Servant Leadership

[This is an excerpt from a talk that I gave at Rockbridge two weeks ago entitled "Leader as Servant"]

People will often say that they like Jesus but dislike Christians or Christianity. They look at passages like the one we just looked at [Jesus washing the disciples feet in John 13] and they say, "Jesus is such a great teacher! And so very nice!"

I want to contend that Jesus is, indeed, always a servant leader. But that doesn't always look like what we want it to look like.

Mark 10:17-22

17 As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. "Good teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

18 "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.'"

20 "Teacher," he declared, "all these I have kept since I was a boy."

21 Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

22 At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

This is servant leadership—to invite this man to be freed from the love of money that would absolutely destroy his soul is absolutely loving service: Servant leadership is not people pleasing.

People like Jesus because they think that he’s nice, but here’s the deal: Jesus is GOOD, he is not NICE. Those are two very different terms. And sometimes being good means being nice and other times being good means being ruthless in order to serve and bless someone who needs that blessing.

Some of you are truth speakers—you are hard-core black and white, you know right and wrong from a mile away and you’re not afraid to say what you think or see. Truth speakers, you do need to grow and learn gentleness and love and patience and grace. I hope that the abuses or the wrong-uses of truth speaking are fairly well-known and recorded throughout history: tyranny, loveless-ness, overly-aggressive, angry, controlling, etc. Truth-speakers, you need to pay attention to those stories, to tread cautiously with your passions and your mouths!

But the majority of us are conflict-avoidant, people-pleasers, overly-passive, apathetic or some dizzying combination of all of the above. And the abuses of those ways of relating are not nearly as well documented but they are just as real and our world bears the scars just as much.

And for those of you who fall into this category like me, you need to hear that serving people and being a servant leader is NOT people-pleasing. At some point, like here with Jesus, you will absolutely have to and need to deliver a hard word to someone, you will have to speak the truth in love. And my friends, if you duck that responsibility that you have as a leader, you are no longer a servant leader. No matter how nice you might seem. And no matter how much people might still want to follow you.

Being a servant-leader does not mean people-pleasing. It means walking upright before the Lord, in step with the Spirit. And we always honor the people around us, even and especially when that means we are called to say hard things to them.