Quietly Jesus gets up from supper, sets aside his robe (a sign
of rank and authority) and puts on an apron. Then, as your recall, he pours
water into a basin and begins to wash the feet of his disciples. The leader is
there, totally vulnerable, in the posture of a servant. Scandalous!
When you picture Jesus, how do you see him? Standing before the multitude as a teacher? Healing the sick? Feeding the hungry? Hanging on the cross? How you see Jesus has impact on your life.
John's Gospel would have us picture the Lord on his hands and knees, washing our dirty feet. "We can be humble before the Lord," wrote William Temple, "but most of us are not ready for the Lord to be humble before us." The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life as a ransom for man.
A Totally Different Way
In taking the role of a servant, Jesus demonstrates the heart of his teaching. He is showing his love toward others through service. He is saying "I love you" to the disciples. If Jesus can be a servant to his disciples, we can all be servants to one another. He is teaching us how to build the church.
Jesus' way for us is completely different from our own social training and inclinations. Instead of the right tag words of doctrine or of piety, or a certain social ideology of the left or right, Jesus' mandate is to love our brothers and sisters enough to care about their empowerment!
The business-as-usual church tacks servant leadership on to its life. Along with all the others, we may have a servant leadership committee. But no, servant leadership is the mainspring. The church is directed not just to do good things, but to love God and our neighbors and to develop, energize, and equip the saints for the work of ministry. This is what it means to take Jesus seriously as Lord.
The Only Model
The servant leader is the only model for Christian leadership. We are to get down on our knees in the company of Jesus and build the church. Nothing else will do. This makes the pastoral office inclusive. We are to be vulnerable brothers and sisters who care and are cared for, forgive and are forgiven, love and accept love. Servant leadership seeks to enhance the capacity of others to make a difference.
There is the young bishop who surprises people in his diocese by repeatedly asking: AWhat would help in your ministry? Are there ways I could be of use?" And he means it!
There is Barbara, a gifted professor of law who donates her time directing a walk-in legal clinic, and in so doing is impacting the atmosphere in her law classes and the professional aspirations of her students.
There is Tony, retired from the State Department, who now devotes his days and nights to supporting and nurturing fledgling hispanic leaders in the start-up phases of neighborhood businesses. Tony believes in them. He becomes their friend, advisor, and coach.
There is Jacob, a young man who dares to dream that teenage inner city kids can have a chance and go to college, so he locates computers and recruits his Ivy League buddies to come to the teen center as part of a tutoring program. Here are people-investing their love, their creativity and authority to build up the potential of others and to serve God's dream for a transformed world.
How Do We Serve?
If you and I take seriously the example of Christ, it involves staying close to him and working for the liberating of others into their fullness. This does not mean being a doormat. Like it or not, we don't always get to choose the people we would serve. Sometimes God puts people whom we would rather not serve in our way. And more times than not he will lead us to the poor.
A friend describes servant leadership this way:
Helping others to move from self-distrust to self-esteem, from anxiety to peace, from emptiness and alienation to hope, from the slavery of secular value judgments to fearless Christian value judgments, from a search for the safe path, the respectable street, to a deepening encounter with Christ and the cross.
The shifts, the inner changes come slowly, but with God's grace they come.
Empowering Others
Leadership takes many forms, but underlying them is a single element--the stimulation, the building up, and the nurturing of each Christian. If that is our intention, then worship and sermons, meetings, gatherings and commissions will reflect it. Surely it will permeate our daily lives and the functions and structures of our church communities.
Is this empowerment the primary focus of my ministry? Is servant leadership what I am really about? So much of what I do seems like busy work. It does not have much to do with anything for which I was ordained. I need to go back to the One who comes to wash my feet, to the One who comes to me on his knees, to the One who loves me first.
Servant leadership is never easy. For many of us it will mean doing church differently. It is humble, quiet, and painstaking-often dreary and unsensational) saturated in prayer, full of risks and doubts, sacrifice and heart break, never mentioned in the pages of People magazine.
Servant leadership is the mother who stands bleary-eyed and dog-tired over a sick child at 3 a.m. It is a carpenter who uses his vacation to take his two sons and their friends down to Alabama in order to help rebuild a burned out church. It is a welfare recipient, who organizes her neighbors over and over again to drive out the drug dealers from their project. It is a bilingual federal judge, who on weekends creates hospitality and a supportive community for young Hispanic mothers in Washington, DC. It is the little things that warm our hearts and make us glad to be alive. It drives us to our knees.
Jesus' Way
Servant leadership is rarely acknowledged. The world (and too
often the church) identifies leadership from the top down with power and
privilege, efficiency and control. Competition is the character of most
relationships. Henri Nouwen once remarked, "The long and painful history of
the church is the history of a people ever and again tempted to choose power
over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led." I am
reminded of the advice a young cleric received on the day of his ordination.
"You
will do well in ministry if you don't care who gets the credit."
Servant leadership is to be our pattern if our notion of leadership comes from the person of Jesus Christ. For in the Christian view, it is those who lose their lives will save them. Jesus devoted his life to the possibility of growth and leadership in others. Throughout the Gospels Jesus teaches by word and by example what kingdom living is all about. And the disciples keep missing it. They don't catch on. They just don't get it.
If we finally get it, we will be driven to our knees. Our leadership will define itself in terms of the 101 unspectacular tasks that liberate our brothers, our sisters and ourselves to grow into the image of what we are, beloved children of God.
A final word. In the heart of the bustling Adams-Morgan section of Washington, DC., there is a life-sized bronze statue of the servant Christ created by Jimilu Mason. This kneeling figure is on a busy sidewalk outside of a hospital operated by Christ House for the poor and homeless of our nation's capital. The figure holds a basin filled with water, where sometimes people drop flowers or coins.
Gordon Cosby, pastor of the Church of the Saviour, observes that most passersby who come upon that servant figure are taken by surprise. Some even stop to engage in conversation with the figure. Still others simply choose to sit in its presence. Many people caution, "You have to get that servant figure out of there. It's too vulnerable. Move it out of the way. It's too open, too exposed."
The statue remains a reminder, a call to action.
Lord, I don't always get it. Help me to understand.
Journal Question:
How do you picture Jesus?
What qualities of Jesus are most important to you?
What qualities make you uncomfortable?
How do you practice servant leadership in your church?
Dick Busch recently retired as Director of the Continuing Education Program at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria VA and joined the staff at the Servant Leadership School in Washington, DC. For more information call 202/328-7312 or send an email.
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