I can’t stop thinking about Tony Reinke’s short piece The Word became skin, muscle, fat. Apart from Greg Lucas’s I love you no matter what, perhaps no other blog post has had such a profound impact upon me in the last year.
What a comfort to know that God became flesh (skin, bone, muscle, nerves, blood, hair, saliva, nails, tears, eyes, ears, fingers, toes) and dwelt (lived, grew, laughed, cried, spoke, sang, rejoiced, feared, marveled, hoped, socialized, slept, suffered, died) among us (doubters, betrayers, deniers, haters, enemies, unbelievers, sinners).Servant Leadership
Servant-leadership is bottom-up leadership. It’s the opposite of all the top-down models we are so familiar with (e.g., the royal king, the authoritarian tyrant, the distant guru, the superior academic, the bureaucratic czar, the CEO, etc.). Someone described top-down leadership this way: “The boss barks orders to the employee; the employee goes home and barks orders at his spouse; the spouse barks orders at the children; the children kick the dog; the dog chases the neighborhood cat.” Sound like your church? It shouldn’t.
The top-down model is not only the most common, it is also the one that comes most naturally to sinners (as it reflects the devil’s nature). It is easier to order people around than to engage, motivate, inspire, enthuse, etc. It is also far more predictable and far less risky. I’ve seen so many pastors, elders, etc., decide things on their own rather than consulting with God’s people or putting something to a vote, because they can control the outcome better.
Where are our models?
Old and New Testament saints saw themselves as servants (Gen. 18:3; 19:19; Ex. 4:10; Num. 12:7; Jer. 44:4; Rom. 1:1), as of course did Christ Himself (Mark 10:42-45; John 13:14-17; Phil. 2:5, 7). The last passage shows how Christ gave up His rights, his reputation, his recognition, and his royalty to become a servant. They, and He especially, are our models of servant leadership.
Whom do we serve?
We serve God first (we’re not independent but dependent on God for commission, authority, blessing)
We serve God’s people (we’re not their lord or sovereign)
We serve sinners (we don’t look down on the unsaved but get down on our knees for them)
We serve servants (we don’t compete with other pastors but serve them [Luke 22:26])
We serve the Servant (who said, “I am among you as one who serves.”)
How do we serve?
Someone once asked, “How do I know if I am functioning as a servant?” The answer: “By the way you react when people treat you like one!” But here are some further characteristics of the servant leader in pastoral ministry:
- You consult before making major decisions. People you should consider consulting are fellow-elders, other pastors, mature Christians, your wife, and anyone who will be impacted by your decision.
- You visit people as their pastor. Pastoral visitation and involvement in the messiness of people’s lives keeps our feet (and our knees) on the ground.
- You socialize with people from all walks of life. Don’t be too proud to lunch with the poor – or with the rich.
- You encourage the expression of divergent views. Seek out those who you know will usually oppose your plans and decisions and ask them for their opinion and reasons. Make sure everyone on the elder’s board has opportunity to express their opinion, even if you know they will disagree with you.
- Your take responsibility. When something goes wrong, the first thing you ask is, “Am I responsible?” Be ready and willing to point the finger at yourself, even if it is not entirely your fault.
- You resist the default of viewing criticism as personal dislike. However excessive, imbalanced, or “personal” the criticism, try to find the grain of truth in it.
- You need and use the means of grace. The busier you become the more time you spend in prayer and Bible reading. Cultivate and maintain a close and lively walk with Christ.
- You welcome the insight of other Christians on texts and doctrines. You recognize that God often reveals things to babes that he hides from the wise and prudent.
- You seek accountability. You ask your wife, your fellow-elders, or a mentor to keep you accountable to Scriptural standards. And when choosing accountability elders, don’t choose the ones most like yourself!
- Accountability requires honesty on the part of both parties.
- Accountability requires commitment from both parties.
- Accountability requires clear expectations (see John Piper’s accountability questionnaire)
- Accountability requires clear procedures
- You never use the threat of resignation as a lever. You persevere through difficulties and disagreements without resorting to worldly methods of manipulation.
- You continue to evangelize the lost. You recognize that however well-respected you are in church circles, you are still fundamentally a disciple and a witness to the resurrected Christ.
- You take on the dirty jobs from time to time. Without abandoning the ministry of the Word and prayer, from time to time you show that you are not above the menial jobs in the congregation.
- You keep learning. Because you realize your own limitations and needs, you make a point of listening to others sermons, reading others books, going to conferences, etc.
- You put the growth and development of others ahead of your own. Robert Greenleaf was one of the first to advocate for servant leadership in business. His website offers the following test of servant leadership: “The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”
- You return to the cross of Christ for forgiveness and for the power to serve more faithfully.
How do we lead?
Having said all this about service, it is important to remember that servant-leaders still lead. They do the things that leaders do – direct, organize, delegate, etc., – but they do so as servants. In Effective Pastoring, Bill Lawrence says that “servant” qualifies “leader.”
Servant leaders exercise authority but they do so with motives, focus, values, methods that differ from those of other leaders. The servant leader exercises authority motivated by a love for Christ, a focus on his interests, the values of the cross, and the courage to wash the feet of those who follow Christ with him (p. 100).
But he hastens to say, they still lead.
Servant leaders serve or they don’t lead at all. And servant leaders lead, or they don’t serve at all. Stated another way, servant leaders lead by serving and serve by leading (p. 104).
Greenleaf puts it like this:
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.
I hope that every pastor, and indeed anyone engaged in Christian service, is a servant-first.
My Life’s Work
HBR have a great series of “Life’s Work” interviews here with what they call “Wildly successful people.” They come from all walks of life, but have one thing in common: they all absolutely love what they do.
You have to subscribe to get the complete interviews (it’s free), but here are some of the quotables that I thought pastors and other christian leaders could profitably reflect upon. “Early on I didn’t know how to delegate. I was always trying to do other people’s jobs. I learned you’ll drive yourself crazy doing that, and you won’t have good people working for you very long.”Condoleeza Rice, Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. Q. How do you respond to criticism
“If the criticism is structural or intellectual in nature, and it makes sense in terms of your procedures and what you’re trying to communicate, then you listen to it. If it’s personal—or if it’s a mixture of both—then you become very, very skeptical.”
Richard Serra, Metal sculptor who put himself through Yale by working in a steel mill. “You usually can’t change people’s minds by the intellect. You’ve got to find something that reaches into their hearts… [But] if you can find a story, if you can make them think and not be defensive, sometimes the toughest person can change.”
Jane Goodall, World’s foremost expert on Chimpanzees. Q. What do you look for when you hire executive chefs?
“I don’t hire them. I bring them up from my team. The highest level we’ll hire from outside is a line cook.”
Mario Batali, Chef-Entrepreneur. Q. How do you react when your team is in a slump?
“Number one, you can’t panic. You can’t have a bad week and start throwing things. Your character has to be the same whether you are winning or losing. If it’s not, then you care about the winning and losing more than you do about the people.”
Joe Girardi, Manager of the New York Yankees. “I can become fanatical about things. I hope in my old age I’m slightly more measured but in order to make something work you often have to often exclude anything else. There may be more intelligent people who don’t have to do that, but I have to. It’s a single-mindedness.”
James Dyson, who created 5,127 prototypes of his Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner before settling on the model that made him a billionaire. Q. What made Katharine Graham a great newspaper publisher?
“She loved the newsroom. She was down two, three, four times a day. She couldn’t go home at night without coming down and saying, “Whaddya got? Whaddya got?” That is a wonderful thing for reporters—to see the superboss down there.”
Ben Bradlee, The Washington Post’s executive editor from 1968 to 1991, a period in which the paper won 23 Pulitzer Prizes and exposed the Watergate scandal. “Preparation is everything. You need to rehearse so you’re confident in the set, you know the songs very, very well and what’s going to happen very, very well. It has to be flawless… On stage you almost have to convince yourself this is the last time. You perform as if you’ve never played it before and you’re never going to play it again.”
Annie Lennox, who sold more than 80 million albums, logged numerous hit singles, and won four Grammys. “I’m not a physician and a storyteller. I regard the two things as linked… Writing gives one a way of reflecting and re-experiencing.”
Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, whose books of clinical tales have become bestsellers. Q. Were you immediately successful?
“I didn’t have a clue. It took me about 10 years to learn the craft—not in school, in the factories. But I was very lucky to have incredible women around me who were mad about what I was doing—Bianca Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Marisa Berenson, so many.”
Manolo Blahnik, perhaps the world’s most famous shoe designer, whose name has become synonymous with luxury.
Staying on the leadership tightrope
The Christian leader has to juggle numerous balls while innumerable forces seem to pull him in every direction. On top of that, the Bible presents at least 20 biblical models of leadership. Twenty! You mean I have to be twenty things at one time?!
Not exactly. Sometimes the situation is simple and demands a single model of leadership. More commonly, depending on the situation, the Christian leader has to combine different elements and proportions of the Bible’s leadership models. And here is where so many go so wrong. It is so easy to become imbalanced. 1. Temperament imbalances us.Temperaments or characteristics, per se, are not sinful. God has wisely given different leaders different characters for different times and different purposes. However, our temperaments or personalities do tend to imbalance us. Men with confident, forceful personalities are going to be more attracted to the authoritative Captain model; while men with gentler, more compassionate natures are going to be more like the caring nursing Mother (1 Thess. 2:7). Men who enjoy debates, will love the Reformer model; while those who hate controversy will default to the Peacemaker model. Men with speaking skills, will tend to speak more than listen; while men who listen well, will listen more than speak. While we have to work on our weaknesses, we also have to beware lest the strengths God has given us become our weaknesses. 2. Sin imbalances us.
Sin has weakened every faculty, every sense, and every aspect of our gifts and abilities. Take our thinking abilities, which enter into every aspect of leadership. Every thought we have passes through our brain. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, passes through our brain as a thought, using a phenomenally complicated combination of electrical impulses and chemical reactions. Brain surgeon Ludvic Zrinzo said: “The brain is the final frontier. If you look at the number of neurons, synapses and connections, these vastly outnumber the stars in our galaxy, and we won’t understand all the complexities for many generations to come.” Stanford researchers have found that, “A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.”
But like the rest of our bodies, our brain is fallen; the chemistry and electrics are faulty. That means that even if we lived in a perfect world, our perceptions and thoughts about it are going to be imperfect.
That also means that even if we had perfect hearts with perfect desires and motives, these desires and motives are often going to be obstructed, misdirected, frustrated, or weakened by having to pass through our misfiring and imbalanced brains. In other words, whether it is an incoming perception or an outgoing thought or desire, they are going to be “damaged” to one degree or other by passing through our brain.
But of course we do not live in a perfect world, and we do not have perfect hearts either. On top of a fallen and faulty brain, we have to contend with our fallen and faulty hearts and environments. What a toxic mix! When we have sin coming at us from within and without, and all being processed by a sin-cursed brain, all these negative forces combine to make it very easy to unbalance and fall off the leadership tightrope. 3. Role models imbalance us.We are all thankful for the powerful impact of godly men and women in our lives. God has given us pastors, elders, teachers who have modeled godly leadership for us. We cannot help but consciously, or unconsciously, imitate these people. However, strangely, we often tend to imitate their quirks, eccentricities, and idiosyncrasies, rather than their strengths and qualities. And even the best models were best for their time and situation. Their kind of leadership may not be suitable for us, or our time, or our situation. The secret of Christian leadership is having the spiritual wisdom to know the balance of leadership characteristics required for each situation you are dealing with. Knowing your temperament, knowing your sin, and knowing how role models have influenced you will help you to prayerfully seek God’s wisdom to know what kind of leader you should be. Of course, this means, that sometimes the Christian leader is changing his approach multiple times in a day. In the one situation he has to be a courageous captain, in another a far-sighted visionary, in another a team builder, etc. And sometimes when being a team builder he has to act as part-peacemaker, part-administrator, part-judge, etc. Our ability to choose the right model for each situation, or the right models in the right proportions, will make or break our ministries and our congregations. It is that significant. If what’s called for is a listening ear, and all we do is talk; or if we choose peacemaking instead of fighting when facing false doctrine, then we have failed ourselves, our congregations and God Himself. In the light of all this are we not thankful for the promise: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5). God alone is able to balance out all our imbalances and keep us on the tightrope.
Children’s Bible Reading Plan (13)
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‘Tis the season to be…depressed
Last year a student and I put together a short video about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). With yesterday being the shortest day of the year, I thought this might be an opportune time to make it available again.
And if videos are not your thing, here is a really helpful article about how physiological and seasonal factors can contribute to depression. It is written in simple language, includes great illustrations, and some practical how-to’s (and how not-to’s) The focus is on two potentially problematic areas: the importance of sleep and the effect of nutrition. Here are a few extracts: The importance of sleep
“Sleep to a human is like refueling the car. You can’t drive a car 60 miles everyday without refilling the gas tank. The same is true with body and sleep. Adult humans need seven to nine hours of sleep per night to function optimally.” “Fatigue from sleep deprivation has many of the same symptoms as depression. Dr. Edward Welsh of the Christian Counseling Education Foundation here in Philadelphia explained that sometimes clients who feel depressed are actually sleep deprived. This is not to say that all depression is merely sleep deprivation. But rather, certain symptoms may develop without proper sleep. Furthermore, a sleep-deprived brain can’t handle stressors like a fully rested brain. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas many people log long stressful days without balancing it with necessary sleep.”
The effect of nutrition
“Giving your body proper nutrition is like keeping all of your car’s fluids full and clean. Let me say from personal experience, if you don’t have coolant in your radiator, you will find smoke billowing out of your car’s hood.”
“If we were to put butter in the radiator fluid, it may function OK, but not optimally. If we continue to put butter into the mix, the car will eventually be nothing more than a fancy cigarette lighter. The same goes with our bodies. We treat them badly, then wonder why the feel so run down. Furthermore, when we are not giving our brains the nutrients they need to perform well, then stressors will seem all the more overwhelming.
Every time you feed your body food devoid of nutritional value, you place the task of food digestion on your body, but give it none of the tools (vitamins, fiber, protein, and whatnot) that it needs to do the job done. This leaves your systems weakened instead of bolstered, leaving you open for attack by viruses and bacteria. Whether we end up getting sick or not, the brain is also harmed. And, when the brain is harmed we may feel depressed.”
Read the whole article here.