A recent conversation about leadership and conflict turned toward a question I have learned to expect. Most of my public work is with churches, pastors, governing bodies, and ministry leaders. I write and teach in Christian language. I speak about God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Scripture, Calling, stewardship, and the responsibilities of communal life. How, then, does my formation as an ordained Daoist monk relate to that work?
The question is reasonable because two easy answers would both be misleading. One would reduce Daoist formation to a few contemplative habits that make me calmer or more patient. The other would assume that my Christian books are Daoist systems concealed beneath Christian terms. The relationship is more substantial than the first answer and more carefully bounded than the second.
Influence describes what helped form the work; identity describes what the work is.
My Daoist influence did not begin with casual reading or the selection of a few useful ideas. It came through a three-year process of formation under my Shifu that included study, meditation, inner cultivation, personal retreats, reflective assignments, quarterly reports, accountable practice, and direct oral teaching. At the end of that process, I was received into a Daoist lineage, accepted precepts, and received the name Qing Jing—Clarity and Stillness.
That name does not describe an achievement I completed. It names a continuing discipline. The formation asked me to pay attention before acting, to examine the condition from which I was responding, and to recognize when force was replacing clarity. It cultivated restraint without passivity, humility without self-erasure, and an awareness that timing, relationship, capacity, and material conditions belong to the meaning of a situation.
Before I developed the CERD framework—Calling, Energy, Resources, and Discernment—those practices had already begun to take written form in The Shēn Dào Planner. The planner gathered stillness, identity, longing, season, responsive action, release of force, and return into a personal process. It did not yet contain the completed translation of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth into Calling, Energy, and Resources, or Discernment as the practice relating them. It provided the formative field from which that later framework emerged.
One lesson within that field has remained especially important: information held only in the mind is not yet the same as embodied understanding. A leader may grasp a concept, repeat the right language, or complete a training and still discover that actual knowledge develops through action, consequence, observation, and correction. This is one reason my work repeatedly returns to practice. Listening must eventually meet responsibility, and interpretation must remain answerable to what happens when people act.
Those habits continue to shape the way I work. I usually begin by listening rather than arriving with a prefabricated answer. When a church names a problem, I try to understand the larger field around it: who is carrying the work, what pressures are present, how authority is operating, what information is missing, what the organization can sustain, and what consequences earlier choices have created. I am less interested in imposing a solution than in helping people see the relationships that make the presenting problem possible.
Daoist formation also strengthened my suspicion of unnecessary force. Leadership sometimes requires decisive action, especially where harm, legal obligation, fiduciary responsibility, or institutional failure is involved. Yet pressure is often applied before leaders have understood what the situation is revealing. More urgency, stronger persuasion, or tighter control can suppress information that the community needs in order to respond responsibly. I therefore tend to favor proportionate action followed by observation: make the smallest responsible intervention, notice what changes, and remain willing to revise the interpretation.
This influence reaches beyond how I accompany people. It also shaped some of the conceptual grammar through which I developed my Christian leadership frameworks.
The principal example is the relationship of Tian–Ren–Di: Heaven, Humanity, and Earth. I received this relationship through oral teaching from my Shifu. When I asked him to explain it, he applied it to Strategy, Tactics, and Logistics. His explanation showed me that the triad could be translated into different contexts while retaining its relational architecture.
While developing Called Together, I translated that relationship into a Christian and congregational framework: Heaven became Calling, Humanity became Energy, and Earth became Resources. I then added Discernment as the operational practice through which the three are interpreted together.
Calling names the orientation a congregation seeks to receive rather than manufacture. It is not identical with a leader’s preference, a strategic plan, a program, or an institutional outcome. Congregations act from their current understanding of Calling, and that understanding remains provisional, morally accountable, and open to correction.
Energy came from the Humanity position, not from the Daoist concept of qi. It names the human and communal capacity through which a response becomes possible: attention, willingness, skill, passion, trust, endurance, emotional condition, and the ability to participate. Energy affects pace and sustainability. It is not grace, the Holy Spirit, or a measure of whether God is present.
Resources came from the Earth position: the concrete forms and conditions through which response takes shape. Money, time, buildings, people, knowledge, systems, relationships, information, and institutional structures all belong within that field. Later work in governance, finance, nonprofit leadership, and church administration expanded the category far beyond its original cosmological influence. Resources serve a congregation’s current understanding of Calling; their abundance or scarcity does not certify what God desires.
Discernment is not a fourth cosmological realm beside Heaven, Humanity, and Earth. It is the continuing practice through which people attend to Calling, assess Energy, examine Resources, act, observe what follows, learn, correct, and return. In Called Together, that practice was translated into Christian communal listening shaped by prayer, Scripture, the Holy Spirit, responsibility, and review.
The resulting CERD framework—Calling, Energy, Resources, and Discernment—is therefore not a traditional Daoist formula. It is my Christian and organizational synthesis, developed from the Tian–Ren–Di relationship and from practices of observation, responsive action, embodied learning, and return.
Naming that genealogy requires equal clarity about what the translation does not mean. Heaven is not simply another name for the Christian God. Dao is not God. Calling is not Dao. Daoist Shen is not the Holy Spirit. Energy is not qi, grace, or divine activity. The relationships influenced the structure through which I learned to perceive purpose, human capacity, and material conditions together; Christian theology changed the agents, claims, responsibilities, and meaning of the framework.
That reformulation is substantive rather than cosmetic. My church-facing work is governed by belief in God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Scripture, grace, Christian vocation, the life of the church, and responsibility toward people affected by institutional decisions. Calling is interpreted rather than possessed. Grace is already active and is not created by awareness, governance, formation, or good process. Authority remains stewardship rather than ownership. Conscience and dissent cannot be erased in the name of unity. Outcomes provide evidence and consequences, but they do not prove divine approval.
The same Christian and ethical responsibilities bound the Daoist contribution of non-forcing. Restraint cannot excuse failure to intervene where abuse, danger, dishonesty, illegality, retaliation, financial misconduct, or serious institutional harm is present. Balance cannot replace justice. Emergence cannot establish moral authority. A process that feels calm or harmonious may still protect unequal power or leave obligations unmet.
The influence continued beyond CERD. In Guiding the Vision, I intentionally translated the Daoist Five Elements into five congregational rhythms: Wood became Growth, Fire became Witness, Earth became Sustainability, Metal became Clarity, and Water became Discernment. The purpose was not to teach churches Five Elements cosmology. The framework helps pastors see congregational life relationally.
A church may emphasize Growth while neglecting the Sustainability required to carry it. Strong public Witness may outrun the Clarity needed to explain what the church is actually offering. Discernment may become detached from embodied limits. The rhythms generate and restrain one another, inviting a pastor to ask what has produced the present condition, what is missing, and what proportionate adjustment may be needed.
That framework also reflects non-forcing and re-observation. A pastor does not have to redesign the whole congregation after noticing one pattern. The work may begin with careful observation, a limited adjustment, and renewed attention to what follows. This approach does not guarantee accuracy, and it is not adequate for every urgent situation. It does, however, resist the assumption that greater pressure is always the path to greater faithfulness.
The practical contribution of Daoist formation is therefore visible in both method and structure. It helps me attend to received direction, human capacity, material reality, timing, relationship, emergence, embodied consequence, and the limits of force. It encourages me to remain with complexity long enough for patterns to become clearer and to treat action as part of learning rather than the end of discernment.
Christian theology determines how I understand the One for whom I am listening, the meaning of Calling, the activity of grace and the Holy Spirit, the responsibilities of authority, and the moral limits within which any framework must operate. Church life adds further obligations: Scripture, communal interpretation, conscience, accountability, law, fiduciary duty, pastoral care, and protection from harm. These are not later decorations placed around a Daoist core. They govern the public identity and responsible use of the work.
Qing Jing—Clarity and Stillness—continues to remind me that clarity is received imperfectly and stillness is practiced amid real responsibility. The name does not release me from deciding, teaching, advising, or being accountable for the effects of my influence. It calls me to remain attentive while doing so.
When I accompany a church, I am not trying to possess its future or substitute my interpretation for its discernment. I am trying to help people notice the relationships they are already living within, respond without unnecessary force, and remain accountable for what their choices make possible. The traditions that formed me remain distinct, and the work of translation remains unfinished wherever new responsibilities, consequences, and questions become visible.