Contrary to popular belief, leadership is not evil. Without someone saying, “I’ll make sure this gets done,” nothing gets done. All of us look to someone to coordinate or plan or even motivate. As long as you don’t abdicate your own responsibility to lead your own life, this is pretty healthy.

I went looking for good materials on leadership and found this site. It certainly parallels a psychological survey, but the undelying principles ring true to me as of my first look of them.

It short, leadership is based on four principles:

1. Love God and others above yourself
2. Be a servant and a shepherd.
3. Relate to those you lead as friends.
4. Use wise methods and procedures.

The first two deal with the leader’s heart and their own attitudes towards leadership and those they lead. The last two deal with the actions and deeds of a leader. There’s plenty of scripture to go along with these and I plan on looking into it.

What I see in the ‘call for strong leadership’ in various conferences, is a call to Love God, but also an encouragement to lead in a strong and powerful way(tm). When asked what a strong a powerful way means, the answers are not entirely clear. As best I can discern (in my limited ability), this means that leaders should regain a sense of confidence (in ICC vernacular, this is called boldness(tm)). Leaders should, as I understand it, preach powerfully and speak plainly about sin and commitment and responsibility. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but it says nothing about leadership. Saying that a preacher should be forthright in style, dynamic in presentation, and biblical in content changes the focus away from leadership and onto preaching style. Preaching is preaching not leading; all Christians are called to preach. Saying that a leader should be confident and decisive is just as off-topic. We should all be confident in our lives: Jesus sacrificed everything on the cross so that we could confidently approach the throne of God. If you and I can approach the Lord of Heaven with confidence, what is left to be afraid of on the Earth? Being decisive in action is getting closer to the matter, but leadership is something different entirely.

The real heart of leadership is to love. Through this love, a leader should serve and shepherd. As a leader myself, I strive to grow in my love and I fight with all my might against what I perceive as enemies to the church locally and abroad. I need to learn to love. I still need to repent in my willingness to serve in individuals’ lives. It’s true I work hard and coordinate the teachers, but I mean something different. I’m talking about going to someone’s house that is not on the advisroy group, taking care of their pets, or taking care of the house, or help clean out a basement, or something like that. I don’t want to be above a certain task or too busy to simply help someone.

I hope that this program will turn out to be a ‘wise method’. So far, it looks great, but I’ll let you know as I look into it. In any case, I hope that a look at the heart of leadership will bring about godly behavior as a leader.