Theology of Credible Leadership - Lesson 2

Dr. John Johnson
Theology of Credible Leadership
Foundations For Leadership
Lesson Transcription

So we've, been raising the question, how did we get here? What, what explains some of our leadership ineptness and our leadership failure? And it's not that there's any simple answer, to that question, but I believe what we just have last talked about the, the emphasis on the pragmatic and the deemphasis on the theological explains a lot of where we are. So leads to this question here, and that is how can we change things?   

How can we get back to what we need to be doing? So, first thing is that we need to establish a solid foundation. Again, think about the dancing houses.   

And what we need to do is to get back to building something that's, on something more firm that recognizes and understands there's a critical place for theory. There is a need. If I'm going to be a really effective leader to honor learning and to realize that in this learning, I've got to make sure I build on solid foundations that will lead hopefully to straight structures.   

So, we also then need to, reverse our priorities. And here what I'm marking for is that we need to get back to what is first and then what is second.   

So, we need to get back to some rigorous, logical thinking that is asking the questions that really matter, starting with, for example, what's the meaning of life? What is the role of leadership from the very beginning? How does leadership play a role in the flourishing of life? So, what I'm arguing for again, is that we come back here to theology, because theology frames all of life's issues.   

God is the logical start point for every subject, for everything as Odin notes. And I like this quote, “God minus the world is God. The world minus God is, is nothing.” So, theology, my argument is, provides this overarching theory, of leadership.   

It takes us again, down to the core, the root, the heart of leadership. It describes the way things really, how they really are. It gives, leadership, a transcendent meaning when placed under God. It helps us then to know very practical questions. How do I lead my staff? How do I work with the board? How do I put together a budget?   

Those are key questions that get us down into the weeds of leading. But I've got to be driven back. I have to go back to the very fundamental questions at the beginning. What is God doing here? Why has God placed us here? What is the mission? Where are we going? So any fundamental principles begin with God for leadership, again, is his idea. 

Consider, for example, these truths. God has made humans in his image and trusted them with sovereignty over creation. Genesis 1 28. Now, why is that verse important? It tells me from the very start, when God placed us on this planet, he gave us, the responsibility of leadership, to rule his creation. The sage put it even more clearly in Proverbs, chapter eight, verse 15. Behind all leadership is God, and his wisdom.   

It's what creates leaders. If we look for example, at the life of Jesus, we could say he's the pole star of leadership. So again, when we think in terms of what God has revealed it, and we open this, we see, that leadership from the very beginning in Genesis was God's idea. It's God's design. It's really our purpose, that his wisdom is what enables any of us to lead.   

And he sent his son, on his redemptive mission, but also as an example of what leadership looks like. So without this theological or orientation, leaders could morph into other things. Catholic theologian, Henry Nouwen, once spoke at a leadership conference in Washington DC and he warned that without solid theological reflection, future leaders will think of themselves as simply enablers.   

As facilitators, as role models, as father or mother figures, big brothers or big sisters, we're far more than that. When we think about leadership theologically, theology clarifies the purpose of leadership.   

It corrects the notion that leaders lead for themselves. Leaders lead. Scripture tells us to bring glory and honor to God. Again. You see, that's a centering piece of leadership. It causes me, it should anyway, force me to step back and go again. What's my overarching purpose? It's not just to lead a church or lead an organization. My overarching purpose is to ask the question, how can I make something of God, something of God's glory, greater that, that's a leader's mission.   

Leaders are not created to take charge and use their position for power. I look at theology and theology says, no, I, I'm summoned by God for his purposes. Again, leadership is not my idea to serve as God's priestly vice region for His praise is what Genesis 1 28 is.   

Declaring to subdue and rule gets to the origin of leadership. It's not my idea. It's God's to serve as a pastoral role, care for souls, care for the inner life. Of those one leads begins to get to the heart of what leaders do. They're shepherds at heart serving God. So theology begins to center. You see, it places leadership in its true context because leaders, work out of context, and leaders need to understand the context they're in.   

It is not as McChrystal put it a static checklist. Leaders work in a contextual, realm, if you will. It's dependent on upon circumstances. Hence, Keller who teaches leadership at Harvard says, context is critical both to learning leadership and to exercising that.   

So leader has to step back and ask, what is the context I'm working in and how does that help, again, shape and define leadership? It's going to look differently if I'm leading a church or if I'm leading a, a corporation, or if I'm in executive leadership in the political realm or leading an athletic team.   

Context will have something to say about what the expectation is of me as a leader and what that looks like. So, I've just finished a book on John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Gary Wills, who's written a lot about leadership and you can't understand his leadership without understanding his context, his family, that gives you a certain grasp then of his leadership.   

So now let's think theologically for a moment, a leader realizes he works within the meta narrative of God, that it's God's context overall, A context that started way back in Genesis one. So we see this context in God in his first act of creating humanity to care and lead his creation. And then we see the fall of, of humanity in Genesis three.   

Again, that context helps me to understand then why leaders do what they do. It explains a lot of a leader's potential for perversion. It goes back to a fallen nature. So I move through scripture, the context of Israel, the context of Jesus as Messiah, and, who he was and what he has to say about leadership.   

And we see, the Lord sending the spirit and his enabling of us to lead. So all of these stages of history serve as a reference point, as a guide, if you will. So this is how we establish a solid foundation. We reverse priorities and we get theology back.   

And then as we're trying to build a sense of understanding leadership, it's really important to also look at, at, at great biographies, autobiographies of leaders. So we read them, we also learn from them. So if you want to be a good leader, it's important that you have a sound theological foundation. It's important that you study, leadership from multiple perspectives.   

It's important that you also look at lives of leaders and read them and learn from them. Some of the leaders I list here, Wilberforce or Bonhoeffer or Lincoln, or Roosevelt or King or Thatcher or Halsey or Tim Keller, or books like, Henry Kissinger's, recent book leadership in which he looks at six profound leaders that changed the world, or McChrystal's book leaders in which he talks about reality and the myth of leadership, or Gucci's moral leadership.   

These are all books that we need to read, as well as books that keep emerging. That every now and then we stop. We must stop and read and look at a leader's life and ask the question how, what explains leadership?   

Reading Churchill as an example, and reading different books about Churchill, looking at how Churchill became who he was looking at Churchill as he led England in one of its worst days. And we pause and we step back and we go, so what am I learning? What, what, what does this tell me about leadership? And, and of course, again, it's all filtered through a theological lens because we step back and as I did recently reading Gary's wills book on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I asked myself, what made this man a leader?   

What explains some of his perversions? What are things that I assume that really weren't true? What was it about power that became an obsession with him, while leaders, and we'll talk about this later, should be suspicious of power.  

A leader like Kennedy was obsessed with and in love with power. So I step back again and I go, okay, how does that, how, how, how does that relate to then how I should look at power theologically? You see? So this is what I'm proposing. If you want to be a really good leader, think hard about leadership, read multiple sources, but always step back and ask yourself the question.   

So what do I learn? What does God want me to see? Just reading, for example, Kissinger's recent massive book on leadership and finishing at the end, his conclusions, his summaries as to what makes for good leadership. Really great stuff. But I have to, again, from a theological side, ask myself the question.   

So how does that compare and contrast how I need to see leadership? So another way to say this is that sometimes we more in the religious realm, which is where I've spent most of my life working, can think in a very narrow sense that, well, I just need the Bible and that's all. And I can figure out leadership. No, we need to read much broader, but we need to understand, again, our theology so that we can honestly evaluate these things.   

So, and then finally to this question of how, we need to then also discover our commonalities and our differences. So we are, if I could go back here for a moment. So we're looking, in terms of how we're looking at the importance of biographies and how they shape and what they teach us.   

But finally at the end, we need to think about commonalities and differences. That is the commonalities we have with leadership theory, maybe more on the secular side and, commonalities with the theological side, but then the, the differences between the two.   

So commonalities, we, we find that there's a lot in leadership books that we have in common, seeking truth, looking at the myriad of resources, we find there's a lot of good things to learn. Let me give you an example another example.  

If I read a book like Barbara Kellerman's book on leaders. So here she is a Harvard professor. I found it to be one of the most helpful books in learning what leadership is. So she talks about skills and acquiring awareness and how you mobilize change. And she looks at many lives that do that. And I learned from that. And I go, okay, so those are things that I can hopefully incorporate in my leadership and what I do.   

But at the same time, we understand that there are vast differences, that it's important that we honor the differences that theology places every subject under searing critique. That there are things that can't be compromised. That there is an ultimate reality. And that is, it is God not man. There is an authority that transcends our authority, and that's God that leaders have as their first allegiance to serve God.   

This is what theology tells us. The successful leadership is not a matter of faith, as someone would say, but of faith, that we need to recognize that theology not only has a place at the table, it belongs at the head of the table. And it's theology that again, explains why we have the leadership failure that we do.   

It’s theology that again, centers in terms of what is my purpose, a as a leader, and, and it's theology that explains again, how we get off base. As an example you can look at a book, I'm thinking about George's book, on leadership in which he asks the question, how can we get ourselves centered and back on track as a leader?   

And it's a, it's a book that's read by many in the corporate world. It's really sound in in many ways. But he says, we have to get back to our true self. We have to get back to the compass reading to get ourselves back on track. But theologically we'd go, yeah, but you're not telling the full story. And the full story is that you can't find a compass by looking within. That self-leadership isn't the key to getting right leadership. We would say, of course, theologically the key to right leadership is to get the self-corrected. And the only way self is corrected is through redemption, through, a massive reorientation through God's work of redemption, his work on the cross. That's the only way we're going to get a compass, correction, if we're going to lead carefully.   

So it's just an illustration again, of the fact that with all the great theory here, there are things that are left out. There are things that theology, again, can teach us. So, perhaps a day will will come when we'll get foundations right again. Otherwise leadership will remain crooked and lost and leaders will remain, unrooted and they'll remain shallow,   

like those, those houses on swamp land. The what we'd say, and what this course is saying is we've got to get back to building a really solid foundation, foundation that's built on theology, that's asking the right questions that respects this world and this world, and brings them together, hopefully in a leadership theory that will lead hopefully to great, leadership practice.   

So you said how important it's for the foundations to be, correct. Mm-Hmm. And you also mentioned about the importance of pastors encouraging people in their inner life, and then the example of coaching and aren't good coaches.   

Ones that not only help people individually, but that also help groups of people be more than they can be as the sum of their parts. So that as we look in scripture, we look at what Jesus did to help his disciples individually, but then they also did a lot as the body of Christ too.   

Mm-Hmm. And encourage that model. So, is that accurate to say that that's something that's important? As pastors and as leaders in a church community, There is a, a tendency for pastors to speak, into the lives of the people they lead, as individuals and to challenge people to be all that they can be and do what they're going to do in terms of their individual efforts.   

And when preaching tends to go a lot that direction, it overlooks, I think scripturally what we see, are books that are very much corporate in orientation, right? Paul is not writing to individuals.   

I mean, there's exceptions like Philemon, but in, in the main he's writing to the corporate body of Christ. And our preaching needs to be, while at times addressed to the individual, it largely, has to be focused on what we, as a corporate body need to be doing, so that people are reminded they're part of the church, but we, if we're not careful, we can tend to go with the very individualistic culture we live in.   

And people want to come in and be challenged about what they need to do, not what we need to do. And I, I remember at times when I would start to, think about my preaching focused upon what people need to do and how they'd respond to that.   

I would sense the spirit of God saying, remember, you're leading a, a body of Christ. it's what we corporately need to do what, not what just I need to do. What kinds of strategies do you use as a pastor to encourage individuals corporately and individually, and how do you know when you're doing that?   

Well, I think whenever you're, let's say teaching scripture. I think you, you need first of all to ask the question, what is God saying to me? So it starts at a very individual level, right? I have to process it all through before I can speak it into the lives of others. So if I'm looking at a subject like leadership, I have to start by what is God saying to me about my own leadership that then translates into what I, I need to be saying to individual leaders about wherever they're leading in whatever context they're leading, whatever they're doing.   

But that's not enough. If it doesn't move to the third level, and then that is what must we as a church, that's called to be a leader in culture too, right? So it it's got, it's got to be all of those.   

So for example, right now I am, I'm doing a, interim teaching position in a church and I've, what I see a lot of individuals kind of doing their own thing, a body that's really not very united. And I'm realizing this church, if it's going to have any impact, has to come together corporately. They have to start acting as one voice. So I've determined to preach through the one anothers all through the fall to just keep saying that it has to be one another.   

We've got to provoke one another. We have to love one another. We've got to bear with one another, right? It's, it's all this, that's what the church is about. It's not just a, a bunch of individuals coming together saying, what's in this for me? Because that's not what the church is. So, Because would you say then the result of that is by people encouraging others, each other within the body, that that encourages them to have an influence in their different spheres of life and to have an impact outside of the body?   

Yeah, I think so. I mean, the, the, the church needs to, all of us as individual parts of the church need to ask the question, how can I impact the world in which I live? But the church also needs to ask itself, how can we as a corporate body impact the world in which we live?   

So that when people see the corporate body at work, that becomes its own powerful witness. So, when I was pastoring a village, a fairly large multicultural church on the west side of Portland, we received one year, from the city council, the Diversity of the Year award as an institution.   

So, when I went to receive it, they asked me if I had anything to say. And I made the point that if you think we did this out of political correctness, it had nothing to do with that. It's all about what the gospel represents. It's people coming together and getting past our differences, whether it's generational or cultural to say, this is our profound witness of the power of the gospel.   

So again, that's corporate, right? That's, and, and, and that's what we need to see, that we have this powerful witness as a corporate body and we're called to that, but we also have hopefully this powerful witness in our individual spheres of work. So it's both, and that for the one leading, it starts, first of all, with what God's doing here.