As many people have asked about my own training towards licensed ministry, I thought it might be interesting to share the following assignment piece. This was my answer to the question ‘What is Christian leadership?’ which formed part of assessed work for the course at Emmanuel College. The brief asked for something which would be suitable for a magazine article and the timing now seems particularly appropriate, with our search for a new Rector currently in progress.Christian Leadership: Is God Calling You?

If you were to make a list of great leaders I wonder who you would choose? You could pick from the world of politics, where perhaps Churchill springs to mind, or business, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were the heavyweights for many years. Or perhaps you would naturally go for someone like Alex Ferguson from the sporting arena or a military figure such as Julius Caesar.

Although from very different fields, all are seen as examples of great leaders – which begs the question, what exactly is the concept of leadership that unites all of these together? In each case, I’d like to suggest that they had a vision in mind and their leadership involved a movement of a wider community from where they were at some present time or situation towards this desired future outcome. Key to this movement was the way in which the leader was able to influence their ‘followers’ to work towards their group goal. Their strategy to accomplish this would have involved discernment in order to identify required resources, deciding the areas where these should be applied and perhaps withdrawn if not central to the main goal. In their respective fields these leaders would have been concerned with the key values of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity, and their power and authority over others would have been central to how they operated.

If we consider what leadership might look like in a Christian context we can see there may be some similarities, we could say for example that it is the responsibility of the Christian leader to encourage people to keep moving forwards, working towards the realisation of the Kingdom of God. However, a quick glance through our Bible may alert us to the possibility that there is a bit more to leadership in a Christian sense. There is for starters the recurring theme that God seems to have a peculiar habit of choosing the most unlikely of characters for the top roles of leadership, people who seemed totally unsuitable for the task they were given from a secular perspective. David the lowly shepherd who becomes King over Israel and Peter the outspoken fisherman whom Jesus chooses to be the rock of the church both spring to mind. Faith, trust and obedience to God are the key values to consider for leadership in the Christian context. Additionally there is the matter of the folk to be led: in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul notes that the baptized community, those chosen via the working of the Holy Spirit and needing leadership contains all manner of different characters and abilities. The weak and vulnerable may not be suitable for the demanding worlds of our secular leaders, so how should Christian leadership then differ if we were aiming instead to nurture these very same people and help them to develop?

If we were going to put together a role description for Christian leadership then perhaps not surprisingly we should start by looking at Jesus himself, the leader God has given to us. We should consider how he chose to operate and especially the ways this contrasts to the methods we have come to expect from our secular role models. Whatever we understand about Christian leadership, it is clear that it should start by being rooted in our spiritual life: Jesus notably gave priority to his own relationship with the Father, making time and space to pray as he went about his ministry and also when faced with life changing choices, the moments before choosing his first disciples and the crucifixion being the prime examples. Such a practice is the basis of a Christian leader’s ability to show discernment in a given situation, able to see the way in which the Holy Spirit is at work and plan a strategy accordingly.

Padfield, who has written on the subject, uses the concept of ‘hopeful influence’ to define and distinguish how Christian leadership should function as this strategy is formed and put into practice with the help of the community. In identifying what this hope is and how this influence should work we begin to see further distinctions from how the wider world operates.

For the Christian, Christ is much more than a role model, he is our hope. The hopefulness to which Padfield refers is not only rooted in Christ but also the certainty that, unlike more worldly leadership goals, the promise of God’s Kingdom will be fully realised. Christian leadership responds to this hopeful work of God and aims to influence others to move closer to the world as it should be, sharing the vision that what we do ‘now’ actually makes a real difference to how the world will be transformed. It is in how this influence works where we should see perhaps one of the most clearly distinguishing features of Christian leadership. At the last supper Jesus gave his disciples an example when he chose to take on the role of a lowly servant and wash their feet, and afterwards a command, that they should do for others as he had done for them.

If we say that the specific model of Christian leadership needs to be rooted in faithfulness and obedience in our relationship with God and inspired by our hope in Christ, then the ‘outpouring’ should be in our influence through service to others through the activity of the Holy Spirit. Christian leadership should always come with a sense that it is there for the benefit of others, helping them to grow in faith and develop their own gifts. In this respect we may now become aware of a distinction between Christian leadership and the office of a Christian leader within the church community. We may, I think, correctly conclude that God’s call to Christian leadership is to an activity which is not restricted to certain members of the church. In a sense, and unlike how our secular world tends to operate, we are all being equipped and called to show the qualities of leadership, especially when we leave our church service on a Sunday morning and walk out into the wider world.

Andrew Bailey, Licensed Lay Minister in training