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About the Book
"Excellence in Leadership" by Dag Heward is a comprehensive guide for aspiring and current leaders to develop their leadership skills and create a positive impact in their organizations. The book provides practical advice, strategies, and examples to help individuals become effective and influential leaders in their personal and professional lives.
Hannah More
Beyond any doubt, Hannah More was the most influential female member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. She was educated at Bristol, an important slave-trading town, and began to publish her writing in the 1760s, while she was still a teenager. Her first play, The Inflexible Captive, was staged at Bath in 1775. Later in the 1770s, and for much of the 1780s, she spent time in London and made the acquaintance of many important political and society figures, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Elizabeth Montagu. Her play Percy was produced by David Garrick in 1777, and Fatal Falsehood was staged in 1779, but she came to regard the theatre as morally wrong, especially after the death of her mentors; Garrick and Johnson. She turned to religious writing, beginning with her Sacred Dramas in 1782. In 1784-5, she 'discovered' Ann Yearsley, the so-called 'poetical milkmaid of Bristol', whose poems More helped to publish, although the two later fell out.
In the 1780s, More widened her circle to include religious and philanthropic figures, including John Newton, Beilby Porteus and William Wilberforce. In the summer of 1786, she spent time with Sir Charles and Lady Margaret Middleton at the their home in Teston in Kent. Among their guests were the local vicar James Ramsay and a young Thomas Clarkson, both of whom were central to the early abolition campaign. More and Clarkson met again in Bristol in 1787, while he was on his fact-finding mission to the city, but they did not become close. However, in the same year More met Wilberforce, and their friendship was to become a deep and lasting one. More contributed much to the running of the newly-founded Abolition Society including, in February 1788, her publication of Slavery, a Poem which has been recognised as one of the more important slavery poems of the abolition period. Her relationship with members of the society, especially Wilberforce, was close. For example, she spent the summer of 1789 holidaying with Wilberforce in the Peak District - planning for the abolition campaign, at that time at its height, formed a great deal of their conversation.
By the mid-1790s, More had become closely involved with the 'Clapham Sect' of evangelical Christians, many of whom were involved in the abolition campaign. The group centred on Henry Thornton's home in Clapham and included Wilberforce, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay, among others. Throughout the 1790s, she wrote a number of religious tracts, known as the Cheap Repository Tracts, that eventually led to the formation of the Religious Tracts Society. Several of the Tracts oppose slavery and the slave trade, in particular, the poem The Sorrows of Yamba; or, The Negro Woman's Lamentation, which appeared in November 1795 and which was co-authored with Eaglesfield Smith. However, the tracts have also been noted for their encouragement of social quietism in an age of revolution. She continued to oppose slavery throughout her life, but at the time of the Abolition Bill of 1807, her health did not permit her to take as active a role in the movement as she had done in the late 1780s, although she maintained a correspondence with Wilberforce and others. In her later life, she dedicated much time to religious writing. Nevertheless, her most popular work was a novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, which appeared in two volumes in 1809 (and which ran to nine editions in 1809 alone). In the 1820s she grew gradually less well, and decreased - but did not entirely halt - the amount of writing she produced. On her death in 1833, she left more than Ă‚ÂŁ30,000 to charities and religious societies (equivalent to about Ă‚ÂŁ2,000,000 or $3,000,000 in 2004).
© Brycchan Carey 2004
The Silent Marriage-Killer
Most Christian couples would not list shame  as one of the top struggles in their marriage. However, in almost a decade of counseling, I’ve seen very few marriages that aren’t hampered by shame on some level. It’s just not often the first thing that’s identified, but it underlies so many other common struggles, especially communication and sex. How can you know if this silent marriage-killer is present in your relationship? Consider the following self-evaluative questions: Are there topics that have become off-limits because you or your spouse get too prickly, defensive, or embarrassed? Can you share embarrassing stories or painful struggles with your spouse and expect empathy, or would you be more likely to receive further ridicule or condemnation? Do you talk openly about your failures, past and present? Is your spouse the first person you turn to for support, comfort, or celebration? And does your spouse do the same to you? When you confront sin in your spouse, do you do so with gentleness and humility as a fellow struggler, or with the posture of one who would never sin in that way ? How comfortable are you in your sexual relationship? Do you share your emotions with your spouse and vice versa? When conflicts arise between you, are you able to resolve them, or do you seem to stall out frequently when one of you withdraws indefinitely? Do you regularly share with each other what God is teaching you through his word, church, and your personal devotional life? Do you pray together? Do you confess your sins to one another as needed, as often as sin arises? Would you prefer not to talk about sin at all, because it’s just too uncomfortable for both of you? None of us have a perfect marriage, or should expect it, but what holds us back too often is the presence of shame — the fear that I will be rejected if I am vulnerable with you. The way to fight shame, and be part of shame’s healing for one another, is to risk openness in these areas where we want to hide from one another. Help Your Spouse Heal We may have been hiding like Adam and Eve since the garden of Eden, but the hope is that God covers our shame and enables us to help cover one another’s shame. If redeemed marital intimacy is to be naked and unashamed (Genesis 2:25), the way to move towards this goal is to become part of healing shame for each other. We have the opportunity to do this in a more powerful way for our spouse than anyone else. We have the unique chance to see them at their most vulnerable, and to bestow grace and compassion instead of judgment and rejection. And the only way we can do this for one another is as we experience this grace from God to us in Jesus Christ. In Christ, we realize that on our own we stand unclothed before God — that our best attempts at righteousness, with the help of his Spirit, are like filthy rags — but that he has clothed us with the perfect righteousness of his own Son, the God-man, so that there is no condemnation nor any threat of separation from God’s love (Romans 8:1, 38–39). Name the Shame Emboldened by the gospel, and empowered by the Spirit, we then can be a reflection of this covering and healing grace for our spouse. We can begin by acknowledging (naming) the areas where shame has held us back from unashamed intimacy in our marriage. Start with yourself. Where have you unwittingly shamed your spouse? Name this, and express that you want to be a place of refuge and safety for your spouse from  the shame instead of a contributor to it. Then with gentleness and love, speak about ways you’ve felt shame from your spouse, and offer a few practical ways that he or she could grow in becoming a safe place for you. For example, you might start with, “I have realized how much I tend to offer advice before I listen when you’re discussing a problem from work or home with me. I bet this contributes to a sense that I’m not always a safe person for you to go to when you’re struggling. I want to do better — will you help me?” You Are a Team Then, you could say something like the following to address the ways you’ve experienced shame from your spouse: “When you criticize [the meal I cooked/or my appearance/or how I haven’t been a spiritual leader in our relationship], it makes me doubt my value and your love. I know this isn’t what you mean, but it’s how my own struggle with shame twists your words. It would be great for you to help me fight against shame by refraining from such criticism and affirming your love for me. I’m well aware of the problem, and I want to do better in this area, but what will help me the most is to know that you’re praying with me and for me and that you support me through the struggle.” Remember, you and your spouse are a team. God has joined you together closer than any other human relationship will or can be, and naked and unashamed intimacy is how he created marriage to be. Through the empowering grace of Jesus Christ, we can walk towards more of this created intention of unashamed intimacy together.
