This post is part of a synchroblog of Christian writers on the topic of leadership.   

When I think about spiritual leadership from the perspective of the Christian tradition I find myself in an odd place. I begin with the conviction that it is not possible to construct a meaningful leadership model directly from the teachings that are attributed to Jesus. I say "attributed to" quite deliberately, because modern scholarship has convinced me that we really don't know what Jesus said, and frankly I think even the "Jesus Seminar" findings are perhaps a bit on the conservative/optimistic side.  The beatitudes, for example, with their strange and paradoxical blessings, and in Luke's case, woes, don't really teach us how to lead.  Rather, they describe what life looks like from the point of view of the Kingdom of heaven, not the kingdom of earth.  Their purpose is to show us the radical discontinuity between God's perspective and ours, not to tell us how to govern ourselves here and now. 

Similarly, when the evangelists give Jesus speeches about leadership, as when he tells the disciples that those who would lead must be "last and servant of all" this is not a discussion about how to run a business within the temporal realm.  It is a statement about how different the temporal realm is from the heavenly.  We prove this over and over again.  It isn't that we don't want to lead that way, it isn't that we have thought about it and decided not to; it is that we can't lead that way.  Even in the best of models, as soon as we identify the best servants as the leaders, we begin to treat them not as servants at all, but rather as those served, and struggle to outdo each other in being servants in order to gain power.  I am a very good servant, just for example, and look what the church did to me!  It made me the dean of a big cathedral, gave me a large salary and a really big house.  Servant ministry?  Hardly, try as we might.  What is more, I colluded in this process over the course of now nearly thirty years.  I was and am a willing co-conspirator in this process of subverting my status as a servant.  I don't even empty my own garbage at work.  I will say nothing of what we do to bishops in my tradition, for it gets really ugly there. 

The president of the United States is, after all, "the servant of the people."  Come on now, do "servants" get their own private 747 to fly around in?  Not usually.  So, again, it isn't that we don't choose to lead in the manner described in the Bible, it is that we can't lead in the manner described in the Bible.  It is not that the leaders conspire to subvert that kind of leadership, it is that everyone conspires to subvert that kind of leadership.  Everyone works together to make sure that the leaders have the special status and are primarily the ones served.  We work very hard to set up conditions that are the exact opposite of how they are described in scripture.

Nor is this mere cynicism, because the truth that there are lots of wonderful leaders out there who give of themselves in truly wonderful ways.  It is however to say that trying to construct a model of leadership from what we believe to be the sayings of Jesus points us not in the direction of how to do this, but at the truth - the often searing and painful truth - of how far away we are from the true spirit of God.  Now my usual disclaimer.  The uncovering of this truth does not mean I think we are rotten and evil and completely awful.  It means we are lost, we are confused, and we don't quite know what we are doing.  Two very different conditions to be in.

So, when I look for how to understand leadership in the church or the world, I look not to a series of sayings, but to an historical fact, the death of Jesus. Here was a person executed by the world's greatest imperial power with the possible cooperation (and I am not at all sure about that) of the region's greatest spiritual power.  The very best people identified Jesus as the source of their problems, and the very best people identified him as an enemy of the state, and of God, and killed him.  Oops.  As a Christian who accepts the claim the church subsequently made about this man, that in and through him we see the image and presence of God, that teaches me pretty much everything I need to know about spiritual leadership.  It teaches me that when in the face of social tensions that are racheting up I decide to defuse the situation by identifying an "enemy" that we must eliminate, I am doing nothing so much as scapegoating, and not addressing the real issues at all.  It teaches me that when I insist that I understand the whole truth of the matter and therefore decide that those who differ must be "part of the problem, not the solution" I am participating in the dehumanizing of other people, and I myself am part of the problem, not the solution. 

To be a spiritual leader to me, therefore, is to allow the death of Jesus to open my eyes to the way I work.  It is to expose me to my own scapegoating and dehumanizing tendencies, and to teach me that when I do those things, no matter how noble I believe my motives to be, I am moving away from, not toward, God.  As a leader it is my sacred obligation not to scapegoat, not to dehumanize, and to teach the people I am responsible for leading not to do that either.  

The precise form leadership takes is very much a function of temperament of the leader and the system within which that leader operates.  But every leader can be aware of the truth about who we are and how we operate collectively.  Every leader can re-humanize relationships, refuse to scapegoat, and listen with genuine interest and compassion to the variety of human voices.  Every leader can be sensitive to the darkness within which we all grope and struggle, and so invite the truth to illuminate the path before us all.  That to me is the essence of spiritual leadership, whether that leadership be exercised in the church or civil government, an open democracy or a one party, autocratic government.  As a footnote I would add this, that every spiritual tradition has within it this same truth about people, and therefore the same opportunity for that all important illumination. 

This post is part of a synchroblog with other wildly diverse Christian writers. Please visit these blogs on the topic of leadership:

Jonathan Brink - Letter To The President

Adam Gonnerman - Aspiring to the Episcopate

Kai - Leadership - Is Servant Leadership a Broken Model?

Sally Coleman - In the world but not of it- servant leadership for the 21st Century Church

Alan Knox - Submission is given not taken

Joe Miller - Elders Lead a Healthy Family: The Future

Cobus van Wyngaard - Empowering leadership

Steve Hayes - Servant leadership

Geoff Matheson - Leadership

John Smulo - Australian Leadership Lessons

Helen Mildenhall - Leadership

Tyler Savage - Moral Leadership - Is it what we need?

Bryan Riley - Leading is to Listen and Obey

Susan Barnes - Give someone else a turn!

Liz Dyer - A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Polls…

Beth Patterson--Leadership: being the river