The Empowered Leader: 10 Keys to Servant Leadership

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Introduction

This book is not about success; it is about leadership. Robert A. Raines has reminded us in his dynamic title that Success Is a Moving Target. But leadership is a fixed goal at which we may take aim, fire, and gather in the trophy. God has never called anyone in ministry to be successful. But the whole of biblical and Christian history is a cumulative account of God's call to leadership.

Leadership is the compass of living. No other subject has been so explored in our day. Corporate heads and management specialists are constantly addressing the issue. They usually do this in an attempt to tell others how to ride the crest of corporate or political control. How should we who are Christians view leadership? How should our understanding of leadership differ from that of the secular getaheader?

Every Christian who desires to become a leader must first know how to follow. While the major precepts of this book are drawn from a study of David of Israel, I suspect you bought this book because you are interested in developing your own leadership skills. It is my hope that this book serves both ends. For only when leadership is consistent with the biblical model can it really be servant leadership.

But is it consistent to talk about servant leadership in a book entitled The Empowered Leader? Let us grapple with this question as we seek to understand the relationship between power and servanthood.

I struggled in writing this book with issues of title and theme. Power is often a corrupting force in the secular world. Power is often a megaword in the megachurch. But King David called himself the servant of God. He hungered to be a person of obedience. Still he knew if he ever forged Israel into a nation, he must also be a man of power. Most of us who follow Christ prefer to follow servant-leaders rather than power-hungry tyrants. Is there a connection between empowered leadership and servant leadership?

At the outset, let me remind you of an important New Testament principle: If you would be king of all, you must become the servant of all (Matt. 20:27). A contemporary spin on this might be Zig Ziglar's belief that you can best achieve what you want in life if you are servant enough to help others achieve what they want in life.

A young deacon in a church I once served paid me the highest compliment when he said, From your life I have learned that leadership is servanthood. I pray his words are true, for all who are going to be effective Christian leaders must first know how to follow Christ. Jesus warned all would-be entrepreneurs that it does little good to gain the whole world if we lose our souls (Luke 9:25). Christ was meek (Matt. 11:29), but He was no weakling. In all relationships, He must be seen as a man of empowered leadership. He did not quail before Herod nor simper before Pilate.

Jesus was a man whose servant-leadership powerfully declared itself. As a servant, He had submitted His life to God. In a similar way, we set free the real power of God's leadership in our lives by surrendering our weakness to His power.

At times in the lives of individuals, corporations, nations, and churches, there is a vacuum in the kind of leadership David's life defined. His meteoric rise in Israel came at a time when the nation floundered. It needed direction and vision. But herein lies the glorious paradox that inhabits the heart of Christian leadership: only those who can obey are worthy to mandate. David was worthy to lead people only because he had learned how to follow God.

If God has called you to Christian leadership, may this study challenge you to follow Christ to lead His people, His way. Only then can you become all that God has called you to be. Be firm in this intention. If God has called you to lead, do so! All leadership is strong. Weak leadership is no leadership. Out of spiritual meekness, boldly command. Lead with power or do not call yourself a leader. But beware your strong pronouncements. Never assume a bogus authority that makes you feel you have the right to run things. Rather, bow your head and let God confer upon you the authority from above that will make you strong for the kind of leadership He requires.

In this book as we examine the various facets of David's leadership we will see him as a great yet ordinary man. Great and ordinary is the usual recipe of leadership. Most great leaders are wonderfully blind to their own significance. They are not ego-oriented, they are task-oriented. They never define themselves out of what they see in the mirror of corporate success. Rather they see themselves in the light of what God has called them to do. David was such a man. As you begin this study, it would be well for you to read 1 Samuel 16 through 2 Samuel 9. The progression of this study will be better understood if you are somewhat familiar with this period of David's life. As you read this book remember this: leadership is expected of leaders; indeed it is demanded. It is imperative for all who want to steer their church on a visionary course.

The chief points of this study offer a well-tried application for church leaders. But the principles may also apply to all who are engaged in corporate leadership as well. The Bible is relevant to every age. Make no mistake: the principles of leadership found in Scripture are applicable in every area of secular business. The Bible has sometimes been ignored by the Forbes-Magazine-Wall-Street-Journal person as a spiritual but pre-modern point of view. It is therefore often seen as beside the point in the right-now world of commerce, entrepreneurship, and technology. If such a notion permeates your view of how great leadership is to be done, let us reason together toward a more biblical viewpoint.

The objectives of this study are three. First, I want the wisdom of Scripture to speak a clear and usable word to every contemporary Christian leader. Second, I want those sound leadership themes that dominate current thinking to be linked with scriptural insight. I have tried to study contemporary management and to familiarize myself with the works of Harry Levinson, Peter Drucker, James MacGregor Burns, Thomas J. Peters, Warren Bennis, Burt Nanus, J. Paul Getty, Anthony Robbins, Philip Greenslade, Robert D. Dale, Kenneth Blanchard, Robert A. Raines, Bert Decker, Joe D. Batten, Max DePree, and others. You will find these pages dotted with sprinklings of their wisdom. I have sought to learn all I can from those secular and corporate thinkers I was not exposed to in my theological training. While this book is hardly exhaustive, I hope that I have presented those important principles that can make a difference in your leadership.

Finally, I hope to define Christian leadership in such a way that it escapes the haphazard reputation it often acquires. If this book furnishes you with new tools for leading, or a few fresh insights for service, I will be more than compensated.

KEY 1

Fostering an Honest

Servant Image

No human being can exist for long

without some sense of his own significance.

Whether he gets it by

shooting a haphazard victim on the street,

or by constructive work, or by rebellion,

or by psychotic demands in a hospital,

or by Walter Mitty fantasies,

he must be able to feel this I-count-for-something

and be able to live out that felt significance.

Rollo May,

Power and Innocence

The loss of the leader in some sense or other, the birth of misgivings about him, brings on the outbreak of panic.

Sigmund Freud,

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego

Why man, he doth bestride the world like a colossus.

William Shakespeare,

Julius Caesar

Letter 1

Dear Leader:

Nobody's perfect! I understand that, OK? Still, I will only follow you if you convince me that you are more interested in being my leader than my boss. Bosses have a way of being too interested in their own career or in the corporate agenda. Believe me, I ought to know. I've had lots of bosses. They were all concerned only about my performance or my output. But to be honest, none of them seemed all that interested in me.

Now, don't tell me that I have nothing to worry about because this is a Christian organization. I've been a part of several churches that talked about leadership but practiced bosshood. They formed programs and built structures that prized people's worth on how much those people produced. Nursery duty, ushering, teaching Sunday School, driving the church van, giving or counting money—all these items became the measurement of worth. Tell me this: How is it that pastors who started out as leaders at last became only bosses, tending their religious machines, ordering them to produce growth?

I'm looking for a pastor who really believes that he who is greatest among you must be your servant (see Matt. 20:26). For me, Jesus abandoned His need for CEO status the night He knelt with a basin and towel and started washing feet. This is a modern age and all that, but I'm not looking for a pastor with an eelskin briefcase and matching Daytimer. I am far more eager to follow that leader who is unashamed to carry a basin and towel. That's the person who can lead as Jesus led, because that's the person who lives as Jesus lived. So, Pastor, get yourself a basin and towel and start serving. Then lead. I promise I'll be right behind you.

—Your Follower

1 Samuel 16:1–13; 18:1–8

It has been well said that others are the mirrors to ourselves. To be an effective leader, you must be perceived as a leader by those you lead. So this study of leadership properly begins with a look at yourself. In chapters 16 and 18 of 1 Samuel, how others perceived David is laid out for your examination. In this chapter we will examine how others perceive your leadership. But keep these important qualities in the front of your mind as you move to the next chapter, where we shall consider how you perceive yourself.

The importance given to the self in the current me generation has sometimes displaced the importance of others. In an age where selfishness abounds, we must ask, Does anybody really see a leader? In truth, does anybody see anybody? Mike Mason says that in our day there is an overwhelming tendency to treat others as though they are merely extensions of ourselves. Compared with us, therefore, others do not seem to be quite real. We see them as if through a haze, the haze of our own all-engulfing self-hood.¹ While Mason's rhetoric is firm, it is not altogether true. However high your own self-esteem rises, you do see other people. You observe them and measure all that they are against all that you are. Through such comparison you learn to define who you are as you take your place in this world. In this gawking society we must all live under the eye of others and leaders are scrutinized most of all.

How do leaders appear? In many ways. One thing, however, must be said of all of them: they appear to be leaders! Leadership always declares itself ! Leadership never translates as anything less than what it is.

I have always disagreed with a poster that appeared in a Minneapolis barber shop. It presented a picture of Albert Einstein in a last, dramatic photograph. The great mathematical genius appears godlike in that photograph with his shock of wild, white hair flying over his keen, deep-set eyes. Yet the caption beneath the poster slurred, A bad haircut can make anybody look dumb. The comment is both belittling and untrue. Einstein was a genius and can be perceived in no other way; the poster has lied.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that what most people want as a model for leadership is a strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will.² The gifts that such men possess project as charisma. You may never have taken the time to define charisma, but you know it when you see it. Charisma, however, may be the least obvious to those who are closest to it. Why is it that in 1 Samuel, Jesse (and indeed, his other sons) seemed to be the last to see David as a potential candidate to be anointed king? Could it be that David's newness to Samuel caused his charisma to be so much more apparent than it was to the rest of his family? Had Jesse's family seen David so often that they had really ceased to see him at all?

David was, of course, not the only person in Scripture to whom this happened. Jesus Himself seemed to surprise the good people of His hometown by becoming quite popular. His great charisma as a leader was recognized everywhere, but mostly by those who did not know Him as well as the hometown folks did. They, in a sense, overknew Jesus.

There was a very ordinary boy in my hometown who seemed destined to amount to very little. But he surprised us all by becoming a nuclear physicist—a true leader in his field. Leaders survive in spite of our vain attempts to contain them within the overly familiar ways we know them. We see them too close-up. We cannot give them that separating perspective that they need to allow them a place in the larger world. We perceive them as little because our world is little, our view is little. Only as we allow them to outgrow our small perception can we see their leadership as large.

Why is this? John White suggests that leaders have a kind of elitism that cannot be denied. What is this elitism? A winning magnetism! The quality of this magnetism is most attractive in the leader who is not cocky or oversold on his or her charisma. Such a leader is psychologically secure with no need to toot his own horn. Even though it may be difficult for small minds to see, great leadership always proclaims itself.

We all grant Jesus His singular Godhead. Thus we cannot lump Him together with mere earthly leaders. But I wonder if this self-proclamation is what Jesus addressed when He said to His critics on Palm Sunday, If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out (Luke 19:40, KJV). Make no mistake about it! Who you are and what you are have a way of becoming known in the world.

Consider this question: If this self-proclaiming elitism characterizes your life, will not your devotion to God cause others to see the quality of your leadership? There is but one mix for great leadership that is unstoppable! Inward substance and outward daring—the Spirit of God and magnetic motivation all in a single life—is God's recipe for greatness.

What elusive qualities attend such secure persons? Could a primary quality be meekness? It is the meek who will inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5). The word meek is best translated power under control. Jesus was called meek, not weak. Meekness is not a lack of power but the confidence that issues from it. W. E. Vine reminds us that our Lord was meek precisely because He had all the power of heaven at His command. At the cross ten thousand angels waited upon the one simple command Jesus never gave. God's Son was meek (Matt. 11:29), made so by His willingness to yield the use of His vast power to His Father's caprice. The meek weep and pray in secret, but in public they may defy heaven and earth. The meek inherit the very earth, said Jesus, because they never lose charge of their self-control. They only tremble before the possibility of becoming abusive with the power they know is theirs. They prefer to die rather than kill. They are like a shepherd defending his sheep or a mother protecting her young. They sacrifice without grumbling, give without calculating, suffer without groaning.³ Christ's true leaders are really His followers who use the levers of God and fulcrums of their esecure selfhood to move the world.

THE THREE INGREDIENTS

OF

GOD'S RECIPE FOR GREATNESS

So in 1 Samuel 16–18, the embryonic charisma of the timid would-be leader of God surfaced as power. Samuel saw such charisma in a shepherd and poured the horn of oil on the boy's head. And what an old prophet immediately perceived as the marks of a leader, Israel would soon see and long celebrate.

The Perception of a Leader

In 1 Samuel 16:1–5, the prophet Samuel gathers Jesse's sons to look for a potential king. We cannot tell exactly who the prophet had in mind as he searched for a monarch in that dusty, one-camel town, Bethlehem. But we can be sure that the old prophet would see no one as fit for a king whom God did not approve as kingly. Again, all leaders must be self-proclaiming. Among Jesse's sons there were none whose demeanor said, I would make a great king. This seems self-contradictory, for there were many of his sons whose appearance seemed to say that. They were kingly in stature, but not in demeanor. It is easy to be as tall as a king, but not easy to be as regal.

But how are we to gain the proper perception of great leadership? How can we look at all leaders through the bifocals of discernment?