ChosenRebel's Blog

The church needs competent leadership. Competent leadership is leadership that has skill attached to integrity and grit. And one more thing, submission. Skill, leadership, and grit must be in submission to the Lord, and his mission. Without all of those things, leadership, no matter how celebrated will ultimately fail.

J. Oswald Sanders, in his classic work, Spiritual Leadership says this in connection with Mark 10:43-44:

“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,
and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”

“Given the importance of competent leaders in the church–and in business and government, too–we might expect that the Bible would use the term more often. In fact, the King James Bible (on which many of my generation have been nurtured) uses the term leader only six times. Much more frequently, the role is called servant. We do not read about ‘Moses, my leader,’ but ‘Moses, my servant.’ And this is exactly what Christ taught.”

p. 21.

I think all of us in any level of leadership in the church could (and probably should) spend the rest of our lives meditating on what it means to be a servant of Christ.

“Lord God Almighty, make me a servant. And help me to remember that another word for a servant is slave (Greek, Doulos). Help me not to flinch from that, but to embrace it as a glory to be a slave of the greatest being in the universe. Keep me close and never let me go.”