Thoughts on Leadership

There are thousands of books out there with titles like Developing the Leader Within You that promote the idea that leadership is a quality or attribute, or more accurately a collection of qualities and/or attributes, of the leader herself. That is to say, a leader is a leader because she is a leader.

This seems to me to be a rather simplistic, and patently wrong, conception. It seems clear to me that a leader is a leader only within a particular context. The interplay between the community and the "leader" is what generates leadership. The community cedes leadership to the leader for its own reasons, and the leader accepts leadership for her own reasons. Both parties are necessary for the leadership relationship to exist and continue. (This is, of course, not to say that there may well be huge power differentials between the parties that make things look as though it were unilateral. But even with the most autocratic dictators, if the community has had enough, the dictator can no longer lead.)

The cooperative nature of leadership is probably most evident within the local church, particularly a church with a congregational governance tradition as is common in Baptist and Baptist-like churches. Both the process by which the leadership relationship is initiated and the bonds of what the leader can actually accomplish are subject to this joint community/leader dance.

For me, the state of being free to stay in the church I am in means recognizing that a primary mode of belonging has been eliminated. Throughout almost all my adult life, the primary mode of belonging to a local church has been through the mechanism of so-called "lay church leadership". It has been in that collegial space that relationships have formed and been sustained, and where the sense of connectedness has been focussed. However, over this past year, it has become increasingly clear to me that the relationship between myself and this community can no longer operate on that level. My capacity to offer my gifts to the community in the context of "leadership" is no longer -- a sufficiently large portion of the community will no longer accept such a gift, for reasons undoubtedly varied and perhaps not even fully known to the individuals themselves. Whether that may change lies entirely within the hands of the community, so for my part I must accept that it may well be a permanent situation.

This of course, raises questions. What means continue to exist for the formation and sustaining of relationship and a sense of connectedness? What avenues continue to exist for the expression of those things God is teaching me, particularly if those things appear on the surface to run counter to the established pattern of the community? Will expressing such things result in greater harm to the community than good? Will not expressing such things result in greater harm to my own spiritual walk than good?

And of course, the big one: Is addressing my thoughts toward such questions part of hearing God's direction or a distraction?