leadership

If you've spent any amont of time in the north american institutional church, most of what you've learned about leadership is probably wrong. You might think you are following Jesus example, but you're probably just forcing an extra-biblical, big-business or military grid onto the Bible to make it fit.

I agree with these brief thoughts by Len Hjalmarson on leading:

• Instead of leading from over, we lead from among.
• Instead of leading from certainty, we lead by exploration, cooperation and faith.
• Instead of leading from power, we lead in emptiness depending on Jesus.
• Instead of leading as managers, we lead as mystics and poets, “speaking poetry in a prose flattened world” and articulating a common future.
• Instead of leading from the center, we lead from the margins.

My comments:

Jesus was constanly among the people. We need to be with people, beside them, in their lives, and with them. We are not over or ahead of people. We aren't detatched and unreachable. And we don't refer to people as "our people". They are God's people as we are. We don't order people or play master/servant with them.

Real Christian leadership is hard becaue it's counter-cultural. Jesus word on leading was to not to do it like the culture does it.