Can leaders serve?
This article first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2008 edition of In Touch Magazine. For reprint permission contact the Director of Public Relations at 1-800-251-6227.
by Cam Priebe
Jesus was not like most leaders of his day.
This fact was reinforced recently when I read the book “The Secret Message of Jesus.” Author Brian McLaren points out that Jesus' call to leadership, as he spoke to his disciples, was a challenge to lead differently than those they had experienced or seen – differently than those who used their position of leadership to lord their power over others. Jesus called his followers to lead by serving.
Christ’s model of leadership seems counter-cultural for us as well. It runs against the predominant models of leadership we see around us. In our day, leadership is often about position and authority, and making quick decisions for a whole group of people – and not necessarily about community, valuing and understanding people, and having people actually take ownership of what they are involved in.
Leading by serving puts the challenge of leadership development in the community of Christ-followers into a unique spot. How do you train someone for leadership by training them to serve? It seems like a good idea, but if you just train someone to serve can they also lead? Are they leading just by serving?
Listening
In the story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4:1-54), a number of aspects of Jesus' interaction challenge us as we seek to lead like him. The episode begins with Jesus engaged in counter-cultural activity as he sits and converses with a Samaritan woman. In Jesus' day, Jewish people would not usually associate with Samaritan people – in fact, they would take measures to avoid them. Also, Jesus is spending time talking about life and theology with a woman, which was not a usual practice for a rabbi of that day. Woman had their role in society, but being involved in theological conversations, and especially being asked for their input or opinion, would just not happen. The other issue that could cause the average Jewish leader to run the other way is the woman’s involvement in adulterous activity, which would sooner be shunned than discussed.
Jesus finds it much more important to pay attention to the woman. He asks her questions; he wants to hear from her. His greatest desire is that she realize that her value and worth don’t need to come from the men in the community who have valued her more for their own selfish desires. Because Jesus takes the time to listen to this woman, there is potential for a whole community to be transformed. She leaves her time with Jesus proclaiming to everyone she meets that there is something different about this leader.
Understanding our differences
I believe that one of the important steps in learning how to lead within Jesus' mandate of serving others is to learn to understand people’s differences, as well as the impact those differences have on how we lead.
At our Fall Ministry Quest retreats, we lead participants through a “Four Cultures” experience. They are divided into four groups, and each group is assigned a unique culture with its own ways of behaving or treating each other: how they host people, typical greetings, common conversation topics, etc.
The center of the experience is when one group “visits” another. The groups are asked to interact while staying in character true to the culture each has been given. The most fun is had when the culture that loves to hug to greet and say good-bye, visits and interacts with the very reserved and non-touch culture group.
After the interaction, we talk about how we, in our daily lives, interact with people who are obviously different than us: different skin color, or ethnic background, or language, or from a different place in the world. However, the greater challenge is to realize that within every group we are a part of, we will deal with differences in people. Whether it is our youth groups, our schools, churches, or communities, we can learn to realize our differences.
Working together
Another experience that we create for our retreat participants at MQ is an exercise where a group of participants is challenged to accomplish a task together. For example, they may be asked to stack paper coffee cups in a five-cup pyramid. The challenge is that they cannot touch the cups but rather can only use a number of strings that are tied together around a rubber band.
The exercise creates an environment where people need to work together to accomplish their goal. We challenge them to consider what their leadership role is within this group, and often that challenge is for them to step outside of their comfort zone.
For someone who is often quiet, we want to help them understand that their voice counts and their opinion is valued by the group. For those who usually find themselves talking and stepping out to lead, we want them to understand the value of listening and asking people for their opinions and views of the challenge at hand.
Sometimes, people begin to understand that their role of leadership can be to create space and opportunity for others to give input. In debriefing the experience, we often find that each person has their ways of doing things, but when they take the time to listen well and understand the different perspectives within the team, there is an added value to the team experience. Leadership becomes about the whole group of people, not just about the “leader.”
One Ministry Quest participant had a desire to be involved in student leadership at her school. However, she didn’t know what it meant to actually lead. After some of these experiences during the retreat, she began to realize that one important leadership task would be to make sure everyone’s voice was heard, and that all people’s ideas were valued and understood in order to work together. By the end of the retreat, she felt she could be a leader with a purpose and direction: to help the people she was leading move in positive directions.
Leadership that Transforms
I believe that Christ’s counter-cultural leadership model challenges us to continue to seek after leading by serving. In their book Youth Leadership, Josephine A. VanLinden and Carl I. Fertman speak about transformational leadership. The focus of transformational leadership is on “the process of leadership and what it means to be a leader. It is concerned with how individuals use their abilities to influence people.”
The call to leadership is to empower others, to enable others, to provide ways for people to use their gifts and their abilities to lead by serving. This counter-cultural leadership model calls us to leadership that is not about the leaders, but rather about ensuring that the people they serve are called into action. For our churches and the communities that we lead, we need to be discovering and developing ways of understanding those we serve.
Cam Priebe is the Director of Ministry Quest. The aim of Ministry Quest is to transform lives through the power of a call. This is done through a one-year program with high school students that includes two retreats, ministry opportunities in their home congregations, and mentoring by mature Christians from their communities. For more information click here.