26 Aug 08 — Some thoughs about leadership

Visit the shelves in any Christian bookstore, and you will find any number of books focusing on leadership. Likewise, visit the shelves in the business section of any secular bookstore and you will find many volumes on leadership. Strange to say, they all say much the same thing, because there are really only so many unique things which can be derived from such a fairly simple subject. The stories may help to inspire, but bottom line, the leadership Moses’ father-in-law Jethro gave Moses nearly 3,300 years ago is as good as anything written today.

Moses’ major problem was his unwillingness to delegate. Whether that was because there was genuinely no one else to entrust some of his work to, or whether it was a power play on his part, or whether he simply didn’t know that it was an option — well, we do not and can not know. Nevertheless, Jethro looked at the line of petitioners outside Moses’ tent one morning and saw the obvious: Moses was spending so much time wrestling with the petty details of life, that he couldn’t take care of the more important details. So Jethro said enough is enough and gave Moses these three leadership principles which are as solid today as they were then.

1. The leader is responsible for representing the People before God. (In a secular case, the CEO represents the company before its shareholders, government agencies, and customers.) This doesn’t mean that the People can not talk to God individually — they can — it just means that Moses (in this case) is the one who sits down with God and works out what the community should be doing as a whole. The same is true for every pastor. It is the pastor’s responsibility to represent the congregation’s people to God, and to provide the guidance which directs the overall flow of the community’s life. (Pastors may delegate some of the decision making process for the sake of consensus building, but they retain the ultimate responsibility.)

2. The leader is responsible for teaching others God’s (or the company’s or country’s) statutes and ordinances. It is not, for instance, the responsibility of the President to judge each individual criminal case, it is his/her responsibility to ensure that the judges are selected, vetted, and trained to do this important task. Likewise, it is not the role of the Pastor to do everything in the congregation, but to teach others how to do things so that together the congregation is co-created out of a multiplicity of ideas and talents. In a larger congregation, just as with a President, a Senior Pastor may only be responsible for training the teachers, and not for doing the actual teaching.

3. It is the responsibility of the leader to show an example. You can talk about feeding and caring for outcasts all you want, but embodying that talk, as say a Mother Teresa, says many volumes more than mere words can. A leader must embody what he/she is leading. If it is a church, then they must be seen as living a graced life in which the Reign of God has already broken in decisively. (If they are a corporate leader, then they must embody the morality and financial sensibility that leads to corporate success. If they are a political leader, they must themselves take the risks or make the sacrifices they wish those they are representing to make.)

Given these 3 principles, it is easy to look around and see a lot of hypocrisy, of leaders saying one thing and doing another. And you could send them 500 books to read on the subject, but the story in Exodus 18 says all that ever needs to be said on this issue of leadership.