This year, the CSA National Leaders' Summit will focus on the first leadership practice from the CSA Leadership Framework Matrix:
Inspiring Imagination
Leaders of vision unleash their calling by inspiring imagination in their teams and wider school community. They delve deep into their own vocation and paint a picture of the future to which others are then drawn.
Leaders who are called are shaped by visionary imagination, evaluating the present accurately, and energising and mobilising their teams towards a hope-filled future. Imagination is at the heart of effective leadership and brings creativity and wonder, strategy and decision making. Walter Brueggemann (2001) claims, “The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and imagine almost nothing. It is our vocation to keep alive the ministry of imagination”. Imagination is easily squeezed our of a leader’s repertoire when lost to the narrow pursuit of productivity, leaders who inspire imagination recognise that every person within their community, staff and students, as image bearers who have immense potential for good or ill. Imagination is a flame present in every person, latent and ready for the leader to encourage, refine and inspire.
The Letter to the Ephesians encourages us to stretch all our capacities in order to comprehend “what is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love which surpasses all knowledge that we may be filled with all the fullness of God…”. It challenges us further, to open our imaginations, no matter how daring, to the ever-greater possibilities and surprises of God (Ephesians 3:18-21).
At this year's conference, we hope that you will be equipped and refreshed, but moreover, that your imagination will be reignited to the possibilities that God has for your leadership and your community.
“See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”. Isaiah 43:19