Servant Leadership School
There is something festive about new beginnings - about the promise and the challenge of a new term. A lot of planning, preparation, and prayer has been invested with this Winter term in mind. Throughout the day here at the Festival Center, we've all been experiencing an air of expectation
In addition, there is a yearning in our souls - an unsatisfied longing for authentic spirituality - to connect our inward journey of contemplation, prayer, and study with our outward journey of service in the world. You can sense it, you can feel it in our gathering. Perhaps you can pick up this longing in our table conversations. There is a fresh wind of the Spirit present with us.
Tonight we would address this yearning. We approach this through our Servant Leadership classes - which offer a combination of theological education and spiritual formation. This involves deepening our relationship with the radical Jesus of the New Testament and wrestling with what it means to be servant leaders in the world. This is what draws us here.
I think all of us knows that the future of the church depends upon gifted leadership. And our country is dependent upon the leadership we are praying for and working toward. now more than ever, we long for a new kind of leadership to guide us into God's future of our nation...the new possibilities, that which is not yet, but ought to be.
Our model for the school is the underground seminary established by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany in the 1930s - and alternative community rooted in Scripture and saturated in prayer - a seminary whose purpose was to raise up a new breed of Christian leaders.
You and I would be fooling ourselves if we imagine we could ever make the radical Gospel popular. Discerning the signs of the times, John Stott puts it this way:
It is too simple in a highly rationalistic age
too narrow in an age of pluralism
too humiliating in an age of self-confidence
[too communal in an age of hyper-individualism]
too demanding in an age of permissiveness
too unpatriotic in an age of blind nationalism
Here at the Servant Leadership School, we find that Scripture is always the best place to begin.
In the New Testament, jesus Christ is presented to us as a servant, as indeed, the servant, "the servant of the Lord," the final fulfillment of the servant passages in Isaiah 45-53. He himself said, "the Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve" (Mark 10:45), and again, "I am among you as one who serves" (Luke 22:27). Throughout the Gospels, we see him serving God by serving others.
He preaches. He teaches. He heals. He prays.
He is accessible to crowds as well as to others who come across his path
He welcomes the least, the lost, and the left out.
He attacks the strong for their unjust and uncaring treatment of the weak.
He washes feet.
No service is too menial or too demanding for Jesus to undertake. Service is seen as the essence of discipleship. The challenge for all of us now is to discover in our own time and place what it means to follow in his steps, to develop and imitate the servant leadership he pioneers.
So the task before us is not an easy one or a popular one - but rather a task that lies at the very heart of the Gospel. For this is Jesus' commission to us: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." (John 20:21) In this, as in everything, he is to be our model. Jesus perfectly embodies the Christian model of Servant Leadership. We are to give our lives in service as he gave his.
Here at the school, we are committed to working with this biblical concept. Inspired by the life of Jesus, servant leaders seek to serve others. Wherever God calls us, this is where we begin. It may be in our home or workplace, with our local church or neighborhood, among the needs of the wider world. Servant leaders emphasize service to others. Service that benefits the common good. Service performed by people for people in the name of Christ. Service over self-interest. Service is what defines them, inspires them, guides them. In other words, servant leaders serve.
Servant leaders seek to coach, persuade, mentor, teach, and witness while serving - to enhance the capacity of others to make a difference...always with an eye toward influencing and changing the caring quality of churches, other institutions, and our society - especially those touching the lives of the weak and needy.
We understand the word leader as it is commonly defined - as one who shows the way. Being a leader involves creative innovating, investing in others, and taking chances (as contrasted with playing it safe or keeping things going as they are). The word leader is as free as is humanly possible from any implication of coercion or manipulation.
As you can see, servant leadershiop is the virtual antithesis of the things a lot of us grew up with and take for granted about leadership. I remember the time our young daughter sought to explain to her parents what she had come to understand about power. I don't recall her exact words, but she said something like this: "Power is a license to talk and not to listen, to tell and not ask, to demand and not serve." Challenging these tendencies is a responsibility of all of us who long for a better world.
What I have learned about servant leadership starts in here - in the heart of the servant. Most of us ponder, "What am I to do?" when the deeper question is, "What is God calling me to be?"
Servant leadership requires an inside-out approach, a transformative process leading to behavioral and lifestyle change - a process that will continue in us for the rest of our lives. The challenge of following Christ in an indifferent and hostile world starts in here - with the servant. Quite frankly, this is the most personally challenging, yet worthwhile task I have ever been part of.
Only God can bring about significant and permanent change in our lives. Only God can build a church. Our task is to collaborate with God in God's word. However large or small, our work needs to be seen as some kind of cooperation with God in which we share in the transformation of the world he has made - and committed to our care.
How does this "transformation business" take place? How does it happen? Servant leadership is subject to many interpretations. Here at the school, we approach this task through what we call our core classes. these core classes are basic to our understanding and internalizing servant leadership. They set the direction. They are at the heart of renewing us for service. They represent the six essential areas of Jesus' radical leadership.
These courses are not new to you - they are the same core courses that the Servant Leadershiop School has been working with throughout our history. They are the areas we can work with in deeper ways in the light of our new perceptions of the world in which we live.
The first area is Scripture; for example, those of you who will be taking the Philippians class with me will work with Paul's self-emptying approach to servant leadership.
Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death -
even death on a cross (Phil. 2:5-8)
A second course is call - how do we get in touch with God's unfolding call on our lives?
A third course is prayer - what practices keep the door of our hearts open and connected to receive God's transforming grace?
A fourth course is community - what does it mean to belong to Jesus Christ and experience the intimacy and transforming power of life together?
A fifth course is being with the poor - what does it mean to know jesus in relation to the poor and excluded?
A sixth course is the nature of divine power - just what is the power of love, of vulnerable love?
The themes of our core classes are interrelated; each builds upon the others.
Listen to this: Recently a friend described his experience in the school - "What I value here is not some idealized picture of servant leadership. that would have been a prelude for disillusionment. The school helped me make sense of my life, take stock and restore my faith - to learn new ways of being and doing and to view my law practice in an altogether different manner."
A former Jubilee intern put it this way: "God really does have a call that captures who I am and what I am to be about. Getting ahold of that changed me - gave me direction."
Another participant had this to say: "As I began to connect my faith journey with my ministry of service, I caught the amazing vision of God's unconditional love and began to feel part of something larger than myself. I sensed a call to play a part in God's dream for a healthier world for our children."
I want to conclude with some familiar words from Gordon Cosby. In his own characteristic manner, Gordon sums up our challenge this way:
Jesus' kind of leadership is the kind of servant leadership needed in this crucial time...If the Kingdom is going to come in, if the church is going to be the church Jesus is calling the church to be, if our society is to be the new society that God longs for it to be, this kind of leadership is required.
Much is at stake. God is calling you and God is calling me to something quite beyond what you and I have ever been or done before.
Dick Busch - 8 January 2002
 Printer Friendly
|