Slant33.com, a website designed to “help challenge, inspire and equip youth workers through thoughtful dialogue and varied expression from youth ministry’s leading thinkers and doers,” recently asked three of its contributors to answer an important question about leadership: “What three books do you recommend on leadership development?”
- Danny Qwon, a youth minister for almost twenty years and a current Ph.D. student in organizational leadership, recommended one book designed with youth ministry in mind and two general texts.
- Mike King, President and CEO of Youthfront and someone with thirty-five years of youth ministry experience, recommended one religious text alongside two general texts.
- Scot McKnight, professor of religious studies at Northpark University and one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, failed to produce a list. Instead, he offers an alternative answer:
My biggest complaint, and it doesn’t apply to all of these books or to any of them from cover to cover, is that they too often go in the wrong direction. They move from leadership models in our world and then find biblical verses about elders that say more or less the same thing. Or they find examples of leaders, like Joseph or Nehemiah or Jesus or Paul, and show how they did back in Bible days what leaders are now just finding—with the tone and implication that if leaders read the Bible, they’d have known this long ago. The movement I see too often is from here to there. It’s the wrong direction. We are called to move from there to here.
But there’s another leadership approach, and it can be called the deconstructive approach. Some say leadership is servant leadership, and they go to Mark 10:45, I didn’t come to be served but to serve, and show that Christian leadership is completely otherwise. That’s helpful, but I get cranky and cynical when I read this sort of thing because I wonder what’s next. Will they then slip in the leadership models into that servant leadership model? Sometimes they do.
Yet, I know there are more or less leaders in the Bible, and there are clear guidelines—say, in the Pastoral Epistles—about how the church’s leaders are to operate and guide and mentor and lead. Yet I’m still not satisfied. Maybe I’m just cranky.
So I want to put my idea on the line and see where it leads us. We have one leader, and his name is Jesus. I want to bang this home with a quotation from Jesus from Matthew 23, where he seems to be staring at the glow of leadership in the eyes of his disciples, and he does nothing short of deconstructing the glow:
But you are not to be called “Rabbi,” for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth “father,” for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Instead of seeing myself as a leader, I see myself as a follower. Instead of plotting how to lead, I plot how to follow Jesus with others. Instead of seeing myself at the helm of some boat—and mine is small compared to many others—I see myself in the boat, with Jesus at the helm.
Maybe I just have not read enough of the leadership books to know that I’m repeating what leadership books say. Maybe not. What I do want to say, though, is that leadership too often places the pastor or some person in the front and having others be guided (and following) that person, and that, I dare say, distorts the entire gospel. Jesus was willing to say that his followers didn’t have a rabbi of their own, didn’t have a human father in a position of ultimate authority, and they didn’t have an instructor who was their teacher. They had one rabbi and one instructor, and his name was Jesus, and he was Messiah. They had one father, and he was Creator of all. They were to see themselves as brothers, not leaders. That’s straight from the lips of Jesus.
There is something so profoundly deconstructing about Jesus’ words here that we need to take them much more seriously every time and any time we begin to talk about leaders and leadership. My contention is that we are not leaders but followers; that Jesus is the leader; and that any leading we do is by way of following.
So What?
If I had been asked to write my response to the question, I likely would have felt constrained by the parameters and compelled to produce a list of three books. My initial thought would be to start with a classic like Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (1977) and then select something from a generation later and rather recent text. Choosing just three is a difficult task, but a less important one than being reminded of the centrality of one’s faith in viewing the concept of leadership itself. I appreciate Scot McKnight’s words and invite you to ponder them with me, especially as you consider these questions:
- How do you define leadership? What sources have contributed to your current understanding (experience, training, books, etc.)?
- How has your faith informed and/or transformed your understanding of leadership? What leadership lessons have you learned from your interactions with Jesus, the texts that seek to bring to life his ministry, and those who seek to follow him?
- How would your world differ if you saw adopted McKnight’s view of seeing self first as a follower in every context (family, work, social, etc.)?