On Being a Biblical Servant Leader: Insights from the Global Church
I am a leader, sometimes even a servant leader. But so are you, dear reader. Perhaps you want to be a leader. Or you are one and want out! (It is hard.) Or you don’t think you are a leader (but you actually are). Then this article is for you. Leadership is influence expressed in relationships, organizations and communities in which certain goals are accomplished, and followership is gained. The people influenced can be two in number or two thousand. Even a baby has leadership through influencing when she or he gets fed. And many people who are not in formal leadership roles are, nevertheless, leaders. They have a circle of influence.
Servant leaders serve their followers. They are primarily concerned with meeting the real needs of their followers, not necessarily their wants. And servant leaders are not primarily interested in controlling their followers. They want their followers to enlist freely in the purpose of the organization, the church or the business in which they work.
How Do You Become a Leader
Leaders can be born that way. Such people are usually gifted with charisma. Other people just want to be with these charismatic leaders and follow them. But charisma without character is dangerous—which is why the New Testament names character as the number one requirement for church leadership. But there are other ways one becomes a leader. The Spirit of God can come on a person and make them a leader through Spirit gifts of exhortation, healing, teaching, giving, or administration. Sometimes cultural circumstances draw out a person’s leadership. Take, for example, Mahandas Gandhi in South Africa and later in colonial India, or Adolf Hitler in post-World War I Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the “group is the womb of the leader.”[1] So a group sucks leadership out of some person in that group.[2] But, finally, leaders can be made as the result of followers being made into leaders by the leader. This is what Jesus did with Peter when he said to him, “feed my sheep” (John 21:17). So, a simple formula sums up this paragraph: leadership equals the person of the leader, plus the followers plus the situation. No person, no leadership. No followers, no leadership. No suitable situation, no leadership. But there is more to defining leadership than this.
Leadership can use various bases of power and it is important for a person to be aware of why they have influence. First, there is positional power (the president, the pastor, the CEO). Then there is affiliation as a base for power (with whom you are associated, preferably an esteemed or influential person). Then there is the base of information and knowledge (degrees, certificates or life-learned wisdom). And, finally, there is relationships as a base for power. But, just as there are multiple bases of power there are many kinds of leadership.
Spiritual leadership is influence that arises from the spiritual life of the leader. So, Paul in his farewell speech to the Ephesian elders said, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28) This means that leadership is more than mere pragmatics—who does what, when, and where. Spiritual leadership nurtures the spiritual life of the people you are serving. It is concerned with the souls of their followers. But, reminiscent of the instructions given on airplanes that, should there be a sudden drop in air pressure, you must put on your own mask first before you assist anyone else. We must take care of our own souls. In passing I note that one can be a spiritual leader, not only in church, but in business, in the home, in the political arena and just about anywhere. But there is a form of leadership that includes soul-care but goes farther.
Kingdom leadership, incorporates both general leadership and spiritual leadership and has as its purpose the values and goals of the kingdom of God, in a word, it is concerned with “bringing in the kingdom.”[3] The kingdom of God is the master thought of Jesus[4] and is the heart of the Gospel (Matt 5:17). Sometimes leading in kingdom work or kingdom ministry is called integral or wholistic mission. In the New Testament all disciples of Jesus are given the privilege of leading or ruling in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:29-30; see also Rev 22:5). The kingdom is wholistic. It is God’s gracious provision for human flourishing and bringing shalom not only to people but to the whole world, and all creation. The kingdom of God is God’s new world coming. And we have a part in bringing in the kingdom. St Augustine said, “God without us will not, as we without God cannot.”[5] We can work with God in bringing in the kingdom not only in the church, but also in business, homes, politics, the media, the art and music worlds, as well as in home-making, farming, trades, and manufacturing. But this article is about servant leadership, which combines, in my view, general, spiritual and kingdom leadership.
Biblical Servant Leadership
Servant leadership is that strange, enigmatic, self-contradictory, even oxymoronic combination of words, like “fried ice” or “falling upwards.” How can one be a servant and a leader at the same time? That is the question that is pondered by writers of the many books on this subject since Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phase. And why try? So, these authors representing men and women of the church, the theological world, and people active in society representing many different cultures of the world, are trying to apply servant leadership to the church and societal enterprises. Greenleaf himself said that servant leadership should make the people so served more healthy, more free to invest themselves autonomously in the corporation, the church or the enterprise, and more willing to become servants to others. But first we must ask whether the concept is biblical.
How do you define servant leadership according to the Bible when Scripture is full of good and bad examples of leadership? Do you use case studies of good leaders, for example, Jesus and the apostles? Do you look into the Older Testament, to explore the leadership of Nehemiah, Daniel, and Moses (this last leader was known as the meekest of all men, Num 12:3). Or do you find in the Bible the actual commissions to be a servant leader such as found in the four “servant songs” of Isaiah (Isa 42-53) in which the leader is, first of all, a servant of the Lord, and only secondly a servant of the people—a nice, intriguing, and critical pattern in which the servant is called to serve both vertically and horizontally at the same time.
In Isaiah that servant of the Lord is called by God and is empowered by the favour of God (“in whom I delight,” 42:1-9)—which incidentally is the ultimate answer for personal insecurity, possibly the number one problem of leaders. But in the second servant song she or he is vindicated. The servant feels he has spent his strength for nothing at all (Isa 49:1-7)—and which leader has not felt that!—but his vindication is with the Lord. Third, the servant leader experiences her Gethsemene as she suffers rejection, the whipping and lashing of people’s tongues—though she has learned in life experience the word that sustains the weary (50: 4-9). And finally, the servant, now clearly an individual, is indeed the Christ experiencing his crucifixion (52:13-53:12). “By his wounds we are healed…. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” While this last servant song clearly points to what only Christ can do as the God-man, and the suffering servant who is also the King, there is a cross to be borne when one is a leader, something Luther affirmed when he said that there is a cross to be taken up in the marketplace. All of us long-experienced in leadership know the truth of this. My President of Regent College used to say to me when I was the academic dean, “You and I must take the pain of the organization.”
Take another exhortation in the Bible, the future king of Israel described in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, a king to be appointed when the people come into the land and demand a king “like all the nations.” But this king must be different. He must have character. He must have social integrity, being one of the people, not a foreigner parachuted in; financial integrity, not accumulating “large amounts of silver and gold” or multiple horses (read cars); eschatological integrity, not taking people back to Egypt but onwards to the new heaven and new earth; sexual integrity, not taking “many wives” or his heart will be led astray; spiritual integrity as he keeps a copy of God’s law to follow it. The king is to revere God as his King. But the final qualification is a litmus test for a servant leader. He is “not [to] consider himself better than his fellow Israelites” (17: 20). Such is a stunning model of servant leadership, simultaneously serving God and people with an emphasis on personal integrity.
In passing it is worth noting that Dee Hock, former president of VISA International offered the following qualifications for a leader. It is something critically important for churches hunting for a pastor or a business looking for a manager:
Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to use by people with other qualities.[6]
But this emphasis on personal integrity carries over to the New Testament where Paul in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 spells out the character qualifications for a servant leader in the church. While the text explains what to look for in a church leader it is also critical advice when you are looking for someone to assume leadership in a societal organization. All of the qualifications are character traits, not educational qualifications, or special abilities. Think and brood on the list: not a lover of money, a good reputation with outsiders, respectable, not quarrelsome, not quick-tempered, hospitable, loves what is good, faithful to his wife [or husband], not violent but gentle, not overbearing, temperate, self-controlled, and not given to drunkenness [not addicted]. These are all external, observable character qualifications but they correspond quite closely to the internal, hidden, working of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-6).
But there is a second great contribution made by the authors of this book: cultural awareness. This is approached both historically and in terms of some of the great cultures of the world, especially, Africa and Asia.
Global Servant Leadership
Personally, I have worked in many countries of the world, primarily of course in Canada, but also in Asia, Europe, South America, and for ten years in Africa. I have worked in pastoral leadership, worked in not-for-profits, Christian organizations, business, and now in my seventies and eighties, in the Institute for Marketplace Transformation, a global organization facilitating the connection of faith and work for churches, theological schools and businesses. I have experienced the clash of servant leadership with church cultures, business cultures, political cultures and the embodied gender roles in various cultures. I am aware of the importance of learning the DNA of the organization before one attempts to lead it, and certainly before one attempts to slowly make changes in the organizational culture. Cultures resist change and tend always to restore themselves to the “tried and true.” But be sure of it the organizational culture speaks more loudly than the president or the pastor on what are the values of this organization, what is important, and who is important.[7] In this matter I have both succeeded and failed as a leader. Once or twice I have taken an exit visa when the going went rough.
But I remember when I became the Academic Dean at Regent College in Vancouver that the then president, my boss, Dr. Walter Wright, served me by saying four things when he hired me. First, “I guarantee your success. If you fail it is because I failed as your supervisor.” How empowering that is! Second, “On your annual review there will be nothing negative. I will stay up the night before and write a long letter of affirmation and give it to you.” (I remember reading these letters and thinking, Is that really me?). But third, “We will have breakfast each Thursday morning and will talk about everything. When things are not going right, we will deal with it then, not in the annual review. No surprises. And no secrets.” But the fourth thing he said was what marked him as a servant of the Lord watching over my soul, that combination of general, spiritual, and kingdom leadership. “In this job you will have to deal with yourself. You love to teach because you get strokes from your students. It feeds something in you. But you will get no affirmation in this job except from me. You will be criticized. And you will have to deal with yourself.” Then he said something beautiful. “And I will help you.” And he did.[8] Servant leadership at its best. But how does servant leadership work globally?
The Message of the Surrounding Culture
Here I am not speaking about the internal culture of the church or organization that one serves but rather the surrounding culture, be it Asian, Indigenous, African, Western or Latino. And it is precisely here that this book with its international group of authors offers a unique help on the vexed and wonderful question of how the leader is to function. Every culture has its unique expectations of leadership which may or may not permit the servant leader to function. These expectations are innate, hidden, invisible to the naked eye—except in certain public ceremonies—but profoundly influential.
In Asia, Confucian culture assumes a hierarchy in the organization. This means that the pastor is the top of the church pyramid, just under the Lord himself. Whereas, in North America the pastor’s authority is largely diminished because of democratic expectations as well as anti-establishment postmodernity. In Africa it is who you know that makes you a leader, what tribe you belong to, what your position is in that tribe, and what it takes culturally to be a “big man” or (less likely) “a big woman.” We have two great needs as followers and as persons who want to flourish: the need to be we and the need to be me.[9] In the West the need to be me is uppermost, because of the rampant individualism implicit in the culture. In Asia and in Africa, in contrast, the need to be me is uppermost. So, in Africa no one ever calls me “Paul.” I am always called by my family name, “Stevens.” I have a corporate identity. But in Canada most people call me “Paul” because I am an individual. Yes, they call me Paul even though I am 85 and many decades older than my students. But, and I cannot stress this too much, as servant leaders and servant followers we have both needs, the need to be me and we!
Remember that just as the internal culture of the organization “speaks,” informs who is important and what is important based on values and implicit beliefs, so too the surrounding outside culture speaks more loudly than the president of a country! Can servant leadership thrive in your culture? Are there points of contact with the culture that we can build on, that will reinforce servant leadership? Are there innate resistances in the surrounding culture that mean that servant leadership will be counter-cultural, subversive, and possibly even deemed to be heretical. But one thing for sure is this.
The master, the ultimate servant leader, is Jesus, whom person after person, gospel after gospel, expounds like facets of a jewel. As a leader Jesus was life on life; he lived with his followers and shared his life with them, and they shared life with him. He was an empowering leader, giving away everything he knew and everything he owned so they could become effective leaders. Jesus concentrated on the three, the twelve, and the seventy in order to serve the crowd, and ultimately the world: concentration with a view to expansion. His leadership was situational, not standardized. He led differently when faced with the opposition of the pharisees than when he faced with a crowd of seekers, and, different again with potential followers. Jesus attended to his own needs dismissing the crowds (Matt 14:23) in order to be alone with the Father, and sleeping in the boat between assignments. But here is the ultimate action of this servant leader: he laid down his life for his followers.[10] Can we do this as servant leaders?
Read this article. Brood on it. Ingest it. Pray your way through asking God to show you what is truly true. And become a leader-follower of Jesus.
References:
[1] Dietrich Bonheoffer, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928-1936. The Collected Works of Dietrich Bonheoffer, Vol 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 186-200.
[2] It is fascinating to note that while most of the evangelical church has followed John Calvin that the pastor has a call directly from God and of which the church is not witness, that Martin Luther said that the call to church leadership comes not directly from God (with the exception of the apostles) but comes from the church, requesting that a person leads and ministers in place of and on behalf of others. See R. Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 152-159.
[3] You can consult my chapter entitled “Kingdom Leadership: Transcending Mere Pragmatics,”in R. Paul Stevens, The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes: The Marketplace and the Reign of God (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 126-36.
[4] Used 144 times in the Gospels.
[5]Quoted in Amy L. Sherman, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2011), 238.
[6] M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Trillion Dollar Vision of Dee Hock: The Corporate Radical Who Organized Visa Wants to Dis-Organize Your Company,” Fast Company, No 5 (October/November, 1996), (76-86), 79.
[7] See “Organizational Culture,” in Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens, The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 713-718.
[8] I dedicated my book, Doing God’s Business to him as the most influential leader in my life.
[9] I learned this from Edwin Friedman, a Jewish rabbi and psychotherapist when he was lecturing in Vancouver sometime in the 1970s.
[10] In my opinion, the best book on Jesus as servant leader is A.B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1871), 445 pages.
