Four Tension Points of Servant Leadership
I find these four tension points of servant leadership from John Ortberg helpful. What do you think of these? Would you add any?
1. Decisive Submissiveness – Leaders must make decisions, they have difficult calls to make, when leaders abdicate making decisions it can be disaster. That is one side. The danger is dominating people and making self-serving decisions. Jesus made decisions but was submissive to his parents and His father in heaven. He exercised decisive submissiveness. He was not wishy-washy, nor did he had a defiant willfulness, but he had a decisive submissiveness. Questions for you: What people do you submit to? Are you submissive to scripture? Are you submissive to the Spirit?
2. Tough-minded Accountability and Tender-hearted Compassion – Leaders must give to the people that they serve what one guy who writes about leadership calls the gift of accountability. There is an aspect of fallen human nature that unless I have people in my life who challenge me and stretch me beyond myself and say, “Here’s the covenant that you agreed to live up to and your not doing it,” I’m not going to grow the way I could. That is one side. The danger is if I’m always in the position of judging and evaluating other people, there’s the danger that I can become so obsessed with accomplishing tasks that people become a means to an end. There just tools. There needs to be tender-hearted compassion as well, loving those on our staff, in our community. Questions for you: Would the people in your sphere of influence – your work, your home, your area of ministry – would they say that you love them? Not just that you value them because they’re able to perform, but that you love them?
3. Resourcefully Dependent – Leaders need to be resourceful people. They just have a knack for unlocking resources. They have a way of challenging people without apology to give and contribute. They stay up nights figuring out ways to tap new assets. They’re creative and inventive. They find resources. This is good thing. Nehemiah is an example. But the danger is over time this resourcefulness, the ability to get things done and make things happen, can lead to a sense of self-sufficiency and of arrogance and destroy the deeper truth, which is that I am utterly depended on God. Jesus looks for people who are dependent, resourcefully dependent. A lack of dependence on God is lethal. Check out the story that starts in Acts 12:20. God wants leading servants who are resourcefully dependent on him, who are just on their knees. Questions for You: How is your prayer life? Do you recognize that all you have is a gift from God? Are you humble?
4. Relaxed Urgency – God wants to use us. Some people just drift through life. There is no sense of urgency. We live in a world that the Scripture says is locked in a battle between good and evil, life and death. These are very real and create in us a deep sense of conviction and urgency. But the danger is that while I need to take my mission and my calling from God with great urgency, I also need to take my appearance, my visible success, my reputation, my little set of ambitions, my resume – real lightly. God calls us to do his work with passion, but God is not anxious about his kingdom at all, He is not biting his fingernails to see what you’re going to do next. Servant leaders have a burning sense of relaxed urgency.
Thanks JR. These are some fantastic questions that get to the heart of my weaknesses as a leader. They will definitely provide some good reflection.
Evan,
Glad you found them helpful.
1st question of leadership: is this a problem to be solved or a tension to be managed? What I love about these 4 from John Ortberg how he leverages the tension that both are needed. Don’t you want tough minded accountability and tender-hearted compassion? Even more, don’t you need them both? What power there is when both are present building off each other. That’s the beauty of leveraging tension well and of servant leadership at its best.
Well said.