Servant Leadership

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Throughout the Gospels, Jesus has been teaching - 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. Even after three years they seem to be clueless. Hours before the crucifixion, they are still looking for the top places.

Yet to their credit the disciples stay with him. They are there while it all happens. They see it all. They hear it all. Tbhey are part of it all. But they simply do not get it.

Time is running out. It's now or never. So in the thirteenth chapter of John's Gospel on the night before he is handed over to suffering and death, Jesus gathers the Twelve in the upper rooom for a final meal. He had loved them through the years, and now he loves them in ways that words cannot convey.

As I read John's account, I keep coming back to a peculiar incident that interrupts the progress of the meal. Listen:

"Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power." John begins with a flourish and then adds this incongruous completion: "So he [Jesus] gets up from the meal, takes off his outer clothing, and wraps a towel around his waist." In the garb of a slave he pours water in a basin and begins to wash the feet of his disciples.

This is one of the events that defines our life as a church and a people. When this happens, everything stops. I mean everything. Talk about quiet. You could have heard a Kleenex drop.

Wait a minute. Something is wrong here. A leader ought not to wash feet.

When you picture Jesus, how do you see him? What is he doing?

Standing before the multitudes as a teacher,
healing the sick,
feeding the hungry,
rushing from one meeting to another,
hanging on a cross.

How do you see him? Here John would have us picture the Lord down there on his hands and knees washing our 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."

In taking the role of a servant and washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus offers us a vision for biblical leadership. He is demonstrating the teaching preserved in the Synoptic tradition: "The Son of man came not to be served, but to serve (Mark 10:45), and again, "I am among you as one who served" (Luke 22:27). We watch him serving God by serving others. As Jesus ministers and shows us the way, we are to do the same. "I have given you an example. Now you know how. You do it. I want this to happen again and again."

Jesus is demonstrating how to love others through service. He is teaching how to build, empower, and enhance the capacities of others through service. As Jesus so loved us, we are to love one another. The foot washing is one of the events that defines our reality. In some ecclesiastical communions, foot washing is a sacrament. This act calls us to move beyond conventional realities. Surely this is what is needed in our day.

Some of you remember John Gardner - scholar, author, cabinet member, and founder of common cause. In speaking to groups like this, Gardner would often say:

I keep running into highly capable potential leaders all over the country who literally never give a thought to the well-being of their community. And I keep wondering who gave them permission to stand aside! Every citizen (and I add - every Christian) cannot evade responsibility to the larger community. Now is the time of tremendous opportunity. We can, each of us, make a difference, and together we can do even more. I am asking you to issue a wake-up call to those people - a bugle call right in their ear. And I want you to tell them this nation could die of comfortable indifference to the problems only citizens can solve. Tell them that. (David Broder in The Washington Post, 3 July 2002)

How we need a voice that lifts us up out of ourselves, a voice that calls us to serve!

The servant leader is the only model for Christian leadership. We are to use this model. We are to give our lives in service as the Lord gave his. This does not mean being a doormat. The challenge for you - and the challenge for me - is to discover in our own time and place what it means to imitate and develop the servant leadership jesus pioneers. Our task is not an easy one or a popular one, but rather it is a task that lies at the very heart of the Gospel. for this is Jesus' commission to us, "As the Father sent me, I am sending you" (John 20:21). In this as in everything he is to be our model.

Servant leaders seek to coach, persuade, mentor, teach, and witness while serving - to enhance the capacity of others to make a difference - always with an eye to influencing the just and caring quality of our churches, schools, and other institutions, especially those touching the lives of the weak and needy.

I am moved by these examples:

There is Vincent, a young bishop who keeps surprising people in his diocese by asking "Are there ways I can serve? What would help you in your ministry? How can I support you?" And he means it.

There is Barbara, a gifted, young law professor who donates her free time to directing a walk - a legal clinic and in so doing is impacting the atmosphere in her law classes and the professional aspirations of her students.

There is Vera, an arthritic grandmother in the projects, who day by day turns out the moms and grandparents in order to protest the presence of drug dealers in their neighborhood.

There is ray, a colleague, teacher, and director here at the school, who provides leadership for our The Things that Make for Peace Forums and who writes editorials for newspapers around the U.S. in which he draws upon his background as a CIA analyst in order to offer important perspectives on what is going on with Iraq.

Servant leaders all - showing the way, inspiring others, and investing their love, competence, and authority to build up the godly potential of others to change our communities.

What I have learned about servant leadership starts in here, by responding to an inward desire to serve, and continues by deepending our intimacy with the servant Jesus. Most of us ponder, what am I to do, when the deeper question is, what is God calling me to be? Servant leadership requires an inside-out approach - a transformative process that leads to behavioral and life-style change. The challenge of following Christ in an indifferent and hostile world starts in here.

As Parker Palmer puts it: "Transformation will come as we who lead take an inward journey toward both our shadow and our light...a journey, that faithfully pursued, will take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a broken world."

This is what we are about here at the school with our classes and programs. Transformation. Our classes and programs set the direciton. They are basic to our understanding and internalizing servant leadership.

Quite frankly, I cannot do this alone. I need to be involved in this with other faithful people - with you - so together we can make the inner shifts. Being in Christian community, you and I can begin to break away from the dominant culture and familiar surroundings that make up our lives.

God knows, I often ask myself, is this the primary focus of what I am about? Is this what I am really about - day in and day out? So much of what I do seems like busy preparations. Not enough of it incarnates the word of God. This is why I need a reminder of what is most real - of the leader who comes to wash my feet.

Servant leadership is never easy. It's humble, quiet, and painstaking - often dreary and unsensational; saturated in prayer and full of risks and doubts, sacrifice and heartbreak; and never mentioned in the pages of People magazine.

I take heart from Marilyn - a bilingual social worker with an obvious heart for the poor - who creates an island of hospitality and a supportive community for young hispanice mothers and their children in the inner city.

With Jim, who for over twenty years has been restoring dilapidated houses and selling them at the low market rate to qualified low-income families. He helps poor people become first-time homeowners, and along the way he engages the powers-that-be in the District of Columbia.

It was Bill, who after hearing Christ's call on his life, left his prestigious position as a corporate lawyer and is now Director of the Children's Law Center (a non-profit agency in Charlotte, NC), working with poor and at-risk boys and girls.

Servant leadership is almost unacknowledged by the world, for the word, and too often the church, identifies leadership with privilege and power - prestige and perks - methods of ministry incompatible with true servanthood.

Henri Nouwen reminds us: 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." What a contrast to the advice of 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, particularly if our notion of leadership comes from the person of Jesus Christ. For in the Christian view it is those who lose their lives for others and for the sake of the Gospel who will be saved.

A final word: In the heart of the bustling Adams-Morgan section of Washington, there is a life-sized bronze statue of the servant Christ. This kneeling figure is on a busy sidewalk outside a hospital for the poor and homeless of our nation's capital.

Now this figure of the servant Christ holds a basin filled with water, where sometimes people drop flowers or coins. The gesture of the kneeling figure bespeaks openness and invitation. Jesus loved his disciples by washing their feet, and he invited us to do the same.

Even today passersby are taken by surprise to come upon that servant figure there on the sidewalk. Some people stop to engage in conversation with the figure. Still others choose to sit in its presence. And yet it is surprising over the years how many people have asked to have the servant figure removed.

Do something.
Move it out of the way,
Get it out of here,
Put it up somehwere else...anywhere

It's too open, too exposed, too vulnerable. It's too risky to have that statue there on the street. Something will happen to it. Yet the statue remains - a reminder, a call to action.

Much is at stake. God is calling you and God is calling me to something quite beyond what you and I have ever done before.

In that Upper Room the servant Jesus says, "I have given you an example. Now you know how. You do it."

Dick Busch
Talk given at the opening of the fall term 2002 at the Servant Leadership School

Good article... good thoughts...

Good preachin... hard livin...

I want to be more like Jesus.

Thanks for sharing this.
--Tony Ingrassia ( tonyingrassia at sbcglobal dot net ) from USA on 7/2/2004; 4:17:44 PM