Dr. Meredith Griffin | The Flourishing Life™

Deeper Roots. Remarkable Results.

Leadership

Leaders Can’t Neglect Family

We’ve counted this week to be family week in our household. It is the last week before the children return to school. Today pa amusement park day, and tomorrow is beach day. We know that we will be exhausted by the end of the week (both physically and financially) but its worth it. My wife and I believe that our family is worth it.

It is often too simple for leaders to neglect spending quality time with family for the sake of organizational success. This is a mistake. As leaders we have to understand that the ministries, businesses, and organizations we serve cannot be used as excuses to neglect the needs of our families. Our spouses and children need, and should receive consistent attention. If we understand what our organizations look like when we neglect them, then we should see that our families are no different. Go spend some time.

Sharpen the Saw

Many years ago I read Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” One of the suggested habits was to “sharpen the saw”, to take time away from the grind of daily striving to refresh, revive, and renew. Many leaders don’t heed Covey’s advice, with often sad consequences. We, like saws, become dull with continued use. We have to cease from striving long enough to allow our cutting edge to again be honed.

I am experiencing that kind of time right now with my wife. We have been running for quite some time, and the “saws” were becoming dull. How awesome it is to allow God to sharpen us again. A question for all leaders to answer is, when did you last sharpen the saw?

Its Been an Extended Hiatus

I know that it has been a good while since I posted to this blog. Let me share a little about what has been going on in my life. As some of you may know, I am a doctoral student at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I am pursuing my Doctor of Ministry degree in Leadership and Renewal. I completed my course work almost a year ago, and have spent a great deal of the intervening time working on our church plant’s many transitions, this blog, and some other projects. I have reengaged my studies this semester, with the full intention of completing my degree in the next twelve months.

The initial purpose of this blog was to be a place to discuss matters related to servant leadership in ministry, the primary focus of my doctoral project and dissertation. In many ways, both good and bad, this blog has strayed from its initial purpose. In the months to come, you will find that the posts (when they come) are more directly related to the issue of  developing servant leaders among the laity in our local churches. I thank all of you for reading, and pray that you will be edified by the future posts in this blog. Stay blessed.

Something Else Good to Read

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Even with a lot of writers taking a mini break fro the Thanksgiving Day holiday, there were still a lot of good things to read. Here are just a few. Enjoy.

  • Michael Spencer over at Internet Monk.com wrote a great post on Christian Community and Abandoning Commitment. In the post Michael deals with the notion that while contemporary forms of evangelicalism have done much for church growth, they have done little to develop a true sense of Christian community. Its a good, thought-provoking post that calls for leaders to rethink our notion of “church”.
  • If you are a preacher, or even if you’ve only listened to one, I’m sure that you will agree with Peter Mead’s assessment of a temptation that all preachers face–using one text to preach another. Preach It From The Right Passage is a post from Biblical Preaching.
  • Whether you believe in luck or not (personally, I don’t), you can benefit from the 4 tips in Jon Gordon’s blog post Enhance Your Luck.
  • Finally, two posts from George Ambler at The Practice of Leadership. Are you living the Leadership Challenge, and The Lesson of the Moth. Both are good reads. If you are familiar with the foundational leadership book The Leadership Challenge, then you will enjoy being reminded of the principles that the book espouses that all extraordinary leaders should exemplify. The second post is just great to me, calling leaders to stop playing it so safe all the time.

A Servant Leader’s Authority – Is the Church Accessing It?

I’m going to begin this post with a quote from Robert Greenleaf in Servant Leadership.

A new moral principle is emerging, which holds that the only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader. Those who choose to follow this principle will not casually accept the authority of existing institutions. Rather, they will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants. To the extent that this principle prevails in the future, the only truly viable institutions will be those that are predominantly servant led.

This Greenleaf quote, immediately brings to my mind these words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 20:25-28,

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you have seen me refer to these words of Christ and the example of his life as a call to the Church to be expression of his servant leadership. For me this is the definition of missional. The question that stands before the Church is, are we accessing the authority that comes with servant leadership, or are we seeking some other form of authority?

While many believe that power and authority are synonymous, I do not. Authority is granted to a person by another person. James Hunter, in his book The Servant, defines authority as “the skill of getting people to willingly do your will because of your personal influence.” Willingly, the operative word in Hunter’s definition, means getting people to grant you the ability to lead them. In the model of Jesus Christ, and in the mind of Greenleaf a servant model of leadership best accomplishes this goal.

Answering my own question, I do not believe that enough churches are accessing the authority available to us as servant institutions. I believe that there are an increasing number of ministries that are reverting to hierarchical, power-based models of leadership, believing them to be more biblical.

I’m in agreement with Hunter’s definition of power as, “the ability to force or coerce someone to do your will, even if they choose not to, because of your position or your might. Jesus told His disciples that power doesn’t work, and should not be the way we conduct ministry amongst ourselves (inside the church) or externally (to the communities we serve). When will the Church recognize that we cannot force people to obey the will of God. Chiding doesn’t work in the long-run. Fear-based ministry doesn’t work in the long-run. We need to develop servant-leadership models of ministry both internally and externally, if we truly intend to make lasting impacts for the sake of the gospel in the world.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree? Do you know of examples of ministries that are proving themselves to be servants first? Are they being granted authority in their communities because of this?