Theology of Credible Leadership - Lesson 1

Dr. John Johnson
Theology of Credible Leadership
Introduction to Leadership
Lesson Transcription

Well, I want to welcome, all of you to this, study we're going to be doing, over the next few days as we talk about, leadership. In particular, talking about credible leadership, which is a huge need. Huge  subject. At least in my mind today. Let me just say a couple words about myself. Again. My name is, John Johnson, and I've been a senior pastor for 35 years. So I've had a lot of leadership experiences,  both here and abroad, pastoring and international church in Europe for several years.   

But I've always been fascinated with leadership and it was, a great privilege for me, particularly in Europe, to work with a number of expats in a church, where, many representing different corporations and, political, places, came together.   

And they taught me a lot about leadership, as well. I also had the privilege to teach leadership for some 20 years at Western Seminary. And I've written, both a book on global leadership and more recently a book on theological leadership. And, that's where I want to spend a certain amount of my focus, with you, is to think theologically about leadership. We tend not to think about leadership theologically, and I'm going to try to explain some reasons why.   

So just, some clarity right up front. This is going to be a little bit more on the theoretical side, but, not to scare you away, I want to also make sure we, bring in some very pragmatic elements to leadership, but it's really necessary. I've learned to make sure you have the, the right foundations. And while some books on more the Christian side, we'll talk about leadership and look at various, lives and passages.   

This is really aimed at being more of a theologically centered, approach that tries to bring in all the aspects that we see in, in God's revelation, as well as, bits and pieces of early church history. So that's going to be our course. And, so what I want to do in this first session is give a little bit of introduction, to leadership itself.   

I think it's fair to say leadership is not some secondary topic. In fact, it's a primary topic at at least when you look at the amount of books that, continue to come out. It’s almost as one, put it in obsession, a national, obsession, even a global obsession. The, the news, every day we wake up and the first thing we read are about leaders and, and their policies and their pronouncements, their past and their future.   

And we see this whether we're looking from a political side or a corporate side, or religious side, or an athletic side. So much of the stories that we interface with every day,  are stories about leaders. And yet for all the interests, for all the continual churning out of thousands of leadership books,  even though we have a leadership industry that, if I have my figures right, is some $50 billion industry,  with all the training, with all the books, with all the interest.   

Isn't it a, a paradox, if you will, and irony that we have so few good leaders that it seems like so many segments of the world today are devoid,  of great leaders.   

Hardly a day goes by that there isn't some leadership failure. Leadership failure, whether it's in the church or whether it's in the political world, corporate world,  everywhere we turn there, there are stories, I think just recently of the Southern Baptist Convention that,  spent a lot of their time dealing with owning up to long-term pastoral abuse or just moral failures.   

I look in my own seminary. I look at churches, significant churches here in the northwest where there have been,  a number of leadership failures, moral failures,  inept leaders who just don't know how to lead. And there are lots of reasons for this, and we're going to look at some of those. Certainly, part of it is the lack of academic training, propensity of leaders to want to please their followers.   

A lot of it has to do with the leader's own self-interests. Certainly a lot of it has to do with the moral decline of our age. And so it's the conviction here that,  a lot of it really gets back to this. There is a failure spiritually and rare is the leadership grounded in sound theology might be grounded in philosophy in some of the social sciences.   

Certainly a lot of leadership theory is built upon business practices. And this is where many of us go to, to learn about leadership. But I want to suggest to you right from the start that if we can get back to the spiritual, understanding, because it's God who defined leadership anyway and has the most to say about leadership, we just might get this, this subject back on course.   

So a big part of the aim here, as I've mentioned, is to present, if you will, a theology of, of leadership that will therefore, I believe, lead to what we all are hungering for. And that's credible leadership, born out of a conviction. Again, that leadership is rooted in God, designed by God, and is therefore, if you really think about it, is sacred in its essence.   

So what I want to do is go back to, the roots, because true leadership is, rooted in, in past, in history, in God's design. And so the working material we're going to look at comes largely from the revelation of God, but it also comes, without apology from a lot of good sound, secular sources, secular scholarship.   

I, I have, in my study, I have my theologies over here, on, on this side of my study, if you will, and secular leadership books on this side. And I have, at least for the last 25 years, I've drawn from both. I've drunk from both wells.   

I have tried to read theology and understand what God says about leadership. And then I've tried to spend a fair amount of time, reading the very best books I can on leadership. So the, the, the plan that we're going to look at here in this course is to draw from both of those, and I'll do my best, to bring, insight from both. So the aim, if you will, is to compliment and to contrast.   

We'll see where leadership theory from the secular side and from many really good, good solid books, and from the theological side, what they have to say, where they compliment and where they contrast. And yet give precedence to theology above it all. So what I want to do is to address core questions, core questions that I believe leaders, must answer.   

Core questions that I believe followers, ask questions, that, I hope will give us some precise, answers along the way that will provide meaning and lead to effective leadership. Now, again, a lot of this comes again, out of my own experience of years and just, a lot of reading and learning and continuing to learn because it's a lifelong, experience.   

So I will look at such things as how do we define leadership? 'cause that's a really important question right from the start. If we're going to talk about leadership, what do we even mean by it? It might seem to have an obvious answer, but as you will see, it's not obvious at all. I also want to talk about, this question that is, is leadership, really necessary?   

I mean, do we really need leaders? It's a, it's a question that is more and more, a question leading to debate. How does one become a leader? That itself is a fascinating question because, is it possible anyone can be a leader? Or is it something that's, that is, is something only those who are gifted and able, to, to lead?   

Certainly a big question that I want to raise here and try to answer is, what leads to leadership credibility? And what I will be sharing with you is that it's an answer that involves three pieces. Credibility has to do with character. It also has to do with wisdom, and it has to do with competence. And then we want to look at a leader's essential task. What is it a leader is called to do when, an institution looks to its leader to lead?   

What, what does a leader, no matter if it's corporate, political, religious, what, what is it leaders must do? And then we'll tackle issues like power. That's a huge topic when it comes to leadership. And so I want to talk about where true power is, what false power is, how power corrupts and how power enables.  

We'll, tackle also the question of why do leaders face so many challenges? Why is suffering a part of leadership? And then I think a question that, I've rarely found anyone address, but I want to address it, is, what is the future of leadership? And I'm not talking about the future being in this temporal zone, but is there leadership beyond, this world, beyond history?   

Is there leadership in eternity? So, this is what we'll try to do. It will require certain humility on all of our parts,  to come with a, a humble, teachable mind. 

Let's start with some logical foundations. Now, foundations are really important. In Holland, where I lived for a number of years, there is in Amsterdam, there are these houses, they're called the dancing houses.   

And, they're referred to as the dancing houses, because when you look at them along the canal,  they're beautiful with their graceful architecture. And these like tall, iconic houses or grace with these gabled, facades. But when you step back, let's say to take a picture, you notice that they're actually tilted. They aren't really straight.   

And the story behind these dancing houses is that years ago when they were built, they were built on wooden stilts. And these wooden stilts were driven into swamp land. And I, I think about that, that metaphor, if you will, that picture when I look at leadership, because it seems like leadership, has something similar going on. There's the absence of a solid foundation.   

What we're building a lot of a leadership, on is like a swamp land. And so leadership inevitably is going to be off kilter. It's going to be crooked. That's created a calamity of sorts. And it's not hard to see the calamity. I was in India recently teaching leadership to a core of students. And the Wall Street Journal, just that week as I was teaching the course, had this article, India is Broken.   

And I read the article to the students, and we talked about it at length, given the subject of leadership, because it was all about how leadership has failed India over the last 50 years or so, or, the Middle East, you think of the Arab Spring that had a lot of hope, but again, there was a massive failure of leadership.   

Or I saw this in the Atlantic just, earlier last month with this article. The China model is dead only to say that almost everywhere you look, whether you're looking at American leadership, Chinese leadership, middle East leadership, India leadership, well, where does the stop? There's something that is a commonality and all, and that is leadership is flawed, it's broken. Of course, we understand why in large measure because we live in a broken world.   

But I think in particular, there's some specific reasons for this. And so this leads to really the first question here in this introduction, and that is, how did we get here? How did we get into this crisis, this swamp plant, if you will. And I'd like to suggest several reasons. And the first one is that, and I'll use, the whiteboard here to say that to this question, how we have put practice over theory.   

Now, practice isn't wrong. Practice is in fact necessary to understanding leadership.   

But, but we've tended to put the cart before the horse. We become more enamored with practice. We gravitate to how to books. We want to know what works. Some of you may be taking this course going. I just want to know what works, what will help me to be successful? What will enable me to be this really effective leader? What will draw and attract people to follow? What will lead to the best outcomes?   

And these are good questions. They're fair questions, they're questions I ask myself a lot as a pastor and as a ministry leader. But the reality is that only goes so far and it provides little support. We're what we really need to, first of all do, and this is a huge argument that I want to, I want to keep making, is we have to think deeply about this.   

We have to begin by studying leadership theory. And that might, that may not necessarily, get our best attention, but we need to do it, more time and resources are devoted to the practical. We want to know, again, what makes for leadership success. But pragmatic lessons are not enough. Studies indicate, and the statistics, again, are alarming.   

One, out of two contemporary leaders are considered ineffective and incompetent. So the reality is that leadership, that is effective and competent, that is sustained over time, requires good methodology, but also good theory. So there has to be, if you will, and this is again, part of what we're doing, is to make a kind of intellectual inquiry that is interdisciplinary, that is looking at history, looking at philosophy and sociology and business, and above all theology.   

And that's the point. A good leadership theory has to be imaginative, has to be reflective. So if we want transformational leaders, we have to first of all stop and just ask ourself the question, do we make, do we know what we're talking about here?   

And in the end, it was con to said this, in the end, nothing is as practical as good theory. I think that's a great statement because it's true. So first of all, practice over theory. So we've got to change this, and this is how we also got to where we are. And secondly, it's this, we have replaced God's wisdom with our wisdom.   

So our wisdom tends to trump God's wisdom. What I'm saying here is that when we think about leadership, we tend to think in terms of how we see it, what is our wisdom? Rather than stopping to say, maybe we need to step back and make sure we understand God's wisdom here.   

And so we have put things in opposite places. We have given a greater priority to the secular over the theological, so that when you look, for example, imagine again this section of books on leadership theory, more on the secular side. You're not going to find next to anything about God or God's contribution to it all.   

And the same thing over here. When we look the theological side, we often are missing,  much of anything regarding leadership itself. So most leadership programs today ignore,  avoid theology, and in similar fashion, much of leadership, if we talk about it on the theological side,  we don't spend much time talking about it at all.   

This has led to consequences that I believe leads to a lot of the leadership failure we have today. So let's talk a little bit more about how this all happened. Over time, if we think historically leadership, or let me put it this way, theology itself lost a certain amount of credibility.   

There was a time theology was referred to as the Queen of sciences. It was the crown of the curriculum. It was the authoritative voice on every subject, including leadership. But by the enlightenment, God was perceived to be more a human creation,  not the other way around. Eventually, other disciplines filled the void. God became outdated.   

Miroslav Volf, a professor of Yale Divinity School, who teaches, ironically think about this, who teaches,  at a divinity school at Yale, said, “the general sense is that theology isn't, isn't producing any genuine knowledge that accomplishes anything that rades with the irrationality of faith and is useless.” Now imagine here he is, he's teaching theology in a huge university and realizing the subject he teaches theology itself,  gets very little respect today.   

And then you couple that with Christianity itself, that is losing influence and respect and culture. And it's not hard to, to imagine then that many of the books on secular leadership leave God out as if God really has nothing to offer.   

Now, the unfortunate thing I've observed in my, my tenure of being a professor in the academic side of theology is that theology in a certain sense has returned to favor. And so it's hard to find in a lot of theological schools, much priority given to leadership and leadership training. Leadership, courses, are not always offered.   

And even those that are offered sometimes are looked upon by some theologians with a certain suspicion, as if it's something more, that should be devoted to the sociological, the philosophical, or the business worlds. And the result, again, is, is really unfortunate because what we see then graduating students from seminary is to go out and lead institutions, ministries, churches, but with people who don't have many leadership skills as well.   

My observation is that a number of pastors seem to think that it's just intuitive. Well, when I get into the position, I'll just, I'll become a leader. I'll just figure it out on my own.   

It's why we have so much, frankly, if I could just say this, so much inept leaders, in the pastoral world, they might know how to do pastoral care. They may know how to preach great sermons, but for many, they have little clue what to do when they're leading a board meeting, or working with leaders in the church. So maybe just to step back for a moment, if you are tracking with what I'm saying, we have in the secular side, a, a world that sees, little need, for theology.   

It gives little respect to that science, if you will, on the religious side of things. We have a, a world that also is suspicious of leadership theory from the secular side, so it tends to avoid it as well. So what we have is we have leadership failure here, because of the absence of theology, and we have leadership failure here because of the absence of leadership theory.   

So, what needs to happen is, where we want to go and the next segment. So as you're thinking about the theological basis for leadership and the secular basis mm-hmm.   

For leadership, can you talk about the tension between doing things in a church based on the leading of the spirit and or our own knowledge and understanding and how we function and how we set up programs, those kinds of things. For example, if I am sitting at a board as a pastor and I'm praying that the spirit of God will come and give us sermon to, to make really good decisions,  not, my argument is that that's essential, but it, it's not that or this, it has to be that and this, and by, and this means, it has to also then incorporate, what kind of leader need should I be at that moment?   

As we're contemplating a particular decision we're having to make as a board, what does history tell us?   

What does, what does good discernment, good wisdom, tell us? What is the best information we can get on this? Tell us. I've been through different capital campaigns in our churches, and to attempt a capital campaign apart from prayer and spending deep time just asking the question from the start, God, is this what we should be doing?   

And God, if this is going to get anywhere, it is going to be because of your power, because apart from you, we can do nothing. So you understand that part, but then it's also, okay, let's look at people who run capital campaigns. What does their wisdom teach us? What can we learn? What methodologies can we incorporate from them? And then theologically, is this the right thing we should be doing?   

So you, you're kind of bringing in maybe a triangle, if you will, of all aspects, right? You're seeking the mind of the Lord, you're trying to think it through theologically, and then you're going after the best resources you can find,  that may be secular or or spiritual to get to a good decision.   

So it's, there's not an either or in any of this. It's a, it's a both end. And, and that's kind of what I'm doing here and arguing is that, that you need this and you need this. And then I think maybe what you're asking is to make sure there's also the aspect of just falling on our knees and saying, God, you know, unless the Lord builds the house at labor in vain.   

Yeah. Is that, yeah. What, what you're getting at? Yeah, I think so. I will be incorporating that, but that's a good, good reminder to make sure I'm sensitive to do that.