Effective Leadership

How can you personally keep your leadership in sync with your own spiritual maturity? All of us need humility to suppose there are levels of leadership that we may not be spiritually ready for, regardless of our other competencies. If we aspire to lead in a certain way, we need to be able to ask: Am I ready for this? Do I have the character it takes to lead well at that level?

I’d like to offer three images that can help each of us who may lead answer those questions:

A mirror

A shadow

A cliff

Let’s look at each of these images in turn.

There’s no silver bullet for restoring faith in our leaders, but I think that a basic principle of spiritual formation can provide clarity: Growing leadership responsibility can only be faithfully sustained by a commensurately growing depth of character. That’s how spiritual formation is relevant to our present moment. It provides a lens through which to see these cultural crises as a matter of what kind of spirit has been formed in a person, in a leader, and in a community. That spirit—that character—is what we should be looking for as we find a way forward.

Thinking, “this is beyond me” is a much healthier attitude than thinking, “I’ve got this” when it comes to multi-ethnic Christian community.
A measure of hesitance about being in a leadership position as a white Christian in an ethnically diverse community is appropriate.
Given the stark history of exclusion and the dangers of false motives, should those of us who are white even consider stepping into multi-ethnic leadership?

When I think about humble leaders, the name Kevin immediately leaps to my mind. When I was about thirteen years old, Kevin joined the preaching team at my home church. At that time, he worked as an executive leader at a nearby media ministry, a respected organization with international reach. Kevin was, as they say, a big deal. He made decisions that influenced hundreds of people, and he made them well.

On an apple-picking trip one brisk October, I learned of the glories of the giant rubber band potato launcher. Not to be confused with its more ambitious cousin the potato cannon, the giant rubber band potato launcher is a satisfyingly analog ballistic endeavor. A small

Do you aspire to be a spiritual leader? I’ve never been a stranger to ambition. Since childhood I’ve wanted to fix the world and punish fools. Fortunately, since then, the Lord has shown me that I would fall among the fools if I tried.

Yet, the desire to make a difference has lived on. Those