Servant Leadership

Over thirty years ago Robert K. Greenleaf wrote a book called Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Power & Greatness. It was so popular that it has remained in print ever since, most recently appearing in a 25th anniversary edition. The dust jacket claims that with its publication, “a new paradigm of management entered the boardrooms and corporate offices of America.” Perhaps so. Yet the idea of servant leadership was at least two thousand years old when Greenleaf started writing. It was Jesus who said, “The greatest among you will be your servant.”

Jesus knew the history of leadership in Israel, from the patriarchs through Moses, through David and the sorry succession of kings who followed him. By the time of Micah, more than two centuries after David, leadership was reaching its nadir. Micah castigates prophets “who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths.” Perversion of justice, bribery, requiring payment to dispense God’s free grace – that was “leadership” in Micah’s time. The future is described in terrifying words: “Therefore because of you Zion shall be a plowed field” and “Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins.” Micah called everyone to true justice, to return to God’s Law.

Jesus is equally condemnatory of religious leaders. He acknowledges that they know the Law; they just don’t follow it. They create more and more rules, but do nothing to adjust the burden to make it bearable once they have thrown it on someone else’s back. And they make sure that everyone knows just how holy they are. Today they would sport hundred-dollar haircuts and thump big gold-edged Bibles and park their new BMW in a reserved space right next to the church door. Everyone would know them from TV broadcasts and call them “Pastor,” or “Doctor” if they had an online degree. And they’d love it.

By contrast, Jesus calls for someone who leads not as a person apart and above, but as one who is in common relationship with all. “Call no one Rabbi,” Jesus says, “because you have one teacher [God], and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one father of yours upon the earth, for you have one heavenly Father” – one Father to whom each owes life in the Christian community. And call no one your private tutor, for you have only one tutor: Christ.

Within that community of Christ, Jesus maps out a path to greatness: “The greatest among you will be your servant.” The Greek word is diakonos: agent, intermediary, assistant; not doulos, slave. Leaders assist the community in doing God’s work, carrying out God’s mission. Indeed, it is the deacons among us who are icons of servanthood, showing us how to serve Christ by serving others.

I have to admit that I’ve had trouble getting through Greenleaf’s book. I’m not sure why. It seems a bit preachy to me, and I’ve never responded well to preachy books [!]. But the real reason, I think, is that servant leadership has much greater power when it comes from the mouth of one who served people so faithfully that he was willing to die for them. “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many,” Jesus says. If all of us, especially church leaders, were to live that way, it would transform more than corporate America. It would transform the world.

[Pentecost 20: Micah 3:5-12; Matthew 23:1-12. The last saying of Jesus is from Mark 10:45. Once again I am indebted to John Nolland’s The Gospel of Matthew, and the classic Greek-English Lexicon familiarly known as BDAG.]