The Job Description of a Leader

If the church is to make a difference in the world, every one of its members must begin to act and think like leaders. Leadership is not for the few and the special, the exception rather than the expected. Whether this mysterious thing called "leadership" comes naturally or is an acquired talent, every Christian must come to terms with it. A biblical style of leadership and language of leadership must become endemic in the church.

In the Old Testament and Gospel lessons for this week both David and Jesus illustrate the mysterious qualities and unique characteristics God has chosen to hold up as necessary for those who would lead the people of God on their life journeys of faith. The surprising nature of their faith, their lives, and their words combine to write what might be thought of as a Christian's "job description" of a leader.

As Warren Bennis points out in his book On Becoming a Leader (1989), leadership still remains the most studied and least understood topic in all the social sciences. In spite of all the recent studies on leadership by MacGregor Burns, Tom Peters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Cary Cooper, Alistair Mant, et al., leadership is all too often still "like beauty, or love, we know it when we see it but cannot easily define or produce it on demand."
--Charles Handy,
The Age of Unreason
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990), 133.

Leaders are servants first of all. The only gospel passage...