The Servant-Leader

Currently Reading
Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future
By Ben J. Wattenberg
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Welcome back.

Before we move on to my final post regarding this article, I wanted to thank all of you for your thought provoking contributions. I hope you guys have enjoyed talking through this article as much as I have. Besides continuing to document my journey and thinking on this blog, I’m thinking about taking one day a week to write about “Creativity: Drawing out the Genius in all of us.” What do you think?

In addition, I have some interesting things brewing on my end that I’ll post fairly soon. Until Monday. Follow Him. He knows where he’s going.

The Seven Ways [“Action Logics”] of Leadership plus ONE

The Opportunist –wins any way possible
The Diplomat –avoids overt conflict
The Expert –rules by logic and experience
The Achiever–meets strategic goals
The Individualist–Interweaves competing personal and company action logics
The Strategist— generates organizational and personal transformations
The Alchemist–generates social transformation
The Servant-Leader –remembers the forgotten and along with a community of Christ followers collaborates to change the whole world one life at a time.

Q: “How do you raise leaders?”

A: “We train people of character and conviction. History raises leaders.”

Christ following leaders are not primarily concerned with their place in history: Am I an Alchemist? They are primarily concerned with faithfulness to Christ –am I His servant?– whether their assignment is large or small.

We know of king David because he is one of the heroes who lived. David didn’t know when he picked up those smooth stones and began to run into the Valley of Elah screaming like hell that he was in Samuel Chapter 17. If he had died there he would have been another nameless, stupid boy who died in an unknown valley. William Wallace set one foot before the other and led a coalition of clans across a field against an army of overwhelming force. He didn’t know that he would one day be played by Mel Gibson in a feature film. Like David, he lived. For a while.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t the heroes and leaders who fall unheralded and unknown or who serve faithfully but without celebrity that cause the angels to rise to their feet and cheer.

Do we lead within the cause of Christ and seek to climb the ladder within it out of personal ambition? Or do we wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how we might make the world a better place for others, for the generations to come, and willingly lay down our lives that the triumph of Christ might resound in all the earth?

Love.

Christ following leaders touch the world and it turns to gold because of love. In a comment on an earlier post, Dominic provided for us the definition of Alchemist. An Alchemist is one who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, the wasted into a treasure. The love that is the power within the gospel and the source of all things in the universe turns everything it touches into something beautiful. And this love beams like lasers from the Christ follower’s eyes, hands and words when we speak and heal in the name of Jesus.

OK, we may never be well known. And we may never talk to kings. But if we walk in the way of Jesus, even should no one else know our names, perhaps eternity will rise to its feet and cheer.

Photographs