Leadership

Leadership is a hot topic in American Christendom and in the American political system right now. As it happens, I am leading about 100 people for a few months, as we prepare to facilitate an intense three-day spiritual encounter with Jesus for about 36 women. So I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of leadership and struggling with our paradigms versus what the kingdom of God really is. What I see in this experience, is that people are clamoring for leadership. This is true across the board, in all walks of life and in all different faiths and traditions. Everywhere around the world, people look for a leader and when they find one, they follow. And this is a good thing, because we are all built to follow Jesus.

The bad thing is that there are so many leaders in this world who do not lead in a godly way. True godly leadership involves no agenda for personal gain. None. True godly leadership, whether in corporate America or in religious circles, is bent only on seeing other people built up, encouraged, strengthened, and equipped, by our service. True godly leadership doesn’t take on the mantle of “servant leadership” as a means in order to increase profits, numbers, obedience, or productivity. And because it is such a virtuous aspiration, true godly leadership is impossible unless the leader is submitted to Jesus on a moment by moment basis.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about leadership in Christendom or in corporate America. The principles of godly leadership don’t change, because spirituality is not compartmental (at least it is not supposed to be). No matter what the arena, according to God, leadership is only supposed to be for the benefit of those being led. I realize this notion is completely at odds with the corporation (and remember that your local little “c” church is a corporation).

and that’s a “whole other” blog post: even though I believe in capitalism, I think corporations are evil, and I’d be happy to tell you why.

Unfortunately, because of human nature, given enough time, human leadership always ends up satisfying some kind of need on the part of the leader (if it didn’t start that way, that is, and much of it unfortunately starts with the leader’s agenda in mind).

Followers usually idolize their leaders, whether they’re spiritual leaders or business leaders. They reverence them. They honor them. They clamor after them, just to be in their presence. They stand in line after hearing them speak, to ask questions or just to say thank you. They pay them. Sometimes they pay them a lot of money. They give leaders power, over them, and over other things in their stead. And perhaps most dangerously, they cede their personal responsibility to leaders and ask these leaders to “take care” of them. Once again, this is true in religion and in politics. The nanny state is alive and well in both realms, I’m afraid, and this is because we have created the systems, both religious and political, that support this kind of thinking.

Selah.

Because we, the followers, want our leaders to take care of us and make our decisions for us, and protect us from ourselves, we, the leaders, take that power and money and admiration and lose our focus, and instead of empowering and strengthening our followers, we fall into a horrible conflict of interest in which our best interests are served by fostering dependency. And the more we foster this dependency, mitigating personal responsibility, the more whinging, clingy, selfish, and immature our followers become and the more parasitical.

This is what we have created in our political system, and this is also what we have created in our religious system.

Leaders in both systems take our money and make the decisions for us about who will benefit from that money, redistributing it as they see fit. They take our personal responsibility away and protect us from ourselves, telling us that they know better how to raise our children than we do, telling us that they know better than we do what we need to know, that they know better how to keep us “safe” in this big dangerous world. And sadly, they take our misplaced adulation and swell their own breasts and build themselves up, instead of refusing to receive it and determining to live a life of obscurity, so that those who have entrusted their lives to them are enriched with the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Slow down and really think about it.