by Duane Stine
When you hear the word “leadership” your eyes probably glaze over, and you find yourself thinking, “not again.” There is so much material available regarding leadership that it can seem overwhelming or numbing. Many of the books, podcasts, and seminars focus on techniques and steps you can take to improve your leadership skills. While much of this is good information that can broaden your leadership capacity and hone your skills, the bigger concern is the matter of the heart. This is why we talk about leadership as Gospel Leadership. The word order matters. Gospel first, leadership second.
So, how does that play out in our day to day lives? Good question. Thanks for asking!
To address this, I will start with a great leadership quote that I picked from a book I read recently titled “Canoeing the Mountains” by Tod Bolsinger. This is a great book on leadership, and I do not want to do anything to detract from it. I am simply extracting one quote to use as a starting point.
“Management cares for what is. Leadership is focused on what can be or what must be. Management is about keeping promises to the constituency; leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.”
That is a great quote and comparison between management and leadership. It is challenging and inspiring. On a first read, it can have you saying “Yes, that makes sense.”
“It is the Gospel that propels us to lead with passion and purpose, to equip the saints, to make disciples who make disciples, to develop others into kingdom minded leaders, to lead with love, to serve with compassion, and so much more.”
You get out your yellow highlighter, glide it over the page and move on. But what if we hang out here for a while?
This quote is a universal statement that could apply to any organization and any leader. That is what makes it a great quote. And even in the context of ministry, it is helpful to see the difference between simply managing a ministry and leading one. But let’s take that statement and place the word “gospel” in front of the word “leadership.” It changes the meaning by bringing focus to the type of leadership, which then refines the desired outcomes.
To help explain this, I want to briefly recap some of the teaching from the leadership breakout sessions at our recent District Conference, where Tom Titus (Penns Valley Community Church), Josh Robertson (The Rock Church - Harrisburg), and Steve Wiggins (Immanuel Church - Mechanicsburg) focused on leading from a Gospel perspective.
The three main areas we discussed were “Leading out of Identity”, “Leading out of Relationship”, and “Leading out of Provision”. Each of these were tied to key moments in Jesus’ life. The first was from His temptation, the second was from when He called the disciples, and the third was from the feeding of the five thousand.
Tom talked about how we all long for significance, acceptance, and security and if we fill them with something other than the truth of the gospel, we find our leadership gets skewed. He also challenged us to speak a phrase to Jesus. Simply say “You take great joy in me.” Then stop and wait to see if something arises in your soul that you would want to add on as a disclaimer. If so, confess it and repeat. It is a freeing and centering process.
Josh talked about Jesus calling people to himself. He coined the phrase “With Him-ness” and talked about the greatest gift we can give to our people is a constant connection with Jesus. Where our leadership comes from the overflow of abundance with Him instead of a self-driven performance posture. I really appreciated his point about the disciple John having his head near the heart of Jesus at the Last Supper. It was a good reminder of our need to have our “heads” close to His “heart.”
Then, Steve focused in on how the disciples were merely delivery men of the bread and the fish and how they had nothing to do with the multiplying of the provision. He went on to describe the cycle of grief, where our identity is based on achievement and the end result is more achievement. And then he contrasted that to the cycle of grace, where our identity is based on acceptance and the end result is fruitfulness.
These are simply some snippets from the breakouts, but you get the idea. Now think about leadership, more importantly gospel leadership, where our identity is completely founded in Christ, our leading flows from the abundance of a life spent with our head close to His heart, and a full understanding that we are only the delivery persons. Let’s circle back to the quote from earlier. Leadership was defined as being “focused on what can be or what must be” and about “an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.” The definition is accurate, but the focus of the leadership, the goal of the organization, and its reason for being may be quite different when viewed through the lens of the Gospel.
It is the Gospel that propels us to lead with passion and purpose, to equip the saints, to make disciples who make disciples, to develop others into kingdom minded leaders, to lead with love, to serve with compassion, and so much more. Without the gospel, it is easy to slip into management mode or lead out of performance or achievement.
If you desire to dig deeper into leading from a gospel perspective, I invite you to check out one of the leaderships tracks at www.epdalliance.org/development.