If you want to be a leader you are potentially dangerous. Forget the title and do the real work

As a 21 year old I remember the dawning realization that I could be a leader and how excited I was at the prospect. I wanted to be a leader.

I have met a number of people like me, people who wanted to be leaders. I’ve also met people who wanted to be writers; people who wanted to be youth workers; people who wanted to be radio announcers; people who wanted to be teachers and people who had idealized pictures of Christian communities they would start.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said:

He who loves community, destroys community; he who loves the bretheren, builds community.

Bonhoeffer is pointing out that the person who loves the idea of community will never be a community builder, because communities are made up of people and people are much more than any idea you might have. The only way to build community is to love people, not love community.

As well as Christian community, Bonhoeffer’s principle can be translated to relate to leadership, writing, youthwork, radio, teaching and almost any other role, including that of a parent.

Someone who is focused on a role is inherently focused on themselves, and, as Bonhoeffer points out, is potentially dangerous.

As I’ve seen this principle in operation, I’ve learned to trust leaders who spend a lot of time talking about the future and a lot about how significant current events are in light of that future.

I have also learned that if a leader talks about themselves regularly, then chances are there is identity needs being met in the quest for leadership and they are probably not leaders in actuality.

In his study of what makes good companies, great companies, Jim Collins boils the one main ingredient to the leader, but interestingly enough it usually isn’t someone who cares too much about what role they have, they just want the company to win.

 

“Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that level 5 leader have no ego or self-interest. Indeed they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves”.

There is nothing wrong with choosing a career path, in learning to be a writer, youthworker, radio announcer or teacher. The acquisition of a skill takes time and energy.  Once you have mastered a discipline  however, you can then begin what N.T. Wright describes as your real vocation.

“You are called prayerfully to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly, act symbolically in ways that declare the powers have been defeated. The powers don’t like that, by the way. Do this only with prayer.”

“The way of Christian witness is neither the way of Quietist withdrawal, nor the way of Herodian compromise, nor the way of angry militant zeal. It is the way of being with Christ in the Spirit, in the place where the world is in pain so that the healing love of God may be brought to bear at that point.”

Wright refers to three groups of people who were three groups in Jewish society at the time of Jesus. The first group , the quietists escaped the world into a kind of super spirituality. The second group were the Herodian compromisers who lived their lives according to Roman rules, looking to stay safe and grow rich in system of that that world. The third group, the zealots, wanted to fight power with power and worked to overthrow the Roman empire and wrest control from Ceaser. You don’t have to look too far before you see modern parallels to those three groups.

The way of redemption is a radical fourth way, it is the way of the cross.  We are called to bring redemption to the world in the place God has us, with the gifts and skills he has given us. This only happens as we are ready for the agenda not to be us.

We see this call to redemptive mission as Jesus appears before his disciples in the upper room in John 20:21 and says “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

We are called to go to the world in the same way Jesus went to the world. Jesus actually uses the language of us taking up our cross five times in the gospels: Twice in Matthew, once in Mark and twice in Luke.

What does it mean to take up our cross?

Whether you are an artist, a business person, parent, a factory worker or a scientist, our vocation is to be involved in the great project of redemption through living by a completely different set of values.

John Stott wrote:

“The followers of Jesus are to be different. Different from both the nominal church and the secular world, different from both the religious and the irreligious. The Sermon on the Mount is the most complete delineation anywhere in the New Testament of the Christian value-system, ethical standard, religious devotion, attitude to money, ambition, life-style and network of relationships all of which are totally at variance with those of the non-Christian world. And this Christian Counterculture is the life of the kingdom of God, a fully human life indeed but lived out under the divine rule.”

At the heart of the Christian faith is an understanding that this world was created by God, and was good, but something happened. We too were created by God, but in a special way the human spirit was created in His image.  The tear of self interest, of sin, entered the story and  cut at the heart of a world that was once right but is now no longer.

We are now, each one of us, in the business of repairing the tear.

Paul writes in Corinthians that all of us who profess a relationship with Jesus Christ, have been given a job to do:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:The old has gone, the new is here!   All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:   that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

The job of our churches is to equip, encourage and support us in this, our real vocation.

Mark Greene, the executive director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, wrote an essay called “the great divide” where he argues that the church is failing in its mission.

“It is because of SSD (Sacred Secular Divide) that the vast majority of Christians feel that they do not get any significant support for their daily work from the teaching, preaching, prayer, worship, pastoral, group aspects of local church life. No support for how they spend 50 percent of their waking lives. As one teacher put it ‘I spend an hour a week teaching Sunday School and they haul me up in front of the church to pray for me. The rest of the week I’m a full time teacher and the church has never prayed for me. That says it all’.