Tag Archives: theology

Theology: spiritual gifts are for followers, too

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What about the theological belief that the Holy Spirit empowers believers and gives spiritual gifts to all who know him? In John 16, Jesus unpacks the Holy Spirit for the disciples he leaves behind, promising that they’ll be even better off with God-as-Spirit than with God-in-human-form.

Certainly, the idea that the Holy Spirit works in and flows through a leader has implications on a leader’s role. Many have written on this subject. In fact, our leadership book discussion group at Wycliffe is getting ready to read Bill Hybels’ The Power of a Whisper. I may have more to say about the leader’s need for discernment and his role in “drafting the Holy Spirit” after I’ve read that book. Instead, I want to focus for a minute on another question.

What does it mean for a leader that every believer has spiritual gifts? It means all followers are empowered. First, leaders must listen to their followers, because the Holy Spirit might speak through a prophetic gift or someone with a gift that complements the leader’s blind spot. Second, leadership is just one part of the body. Just because there are fewer heads than fingers doesn’t mean the head is more important or any less needed. That’s hard for most leaders to believe. Leadership seems a more important gifting.

But leadership is just one of the spiritual gifts mentioned in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12. It is not given special prominence in the Bible; in fact, leadership falls under the principle that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” Certainly, Jesus said that leaders shouldn’t “lord it over people” but should be “servant of all.” So where do we get the idea that leaders should be rewarded disproportionately to other gift-holders?

Let me offer a biblical perspective on leadership from Fast Company magazine. Yes, you read that right. Fast Company. Author Nancy Lubin offers this zinger in the midst of her article, “Do Something: Let’s Hear it for the Little Guys”:

The working world would be a happier place if more of us aspired to roles that were just right — if we valued job fit and performance at every level and stopped overemphasizing the very top.

Lubin says we should honor chief operating officers, midlevel managers and staffers. She would probably add career placement people, whose job it is to get staff into the right positions. So, let’s hear it for the followers!

I think Lubin has a little prophet in her:

The underappreciation of followers has a major bottom-line consequence: crazy redundancy. You can see it in the not-for-profit sector, which has a gazillion little organizations replicating one another. We all want to run our own thing, so not-for-profits never die. As a result, we have huge inefficiency and ridiculous amounts of overlap in the sector. This is wasteful, and this is fundamentally bad business.

When you consider Christian non-profits, it also reflects a lack of unity. Considering that Christ said the world would know we are Christians if we’re unified, Lubin’s statement is a complete indictment of Christian leadership. So, a failure to understand that the Holy Spirit has empowered all believers leads to a misunderstanding of the importance of followers. Bad theology leads to misprioritized values, pride, redundancy and waste, not to mention derailing our witness.

Theology: no answer but Jesus

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What are the implications of the fact that God sent Jesus into the world to redeem us? First, it speaks to our worth. The God who created us in his image felt that we were worth redeeming. He died for our sins, instead of us, to reconcile us to God and to each other. None of us will ever understand that sacrifice by a holy God. So, we are valuable. Remember that as we consider this next part.

Second, according to James Plueddemann, because we are all broken and sinful, “all the problems in the world are directly or indirectly caused by sin.” Poverty, war, greed, injustice, illness and tragedies of every kind stem from a broken creation spoiled by sin. Therefore, government or business solutions are like applying a topical cream to treat cancer.

Jesus is the only solution to the sin problem… so the most competent leader in the world cannot solve any major problem without the gospel of Jesus.

The gospel alone — God rescuing us from our brokenness — is the answer for the deepest needs of humans and creation as a whole.

Third, Plueddemann adds, “the goal of leadership is to point people to Jesus.” Rather than work independently, we realize we are branches on a vine, and we can do nothing without him (John 15). Rather than draw attention to ourselves, we realize we are nothing without him. Our goal is to co-lead with him, if you will, pointing to him as the solution and primary source of any gifts and ability we have or success we enjoy.

Fourth, leaders have a model for their own leadership style. Jesus is the ideal leader who modeled servant leadership, an “astounding and universally countercultural” concept. Mark 10:45 lays out the standard for our leadership practice:

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.

So, a failure to understand what Jesus did for us leads to the misunderstanding that we are something on our own and down the ugly road of pride. This sure isn’t a feel-good post. I feel really small. Thank God that the gospel doesn’t end with how bad we are. It’s worth reading the first paragraph again.

A theology of leadership

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The best book I’ve read recently on leadership is Leading Across Cultures, by James Plueddemann, former executive director of SIM International. The book is his attempt to cut through cultural variations of leadership and get down to the core of what leadership is before building back out to find culturally-appropriate expressions of leadership. I’ve tried to do this a little by digging into what made me a leader, following Dr. Robert Clinton’s theory in The Making of a Leader. I’ve also tried to develop and articulate my personal philosophy of leadership, as a number of authors have urged. I’ve taught a session on my philosophy of leading in your strengths, leading in your weakness and leading in your context. (I should blog on those for you sometime.) But Plueddemann went deeper: he challenged me to consider my leadership theology.

As a church elder, I’ve had to spend some time trying to figure out theology. I’d never really been interested in theological discussions, thinking them a bit of a waste of time. Why not spend your time applying it instead of arguing it? But it has been helpful for me to dig into what I really believe about God so that I can then realize the implications. That’s what Plueddemann says: your beliefs about God will drive your leadership practices.

Let me provide an example. If we believe that human beings are created in the image of God and will live forever, what are the implications? If we truly believe that, therefore

the primary goal of leadership is to facilitate the development of people so they become all God created them to be. The atheistic philosophy contends that people are expendable for the sake of the government. Christian theology argues that governments come and go, but people live forever. People are more important than institutions, including the organizations we lead.

I’d never really considered that logic. I obviously believe in developing leaders, but I’d never considered why before. Of course, now that I have this foundation, it means that I have probably not gone far enough in my practice. Plueddemann points out one clear application to my task-oriented tendencies:

Effective leaders don’t use people to accomplish the job; instead they use the job to develop people.

It’s worth the time to focus for a couple of posts on some other theological beliefs and how they might apply to leadership. Plueddemann gives the why very succinctly:

The purpose and the worldview of leadership are intertwined. A bad theology of leadership will inevitably result in bad leaders. Leadership grounded in God’s glory and driven by a scriptural worldview is the hope of the global church.