Servant Leadership

I know that it's Thanksgiving and you might expect me to be writing about the importance of gratitude and appreciation-- fair enough! But I have written on these themes many times in earlier blogs and you can find them by doing a search with those key words, especially from my previous blog, Katabasis. As I mentioned earlier this week, I just want to offer a thought or two on the theme of Servant Leadership, the form of leadership that Jesus embodied, and which has been imitated by countless women and men since then.

In Jesus' time and in our own, a prevailing notion of leadership is that it is about power and authority, often exercised over others for the achievement of some goal. Even dictionaries describe authority, the right to do the work of leadership, in terms of command, control, power, sway, rule, supremacy, domination, dominion, strength, & might. While some of these nouns are neutral in their own right, or may have a positive value in the right context, I would describe them as characteristics of an egocentric model of authority. By contrast, Robert Greenleaf describes leadership in terms of moral authority. He writes in Servant Leadership(1977),

A new moral authority is emerging which holds that the 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 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 individual 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.

Happy Thanksgiving!