Sermon: Developing Leadership

Jesus uses a harsh word when he contrasts the flesh with the spirit.  ‘The spirit,' he says ‘gives life, the flesh is useless' John 6. 63 This is strong stuff. For if something is useless we might as well say as much and either throw it away (if it is a thing) or move on to something more profitable (if it is a project or enterprise).

This sounds very simple but the business of making the decision that something is useless is not always very easy.  Indeed so difficult is this apparently basic decision that many people often find it all but impossible.  The result?  Cluttered cupboards, attics and garages at home and, at work, a plethora of initiatives and schemes that have never quite produced the hoped-for results but equally have never been jettisoned.

Thus the harsh word ‘useless' does indeed have its place.  It is a judgement word, a word that announces that a decision has been made.  Something, is condemned as useless because, despite the hopes we once harboured, the fantasy we once entertained, we have come to realise that it will not deliver the goods.  That it is in fact a gimmick and we have been a sucker.  

‘The flesh', said Jesus, ‘is useless'. It does not do the job that we hope it might. And the job of course is to deliver what John calls eternal life, abundant living, and what is also called the Kingdom of God.  But don't be a sucker, the flesh cannot deliver the kingdom of God. It's all a matter of the spirit.

In this sermon I want to explore this insight alongside a further exploration of our diocesan scheme called ‘Growing the Kingdom' which, as you may recall, is based on five building blocks.  At the cathedral Eucharist on August 19^th I preached about the building block styled ‘learning discipleship'. Today I am going to share a few thoughts about ‘developing leadership'.

One reason for considering this subject in a sermon is that the church, like every other organisation has, in recent years, become acutely aware of its need for good, wise, effective leadership.  There are several reasons for this, among which the rapidly changing pace of change in our world is one. For it is change that makes the need for leadership - in a static society hoping to remain as it is, leadership is hardly an issue.  But in our highly educated, less deferential, more egalitarian age, traditional authority-figures are more likely to be questioned than obeyed.  This in turn requires new skills of those in positions of authority or leadership.

But there is another reason too.  Over the last fifty years the impact of religious teaching on leadership thought has been quite considerable.  Not for nothing are major authors and speakers called ‘gurus'. One such guru is an American Quaker who lived from 1904-1990, Robert K Greenleaf. Greenleaf is responsible for one of the phrases that you may feel has become something of a cliché but is often given some prominence when people opine about the nature of leadership needed today.  The phrase is ‘servant leader'.

Others have of course taken the idea up, not least John Adair ex of Sandhurst.  When Adair speaks about ‘servant-leadership' what he is referring to is the effort of the leader to overcome the pride which is fuelled by his or her position in a hierarchical structure.

Adair's description of the problem is helpfully stated:

The deepest flaw in leadership is usually arrogance. The root of arrogance is an inflated pride which makes a person in a position of leadership act in an excessively determined, overbearing or domineering way. This insistence on being dominant is always based on a real or assumed superiority. Because of an exaggerated sense of self, and excessive pride in wealth, station, learning or achievements, the arrogant person takes upon himself more power or authority than is rightly his'.  (John Adair Inspiring Leadership p38)

Given this analysis you can see why Adair cites Jesus as a pioneer of servant leadership.  Confronted, as he was, by disputes among his disciples about seniority or relative greatness Jesus always drew them back to basics by saying that to be truly great is to be childlike, or that the last will be first or indeed by stooping to wash their feet. 

Now there is a place for this of course. All too often it happens that people let their ‘positional power' go to their head. They develop pride, they fall for hubris, they become arrogant in away that interferes with their effectiveness as leaders and decency as people.  However, to prescribe ‘servant leadership' as a method or technique or model for Christian leadership is, it seems to me a mistake. Indeed it is as much of a much of a mistake as prescribing us all antibiotics just in case we develop an infection.  It is to confuse vaccination with cure.  And as we all know, wrongly managed vaccines can in fact deliver the disease itself.  And this I believe to be sometimes the case for performed acts of servant leadership. They do not solve, so much as aggravate, the problem of positional pride.

There is however a richer, profounder and more Christian way of putting the words ‘leadership' and ‘servant' together.  And we can identify this if we go back to Greenleaf's 1970 book which kicked this whole thing off.  It was called not ‘servant leadership' but ‘The Servant as Leader.'  And while that might seem like a slight difference when you hear it quickly it is in fact a very big difference.

Greenleaf's primary interest was not in leadership but in service.  So he sees leadership as a special case of service, not service as a special case of leadership. His question is not, ‘what service can you render as a leader?' Rather ‘what leadership can you exercise as a servant?' (The Power of Servant Leadership pxii Forward by Peter Vaill) 

This point is of extraordinary significance for the church as it seeks to appropriate the wisdom offered by leadership thinking today.  For if servant leadership is truly considered as grandees taking a few hours or minutes off to do something which, in the ordinary course of events, other more lowly people might do, then it is indeed a gimmick. A cheap, patronising technique which will not deliver the results and will lead people to say of servant leadership, ‘yes, we tried that but it did not work.  It's useless.'  Well of course it is useless, all gimmicks are.

Let me put this in terms of Jesus' distinction between ‘flesh' and ‘spirit'.  Servant leadership' as ‘self-consciously performed humility' is essentially ‘of the flesh' and useless.  Prioritising service, on the other hand, and being prepared to take on whatever role one is called to in the church or any other organisation, is a matter of the life-giving spirit. Greenleaf makes almost exactly this point at the beginning of an essay called ‘The Servant as Religious Leader'.  ‘Part of my excitement in living comes from the belief that leadership is so dependent on spirit that the essence of it will never be capsuled or codified'. 

A corollary of this, which is spelt out in his essay, is that leadership is not ‘what people called ‘leaders' or with hierarchical authority do'.  Rather, leadership is what people who make a difference do. Leadership, is the capacity to make a difference.  Christian leadership is the capacity to make a difference that is in accord with Christian values. Christian leadership is, in other words, any action, whether great or small, whether word or deed, that is sincerely intended by one who is seriously and sacrificially seeking the Kingdom of God.

Much of what passes for leadership teaching is, in my opinion, better categorised under the headings of project or people management.  As it happens many of the clergy are not very good at either and so most so-called leadership courses will end up doing them some good.  However these efforts to become better managers do run the danger of taking our eye off the genuine leadership questions which really are all to do with seeking, seeking the Kingdom of God. And worse, it serves to perpetuate the corrosive suggestion that there are some important people called ‘leaders' and that it is implicitly the role of the others to follow. 

But I would question whether this is a properly Christian view.  Christian leadership, I would stress, is about seeking the kingdom of God.  And the management exercises involved with this are entirely those of managing the interpersonal and resource implications of being a community of people who are all seeking the same thing.  Jesus did indeed have followers but for the rest of us the highest aspiration we can have is the genuinely humble one of discovering that fellow kingdom-seekers are our partners, colleagues, collaborators and friends.  The church is the communion of co-seekers, not the gathering of followers with their leader.

As we seek to ‘develop leadership' in our diocese the task is not to waste our time on the fleshy uselessness of the latest management gimmicks.  Nor is it right to suggest that the Kingdom of God is a project for us to deliver, build or grow.  Rather it is our task to seek the Kingdom of God and to exercise service in accordance with Christian values.  To do that is so rare and so powerful that it is always ‘leadership', it is always of the spirit, and it always effects life-giving change.  ‘The flesh,' said Jesus, ‘is useless', but the spirit gives life. And leadership is precisely about giving life.

Stephen Cherry