[b]Qualities Of Godly Leadership[i]by Crawford Loritt
What is the essence of distinctive Christian leadership? What does God use to advance His purposes? Before I answer these questions, let me say that nothing ever takes place in life apart from leadership. Furthermore, in the Bible leadership is not about a position. Leadership in the Bible is always about assignment. There is something that God wants to accomplish. Therein lies a key to understanding that it is not the expression of your own ego, it is not a reflection of who you are. Leadership in the Scriptures always has to do with the concept of stewarding what belongs to another person. When you read about leadership in the Bible, there is something to be accomplished.
As I read through the Scriptures about leadership, I had this one question in the back of my mind: what is it that every great man or woman of God has in common? What was it about them that God trusted with His assignments? What I discovered is that, first of all, there is no such thing as a particular leadership personality profile in the Bible. You have shy, reticent people that God trusts with His assignment. You also have extroverts. You have a Gideon hiding out and God calls him a "mighty man of valor" (Judg. 6:12). I discovered there is not a certain personality profile.
Secondly, there is not a certain pedigree. Leaders in the Bible did not come from a certain background or a certain family. You have people who were farmers, people who were noble, people who were average and from all walks of life.
Thirdly, you find there is not a commonality when it comes to education. You have very educated people like Daniel. You have a farmer like Amos. You have fishermen. There is not a certain educational profile. God does not say that because you went through a certain pattern and have an educational degree, that means you are therefore competent, qualified and capable of being a steward of His cause.
As I read through the Scriptures and asked the question, what did these leadership people have in common that God trusted them with His assignments, I discovered they had the four following things in common. These are actually qualities that should be true of every follower of Jesus Christ, but these are exponentially true of every person that God trusts with His assignments. They are obvious but they are profound and powerful. God leads with these four pillars or characteristics. These are things that God smiles on, things that cause Him to trust His people with His assignments.
Brokenness
The first one is this: every person to whom God has trusted His assignments has been marked by and characterized by brokenness. There are all kinds of marvelous descriptions and definitions of brokenness, not the least of which is Nancy Leigh DeMoss’ contrast and comparison. I was sitting there as a staff person with Campus Crusade in July 1995 when Nancy Leigh DeMoss began to speak and there was a holy hush that fell on 5,000 plus of us when she began to contrast and compare broken, humble people with proud people. [See the article by Nancy Leigh DeMoss on page 5 of this issue.] God does not use anyone who comes to Him feeling fully developed and fully able.
I want to balance this by saying that I do not mean you should not be educated, or if God opens a door, that you should not work on developing your gifts and abilities. Too many of us under the guise of sounding more spiritual than we ought to sound, put down development, education, and the acquisition of what we need. Those of us with a revival message have the tendency sometimes to look with disapproval at those people who develop and work on their skills, but it is not unspiritual for them to do that. In fact, Paul encouraged Timothy to develop his skills and abilities (see 1 Timothy 4:12-16). Brokenness does not mean that you do not pursue excellence and the development of everything that God has given you. I am not saying that at all.
Brokenness is a permanent sense of God-neediness. God does not trust His assignments to people who have not slain the desire to appear significant. You cannot use leadership as an extension of your own need for attention and admiration. You cannot prostitute God’s assignments as an opportunity for you to be visible and praised. God does not work that way. When He trusts people with His assignments He first crushes them.
You find this in the Bible. Moses is a chief example. I remind people not to do lazy exposition and study on the life of Moses. Many people talking about leadership suggest Moses was qualified to lead because he grew up in the palace. I disagree. By the time Moses was intercepted by God he had zero self-esteem. He tried it his way and for forty years he was herding sheep at the far side of the desert. He came up to this bush that was burning and God was in this bush! God was speaking through a bush to Moses, the bush was not consumed and Moses was giving Him excuses! I would say that Moses did not have much confidence.
Brokenness is based upon two things. Number one, it is based upon the whole concept of proactive surrender. One excuse that Moses gave to God was that the people would not listen to him. What authority did he have? And God said, "What is that in your hand?" "A staff," answered Moses. "Throw it on the ground," commanded God. It became a serpent. God told him to pick it up. It became a staff again. God told Moses to put his hand in his bosom and then to take it out. It was leprous. "Put your hand back inside," God said. It became whole (Ex. 4:1-8).
Here is the point: God does not use what we bring to Him, but He uses what we surrender to Him. Moses had a staff and an eighty-year-old hand. God let Moses know it is not what you have; it is Who you have that is the authority. Brokenness involves proactive surrender and I am always giving back over to God what He has given me to work with.
The second part of brokenness has to do with the conscious awareness of the pain that my sin can cause. Authentically broken people are not self-righteous folk. Authentically broken people understand they are but a quarter inch away from doing despicable things. That is what David had to learn. Psalm 51 is a great psalm of repentance. The sacrifices of God are a broken, contrite heart. Your integrity to lead is found in the constant conscious realization that you have not forgotten what He forgave you of and what you are capable of doing. That is where the power and the integrity to lead come from. God’s assignments are always, forever about Him and He does not want some obnoxious, arrogant person competing for His glory. So if you are going to be the vessel upon which the treasure is placed, then you cannot be competing for recognition. It is all about the treasure. Your gifts, talents, abilities and background are all subservient. It is all about Him. You can go down the list of every great man or woman of God in the Scriptures and throughout history and find that before God trusts them with assignments, He crushes them.
Brokenness is not a lack of confidence. Some people are wounded and they pass it off as being broken. Brokenness is not woundedness. There are too many unhealthy people in ministry who are superficially spiritual. They are wounded people who have never healed, but they are using their woundedness and using some broken language. Really, they are hurting people who are hurting other people. They are using ministry and positions of leadership as their group therapy to get attention from others. Brokenness is the realization that God has healed me and I need Him every day, every minute of every hour, knowing that I always need to press into God.
Uncommon Communion
Secondly, every man or woman that God has trusted with His assignments has been characterized by uncommon communion. I do not mean just your prayer life. Every person that God has trusted with His assignments receives a twofold assignment. The assignment itself is a statement about what God wants to do in human history, but at the same time the very assignment itself is a call to intimacy with Him. Let me tell you something to help you avoid burnout. The very assignment that God gives a leader is a primary means through which He calls him to intimacy with Himself, because leadership is always prophetic. It is not only what the leader does but who he is that is a picture of the reality which God wants to take people toward. You are not just given the assignment; you are the portrait of the assignment. God never separates His assignments from the sanctifying process of the leader. So the leader authentically not only speaks about where things need to be, but he is a picture of where things need to be. That is the reason why there is always a horrendous gap between what God tells you and where you are. It is always way out ahead of you. Look at David; God was teaching David this even as a young boy. When David was too small to even wear Saul’s armor, God was teaching him that "I am the God of the gap." He was teaching this when David was running from Saul, hiding out in caves.
That is the reason why God will never give a leader all the details of a plan that He wants to fulfill. He gives him enough to know to trust Him for right now. And He tells him enough to let him know that he does not have what he needs, so he has to keep coming back to Him. The very nature of the assignments that God gives us is a call to His heart.
When I began to understand this I did not wrestle so much with burnout or get overwhelmed as I used to in my life. Too many of us make too big a distinction between our ministries and our walk with God. If you change the way you think about your ministry as being one of God’s primary tools for your spiritual development, I guarantee you that you will not have nearly the amount of confliction. Philips Brooks, the famed New England pastor of the nineteenth century, says, "Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be the miracle." You become the miracle in the process of doing your work.
Isn’t that the whole point of the tent of meeting? In Exodus 33 God did not tell Moses every eventuality. He told him to go and deliver the children of Israel. God gave Moses enough to know what to say to Pharaoh, but He did not tell him all that was going to happen. God told Moses that when they got into the wilderness, He was going to give a cloud and a pillar and every day they were going to have to seek God for direction. Exodus 33:7-8 says, "Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, far off from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up, and each would stand at his tent door, and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent." Can you imagine the confidence that this instilled in the children of Israel to see their leader meeting with God?
Verse nine says, "When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. And when all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the entrance of the tent, all the people would rise up and worship, each at his tent door. Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent." I do not know what happened in there, but Moses went there weary and broken. He came out touched by God and with a sense of confidence.
Do not despise the fact that you are overwhelmed and in "over your head." That is your friend and ally. However, do not be foolish and assume that God wants you to do things just because you want to do them. But the very nature of God’s call is in the gap between what He is asking and in what you feel you are able to do. God makes His person through the callings that He gives them.
I am convinced that God gives leaders this incredible vision, task and assignment so that we can plummet the depths of intimacy with Him. There is something about the provision of God that we need to experience before we can tell others to experience it. In the text where Moses was on the mountain and he left Aaron with the people, they ambushed Aaron. (Be careful in giving one who is primarily gifted to be a manager the responsibility to lead, because managers are motivated by the orderly implementation of process while leaders are motivated by direction and action.) Aaron was weak and God said that He would consume the people and make of Moses a great nation. What does Moses do? He intercedes for the people. What does God say? God says, "Let Me alone" (Ex. 32). Because of the intimacy that Moses had with God when God said, "Let Me alone," God changed His mind. The depths of the relationship that Moses had with God moved God’s heart. God had used the calling of leadership to pull Moses to Himself.
There are four jewels in the leader’s development that God uses consistently, besides the magnitude of the assignment, to keep us running back to His presence.
The first one is failure. Failure is often a part of God’s plan. Failure in and of itself does not teach you anything. We need to examine our failures.
Secondly, He uses personal struggles. Second Corinthians 12:9 says: "My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness." Your struggles are not necessarily disqualifiers, although sin is. Everybody struggles. Think about Paul’s thorn in the flesh. He had apostolic authority and he prayed three times that whatever this thing was would go away. It was a personal struggle for him. But God said that His strength is made perfect in our weakness. So whatever you are struggling with means that God has an opportunity to step right into that whole situation.
Thirdly, suffering. I am at a point in my life when I tell folk they probably ought not to follow anyone who has not suffered. Suffering brings a heart connection to people that nothing else can do. It is part of the journey of life. It helps you not to be condescending and arrogant. It helps you internalize the pain of the people around you.
And the fourth one is success through hardship. The work of God is not easy. Paul told Timothy to endure hardship, to stop whining, to watch his priorities and to not get entangled with the things of this life (2 Tim. 2). You have to work hard. Your gifts, your dreams, what you want to do are just entry-level stuff. The real fruit of the ministry is not coming from your gifts or dreams and visions. The real fruit of the ministry comes from your endurance. It is when you can lay hold of that gift, dream and vision and make it obey through adversity and hard times that it means something.
Servanthood
Thirdly, following uncommon communion, we have servanthood. Every great man or woman of God that has been trusted with God’s assignments has been characterized by servanthood as an identity and not as a strategy. Watch out for borrowing from the world’s definitions of servant leadership. When the world says servant leadership it is not the same thing we are talking about. Usually what they are talking about means, "I’ll serve you to accomplish the goal, but you owe me." It becomes utilitarian. You serve to get something in return.
Biblically we serve because we are servants. We give out of the identity of serving. In the Bible, as I said earlier, leadership is not spoken of as a position. The position is given as a platform to serve. You are not given a position of leadership because "you paid your dues." You are not given a position of leadership just to occupy a bigger office. The only reason why you lead biblically is because God can trust you to serve. It is all about the assignment and the service. When you are in leadership, do not ask anyone to do anything you have not done or you are not willing to do yourself. If someone comes to me asking for a position of leadership, ninety percent of the time I will not give it to them. Great leaders do not campaign for position. There are some exceptions to this if there is a sense of God’s calling. But even if you are looking for a position, your motivation ought to be for the opportunity to serve, and not for the stature or the recognition that the position gives.
In Second Samuel sixteen, David was king of Israel but Absalom, his son, wanted to kill him. David found out that Absalom had been anointed king in Hebron and was on his way back to Jerusalem to kill him. All David had was a handful of faithful followers. He fled from the city and we read, starting in verse five: "When King David came to Bahurim, there came out a man of the family of the house of Saul, whose name was Shimei, the son of Gera, and as he came he cursed continually. And he threw stones at David and at all the servants of King David, and all the people and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on his left…. Then Abishai the son of Zeruiah said to the king, ‘Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me go over and take off his head.’ But the king said, ‘What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah? If he is cursing because the Lord has said to him, "Curse David," who then shall say, "Why have you done so?"’" David was perhaps saying, "Maybe I need to be humiliated. Maybe I forgot that I was a servant."
Later after Absalom was killed and David returned to Jerusalem, Shimei came before him. In Second Samuel nineteen verse twenty-one and following it says: "Abishai the son of Zeruiah answered, ‘Shall not Shimei be put to death for this, because he cursed the Lord’s anointed?’ But David said, ‘What have I to do with you, you sons of Zeruiah, that you should this day be as an adversary to me? Shall anyone be put to death in Israel this day? For do I not know that I am this day king over Israel?’" In other words, do you not know that I know the position that I have? Servanthood is really about security. God gives power to leaders so that power is used redemptively and it is used to serve. It is never to be used in a self-serving way.
Some of us God cannot trust with visibility and influence because we will prostitute it. The reason David was called a man after God’s own heart is seen in what I just read. Another time David refused to kill Saul when he could have. David served.
Immediate Obedience
Fourthly, every man or woman of God who has been trusted with God’s assignments has been characterized by radical, immediate obedience. It is as if he or she would rather die than disobey God. The calling of God was sacred to them. As I have traveled a great deal over the last twenty years and have been on a number of boards and been involved with a number of national organizations, one of the hurts that has come to my heart has been to see the mindset that the work of God is a series of selected options and career paths. It is killing us. The sacred calling has been pushed aside. It is almost as if there is no big difference between the church and any commercial organization. We have our own little career path, our plans, our profiles. We consider what we seem fitted for and we choose what organizations line up with our talents, gifts and abilities and preferences. The spiritual dynamics of understanding God’s heart, mind, will and calling, our stewardship responsibility, the things that make us endure that you cannot measure, the voice of God – all of this is disregarded.
As I read the Scriptures, the assignments are sacred. In fact, one’s life was viewed as the arena for God’s activity in human history. Every person is called upon by God to passionately seek what He wants done. We are missing this. I pastor a wonderful church, but I sometimes weep over something I see in our congregation. I see good Christian parents raising their children so they can be proud of them. We do not celebrate God’s calling. The truth of the matter is we do not model it. We are not the compelling portrait of a Godward life that is centered on divine purpose. Since we make assumptions about our lives, the next generation does too.
Listen to what Paul says in Acts 13:22 where he is contrasting the motivations of Saul with that of David and what God did: "And when He [God] had removed him [Saul], He raised up David to be their king, of whom He testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all My will.’" Then in verse 36: "For David, after he had served the purpose of God…." Ringing in my ears are words Bill Bright gave to a group of us young men years ago: "I’m going to take pressure off every one of you. None of you has to be successful, but you have to be obedient." To godly leaders throughout the history of the Church and throughout the Scriptures, you get the sense that this is no game, no job, no career, no self-seeking, but there is a sacred stewardship.
Four Personal Guiding Principles:
1. Do not tell God how to use you. Stay open. Stay flexible.
2. What God has for you no mortal being can take from you, so you never need to compete or compare. Just stay after what God has in front of you.
3. Do not live by your rights, but respond to what is right. People who live by their rights only grow to the level of their demands.
4. Do not operate from giftedness, but operate from brokenness. Your gifts are not a statement of your identity. They are only something that God uses. Your real identity is found in Jesus. Do not make major decisions based foremost on your gifts. Sometimes God wants to grow you and bring about new things. He may want you to be in a situation outside of your gifts, so that He can do something more in your own heart and life.