Skip to main content

Servant Leadership



File:Jesus washing Peter's feet.jpg
Ford Maddox Brown
Jesus washes Peter's feet
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jesus_washing_Peter%27s_feet.jpg

In today’s culture in the West there is intense fascination with leadership studies. Businesses and organisations invest millions in identifying and training leaders.

At the same time the rewards and pitfalls for leaders seem more extreme than ever before. Leaders in the public eye face hostility and adulation in equal measure; leaders are like marmite. Just think for a moment of the leaders you loathe and the ones you love!

More than ever, today, we are in need of leaders who can enable positive transformation in the communities that we live. What would that sort of leadership look like?

Jesus offers a particular form of leadership when he washes his disciples' feet the night before he dies (John 13:1-15). As teacher and ‘Lord’, i.e. one with authority, status and power he deliberately humbles himself to serve those whom he leads. He gets alongside them to model a way of relating that is about loving service. In washing his disciples’ feet, he is demonstrating, and modelling changed behavior. Instead of describing or promising a new future, he demonstrates that future by his own example. He is saying to them: you want to experience life differently, you want to have a better world: then do as I do, serve one another:

‘If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet’.

Children washing feet during the Maundy Service
For me Jesus provides us with 3 basic principles for what good leadership looks like:

A good leader models what changed behavior looks like.
He places the highest value on loving service – drawing people together.
He empowers his followers to be the change they want to see

All of us have leadership roles in our life, at all sorts of different levels – if it’s being a Mum or Dad, an older brother or sister, a manager at work, being a role model in the air cadets, or in another uniformed organization, or being a political leader, or a business leader. All of us also follow others – we make decisions about who to trust and whose word to value. We have many choices to make.

Jesus’ example shows us that when we are leading - actions speak louder than words. When we are assessing leaders or leadership, that principle is significant. Are we modelling the sort of changed behavior that we say we value? Is that person modelling the sort of behavior she’s encouraging?

The transformational aspect of Jesus’ leadership comes from his ability to enable change in others. The power of his messages comes from his ability to draw people together in relationships of love and service. Better community relationships, healthier organisations, a better functioning society requires change from all of us. We cannot expect to change to come from elsewhere, it comes from each of us. That places responsibility on our shoulders, but it’s also empowering.

Just think for a moment about your home, or work, or place where you volunteer. What sort of change does that place need? How might you go about modelling the change you want to see? How can you demonstrate the principles of loving humble service that Jesus models – that will bring people together in relationships of love and care?

In our culture good leadership is essential; Jesus offers an example of good leadership we can all follow: he models changed behavior, he places the highest value on loving service and he empowers us to be the change we want to see.

Comments

Post a Comment

Please be respectful when posting comments

Popular posts from this blog

Radical Story-telling?

Public Domain   The Flight into Egypt  File: Adam Elsheimer - Die Flucht nach Ägypten (Alte Pinakothek) 2.jpg Created: 31 December 1608 Which of the Gospel writers include an account of the birth of Jesus? When were they writing, for what audience? Mark’s Gospel is almost universally considered to be the earliest Gospel and it’s understood that both Matthew and Luke used it as a source text. But Mark has no account of the birth of Jesus, he begins with John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism. Only Matthew and Luke have birth narratives and they are different whilst sharing some common features: Mary and Joseph are to be married and there’s a miraculous virgin birth in Bethlehem. But that’s about it. Jesus is born in a house in Matthew’s account whilst he is placed in a manger in Luke’s because there’s ‘no room at the inn’. Mary’s thoughts and feelings are not mentioned in Matthew at all, whilst from Luke we get the story of the Visitation, Annunciation and the wonderfu...
2 comments
Read more

Silence

Lent Study Group One of my top 10 books of the last 10 years has to be: 'A Book of Silence' by Sara Maitland. I first heard Sara talk at Greenbelt many years ago and I was fascinated then by who she was - an eccentric woman, speaking with intensity and insight, offering an alternative and captivating viewpoint on the human experience. In this book she explores silence in all sorts of ways: by living on her own; by visiting the desert; through analysing the desert traditions within early Christianity; and through attending to what happens to the body and the mind in and through extended silence and isolation. Her book begins: I am sitting on the front doorstep of my little house with a cup of coffee, looking down the valley at my extraordinary view of nothing. It is wonderful. Virginia Woolf famously taught us that every woman writer needs a room of her own. She didn't know the half of it, in my opinion. I need a moor of my own. Or, as an exasperated but obvious...
1 comment
Read more

God's Photos of You

Most of the time it’s possible to live quite happily with the absence of religion. Our lives are full and content without it, indeed most people would probably say less restrictive and less judgmental. But then Christmas arrives with its magical talk of angels, a miraculous birth and God with us . The nativity at school, the lit candle in the darkened church and the carol service remind us of a time when going to church and believing in God made sense. The tune of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ is grasped like an old friend – and it takes us to a place of remembered community, of solidarity, of a secure identity and experience. It gives us a story, which stretches way back, that we can be a part of. Our memories, faded and nostalgic as they are, nonetheless are full of hope, reminding us of an identity that we’ve lost, encouraging us to claim a future that will always be ours. Like the Queen’s Speech, Match of the Day, Strictly Come Dancing – Christmas is the photo frame which colle...
1 comment
Read more