November 21, 2003
Servant leadership
The leadership of today’s church suffers from a chronic case of whiplash. Nothing reveals why so well as the timeless gospel story of Christ, the servant king.
That story reminds us in these present fires of institutional stress that true leadership is servant leadership, that it never causes or embraces schism, but only exposes the divisions already there, opening them to the reconciling work of servanthood. Our present trauma forces into the open that our central problem is the authority of leadership. It is no longer possible for leadership to commend itself alone with external credentials, with “orthodoxy,” with “churchmanship” (whatever that now may mean), or even with “the Bible says.”
Authority must rise from deep within the character and quality of a person’s soul, for without an evident depth of integrity, the authority of election or ordination in and of itself simply does not carry weight for most people, church or otherwise.
The single largest segment in our religious population is made up of what the pollsters call the “decoupled” — those who cherish a belief in God, but no longer attend or support a church. One reason for this is that spiritual and moral mediocrity in leadership inevitably receives mediocre response and respect in return.
Bennett Sims, in his splendid book on servanthood, asks us to consider in a contemporary mode the paradoxes that result from the irony of the servant king in the very heart of the gospel, an irony he discovered when he first became bishop of Atlanta.* He is convinced that there resides even now in the church the kind of servant leadership essential for a redemptive ministry to take hold and flourish. For Christian faith is ironic, not heroic, as some would make it, and thus makes considerable demands on our imaginations.
Assume a position of leadership, he suggests, and give its powers away. Take authority, but never use the instruments of coercion you possess. Embrace and include the weak and the unappreciated; honor them and allow them to make decisions. Refuse the crown unless all are crowned and do not glory in the trappings of office.
Listen often; pontificate never. Disdain competition and refuse to win if there are losers. When you encounter fear or anger, do not nurture it or use it to your own advantage.
Ask embarrassing questions when in the presence of venerated hierarchies. Insist that those over whom you may have authority claim their freedom and exercise it joyfully and creatively, even permitting them to fail. When confronted with hate and fear, venture love. Bear pain rather than inflict it. Risk everything in the pursuit of your calling.
“Everyone who is of the truth, hears my voice,” Jesus said (Jn 18.37). The church and its congregations cannot expect the world to get the drift until it, itself, is deeply embracing servant leadership and modeling this kind of ministry for all to see.
*(”Servanthood: leadership for the third millennium,” Cowley, Cambridge, 1997)