I was having a conversation with one of my mentors just yesterday. He made a statement that I believe needs to be written about. The statement was stemmed from our conversation about how the church needs good leaders. We then started talking about culture and how it is hard to be a good leader due to the nature of the way we are brought up today. I will explain the background and then drop the line which I will expand upon a little more.
It is hard to be a good leader. Especially in the church environment. Let me explain. To be a good leader, in the church environment, if you define leadership as the ability to get things done through others, is difficult because of the fact that often times if you are being an effective leader you do not look like you are doing much of anything. I think the most effective leadership is done in the background of the event that is happening. I have built a team at the youth ministry I have been involved with. The team is an event planning team. I built the team because I wanted to delegate my weaknesses which are included in the planning process to those who found their strengths in the planning process. By doing this I have created a monster in the best way possible. The event team handles everything. For events, I literally show up to the meetings and help with the dreaming portion of the event (something I love to do), then I hand it off to the team leader who loves planning events. She calls me in the event that there is a major decision that needs to be made or if she needs confirmation on something, and that is about it. I love it! If you were to show up to the event, I would give credit to my event team for the success of the event. If it were to fail, I would take full responsibility. Within that view, it would appear that all I did was fail and all my event team does is succeed. I think this is where leadership is most effective.
If I put my pride aside as best I can, if the event team succeeds, I succeed. It is as simple as that. This is why it is difficult though: no one is looking at the event team. They are looking at the event. When I try to disperse successes and praises to my team some people question “did you do anything”? My response to that is simple; if I am performing my leadership duties the way that I hope to, then no, I did not do anything. The reason for that is because my event team is WAY better at planning events than I am. They do amazing at it.
We were having this discussion with leadership in mind. It is difficult to be a good leader. A good leader delegates weaknesses instead of taking more things on that they are not really good at, and on top of that, if there is success a good leader disperses that credit to the team that as successful. On the flip side, I think a good leader takes the hit for any projects that may not be considered an overwhelming success.
A tempted leader tries to make a name for himself. A tempted leader wants to take the success of his team, and hold on to that success, even if he knows that he had little to do with it.
So what am I getting at? It is hard to be a good leader. With the idea of a good leader in mind, there is always this intense desire to please the people around us and to hear their praises. We want to be cheered on and acknowledged.
My question to pose is what does God want a good leader to be? There are obvious answers to this but I want to get away from the obvious. I think that God wants a good leader to do what he knows is right. In the midst of a world that is becoming more and more dishonest and untrustworthy, I think that God would want a leader to be honest and trustworthy. I say trustworthy, thinking of a good leader being worth following.
So the statement that he made, which I thought was just so, so good was this: “It will always be easier to get caught up in trying to amaze men. The challenge for a good leader is trying to do his best to amaze God”. What he means is that we are always going to want to put our name out there and boost ourselves, but what would it look like if we led people well? If we did what we thought God was calling us to do and not what they world thought we should do? Would it not be cool to amaze God?
In the Bible there are only a couple of times that Jesus was amazed. In one he was amazed at a lack of faith. In another, with the Centurion, Jesus was amazed at his plethora of faith. The Centurion was a leader, he was a man who was under authority and he knew what that meant. When he interacted with Jesus, the Bible says that Jesus was amazed! Jesus even went as far to say something like “surely I have not seen greater faith in all of Israel”. That may be a paraphrase but you get the point.
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Food for thought: For you leaders out there, would it not be cool to be the guy that did such a job that it amazed God? Would it not be awesome to be in a position where your motives were Kingdom focused and you dared to be a leader worth following?
My dad used to tell me this quote that he got from someone else: “A leader with no followers is just a man taking a walk”.
Are you leading? Or are you just taking a walk?
leadershape 