Column on leadership 9/21

I am relieved from preaching this Sunday, as I was supposed to be a spiritual director for a growth group, but the schedule changed. I usually put a sermon on the other side of weekly devotional thoughts, so I think I am going to use this column as an undelivered sermon for this Sunday.Our reading for Sunday from the gospels, Mark 9:30-37. It is an argument about leadership. On the road the disciples are arguing about which one was the greatest, the most important, the clear leader. First, our hopes for leadership are inchoate and incommensurate. We want things in leaders that cannot be held by one person. We want leaders to be visionary, but practical, cautious but bold, above the fray but personable. As I used to say, we expect them to be tall yet short. We set leaders up for failure, because we do not have a consensus about what leadership embodies. George Will had a good column recently in the Washington Post to the effect that we calm more for leaders than they can possibly achieve on their own. In essence, we revert to a level of childlike dependency when we consider leaders. We want them to make things all better, even when they cannot. Then we have the temerity to blame leaders at any level of political life for failing to live up to impossible expectations and demands. Yes, I realize that speeches play up to that hope, but adults should be able to translate rhetorical flourish into a reasonable set of expectations. Leaders have a limited span of control. just as important, followers have a limited zone of acceptance. Perhaps the greatest cleavage point is between “hard and soft” leadership. Hard leadership would symbolized by a General issuing orders. Soft leadership would be leadership that empowers and encourages teamwork. We will accept hard leadership in a rigidly hierarchical structure and in times of crisis, but we chafe at being ordered around. Informal patterns of communication and action will undercut the orders over time. the classic example in church leadership would be the parking lot meeting that goes back over what transpired in the formal meeting that just occurred. Jesus seems to go strongly toward the soft model of leadership in this passage. Christian churches often use the phrase “servant leadership” as a shorthand for this leadership model. As business models continue to influence the church, this conflicts with the pastor as CEO and the church board as being analogous to a board of directors for a company. When pastors make applications to churches, they usually issue boilerplate material about wishing to be collaborative and empowering leaders. The reality on the ground is that many of us can follow this until we run into resistance. Then we look like little Napoleons wanting to issue battlefield instructions. My radio listening goes in this order: NPR, old people’s rock music, and sports radio. Mark Schlereth, a great offensive lineman, is now a sportscaster. In an argument about leadership on the filed, he said that to him a leader was willing to sacrifice his ego, his statistics, and his preferences for the welfare of the team. A leader is willing to subsume their desires under the needs of the other members of the team, so that their success is more important than the individual success of the leader. To me, that is a much closer illustration of the words of Jesus than the business books that dot the shelves of pastors where the CEO is a charismatic leader, a courageous bringer of change. In discovering the needs and desires of others, the leader may well achieve the desired state of being on top, not by a scramble for the top, but an offering of the self to serve others.