other people to experience what community should be like. Culture changes on a local level, (with) prayer and a good solid witness. In other words, “Here’s my life. What can I do to make your life happy and more meaningful? How can I serve you today? What can I do to assist you?”
I mean, we’re all starved for that kind of person in our lives. Each of us can be that person in our communities, and I think that’s where the influence starts.
