Servant Leadership

As a pastor who views church as a learning community, I am a teacher among teachers. Practically that means I sit under the teaching of my community with regularity. Tonight I participated in a group studying the book Lead Like Jesus.

The discussion was ably led and the conversation was good. The book is pretty much in the main of current literature and falls under the Robert Greenleaf umbrella of Servant Leadership. Indeed, Greenleaf's work is seminal to this school of thought.

I asked the question of the group tonight, "Do you buy this?" I asked because I'm not sure I totally buy it myself. I agree with the Lead like Jesus concepts, but the back story of servant leadership - at least from the philosophical point of view - is not one upon which I'm totally settled.

I think Jesus' leadership capacity came from a deeply rooted sense of self-definition and a non-anxious presence. I'm heavily influenced by Ed Friedman and Bowen theory, so if you know their stuff, you know my slant on how self-definition and non-anxious presence are the keys to leadership in any arena. In serving his disciples at the famous foot-washing, Jesus seems more about modeling the contrarian, upside-down nature of God's kingdom than about establishing a way for CEO's to increase the bottom line and employee happiness factors.

There are numerous tantalizing theological rabbits to chase on this. Some of the folk tonight mentioned their belief that Jesus knew his mission and purpose so clearly as to know the time and method of his death. However, I'm not personally convinced of this and if pressed, I can make a strong Biblical case for my position.

If we follow that strand of thinking we must deal with the issue of God intentionally planning for God's own death. Some theologians refer to this concept as either "The Suffering God" or the "Sacred Suicide." Purposing one's on physical death is quite the violent act - and some theologians purport that God's act of self-death was a guilt-offering to humankind.

While I'm not sure about all those theories, I go back to my position that Jesus as servant leader had a clearly defined mission, a clearly defined self, and in living fully in the image of God brought a revolution to the world. Jesus was by all accounts a non-anxious, self-defined presence.

My read on the Jesus of the gospels is that we're dealing with a guy who led from the inside out, was playing for an audience of One, and didn't give a rip about winning friends or influencing people. I'm convinced that if we are to truly lead like Jesus it will have more to do with sitting quietly with God and brooding over whom we are as a human before we can step into any arena we aspire to lead.