Virtuous Leadership and the Knife’s Edge Proposition of Power

Have you ever heard anyone claim they were hoping to raise up a generation of meek people?  Ever attended a kindness-ship conference?  I haven't either.  I attended a leadership conference once:  I was one of hundreds of junior high boys and girls at a conference in Rhode Island ignoring our speaker’s eloquent words about raising up a generation of leaders as we all sat awkwardly and hoped arrival at this event meant we were finally cool.  We ate square slices of sheet-tray pizza and were commended by our exhausted chaperones for our natural leadership ability as if popularity, itself, were a commendable trait.

     We have a tendency to treat leadership like it's one of the fruit of the spirit, or some kind of clear virtue.  It's important we be aware, however, that the Bible doesn’t have that tendency at all.  If there is a theme among the virtues listed as fruit of the spirit, it's that each trait requires that we treat the people around us with the God-given dignity that is due them.  Dominion couldn’t be farther from the point.  Jesus, prone to give the occasional list, himself, begins the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, in which he says “Blessed are the meek”.  Self-promoters need not apply.  

Part of what is so audacious about Jesus’ teachings is how boldly he condemned the Jewish leaders that held power around him.  Another prominent list in Matthew is Jesus’ 7 “woes” preached to the Teachers of the Law and Pharisees.  In this painfully direct sermon, he calls these Jewish leaders “hypocrites” 6 times, while sprinkling in “blind guides”, and the exuberantly pejorative “brood of vipers” seemingly for emphasis and poetic effect.  Jesus reserves his harshest words for those who choose to lead, as well as one of his most ominous warnings:  “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”  I’m guessing when the Pharisees pictured Jesus it wasn’t as a smiling man cuddling a lamb.  

The point of all this isn’t that leadership is, in itself, evil.  Jesus, after all, does quite a bit of leading and sends out his disciples to do the same.  The point is that leadership happens in dangerous proximity to power and notoriety.  These have a corrupting effect on the truth-telling role of leaders, drawing them to one side or the other off of a knife’s edge.  They are subconsciously tempted stray in either of two directions. In some cases, they “tell itching ears what they want to hear”, softening the truth about sin and repentance to earn the favor of listeners. In others, they “shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces” through legalist teachings that lead listeners to overestimate the teacher's righteousness and feel hopeless about their own. Each of these tactics is meant to bolster the notoriety and status of the leader, but does so at the expense of the truth and the spiritual wellbeing of followers.

The solution for this problem requires leaders to be humble, willing to be outshined by those they lead. to borrow words from Paul’s inspired explanation of cooperative living, we are tempted to “think of ourselves more highly than we ought” instead of understanding ourselves as parts of a body, each essential to the whole.  It is the duty of the Christian leader, then, to ignore the empty notoriety of leadership and lean into their role as teacher, organizer, and enabler.

Image Source:  AlunGathergood.com

       The notoriety of a leader is a practical necessity brought on by the simple fact that in order to give instruction one must have the attention of those they lead.  In Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, the forming stage, in which a team first begins to take shape, calls for all members to watch the leader to get their instructions or learn their cues.  This doesn’t require that the leader be brilliant or that the followers be dim-witted.  It simply describes the direction of organizing force in the moment of group formation.  A successful executive leads engineers, salespeople and accountants whose capacities in their areas of expertise far exceed their own.  Conversely, if a football team consisted of all coaches, their excellent plans would fail for lack of muscle and an abundance of age-induced injury.  As Paul so well understood in his “one body with many parts” analogy, the leader does not need to be the smartest or the strongest.  In fact, when a team’s leader feels they must be the smartest or strongest in the group, they have become their own team’s limiting factor.    

On this basis, a key quality in a leader is the ability to respect the great capacities of their teammates.  They must see the image of God in them and respond to them with the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that characterize God’s own lordship.  What greater opportunity for godliness do we have than to respond to rebellion with self-control, faithfulness, and patience?  Jesus was moved at the very sight of the people he led, noting that “they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  What better way can we be imitators of Christ than to be moved by the needs of those we lead to acts of sacrificial love and kindness?  A leader who perceives the image-of-God dignity in each of their teammates has a profound opportunity to be an image bearer, themselves, by living out principles that embody God’s own character.

     A leader is not meant to be a glamorous locus of power, but an organizing force who recognizes the power of the people they lead.  A Christ-like leader should not be characterized by privilege, but by sacrifice.  A Godly leader appropriately imitates God, not by being so powerful they cannot be approached, but by being gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.  To lead is to take up a precarious position, with the seductive force of power near at hand.  It is also, however, a profound opportunity to be exactly what we are made to be:  Imitators of Christ, parts of his very body, and agents of his love.