For the past month at my church we’ve been doing a preaching series called, The Heart of Leadership. Each week, the message focused on a different aspect of what I’ll call “Godly” or God-ordained leadership.
It’s been quiet on the writing front for me lately. However, particularly as we’re coming down the homestretch of a contentious—and extremely consequential—election cycle, it seemed like the content from this series was worth summarizing and sharing with a broader audience.
The Table below gives an overview of the content of the entire five-week series. The links in the second column connect to the YouTube stream of each service. Since many readers likely do not want to listen to the whole church service, I included a timestamp beneath the link that lists the approximate start time of the sermon on the recording. I also created a narrative summary of each message, which is included after the table. I’ve tried to do the speaker (referenced herein as “Rev. Laurie”, a.k.a., my wife ) justice, but the content is based on the notes I took, which is my interpretation of what I heard.
Table. The Heart of Leadership series overview. Characteristics of God-ordained leaders.
Date | Message Title Timestamp on YouTube | God-ordained | Scripture(s) |
9/29 | Point people beyond themselves but to the things of God and protect the welfare of those under their care. | 1 Samuel 8:1-9 | |
10/6 | 45:00 | Help people “let go” of the past to free them and allow them to move toward the future God desires. | Numbers 14:1–10 |
10/13 | 36:30 | Prove themselves shrewd in dealing with the world and worthy of trust in small matters, so they can be entrusted with larger ones. | Luke 16:1–12 |
10/20 | 44:44 | Connect with others and shepherd a diverse flock (community) unifying them around common goals for the common good of all. | John 10:2–4 Romans 16:7–8 |
10/27 | 45:45 | Guide people beyond lack of violence toward the presence of God—the source of ultimate peace. | Ephesians 4:1–6 |
The first message presented an example of someone who wasn’t an ideal leader—King Saul. After the death of Joshua, a series of Judges ruled Israel, which is a loose confederacy of 12 tribes at this time. (The book of Judges chronicles their stories.) Samuel is the “Last Judge,” and he is now old. His heirs are corrupt and deemed unworthy to lead. Therefore, the question now before the people is: Who will be our next leader?
Enter Saul—from the tribe of Benjamin—see 1 Samuel 9. Now, this guy apparently was quite charismatic. The Scriptures emphasize that he’s handsome. No doubt he cuts quite a profile in his suit of armor. He has all the qualities that humans think they want in a leader. And he’s clearly the Israelite people’s choice, which they make clear to Samuel when they say they want a King to rule over them—so they can be like the other nations that surround them—1 Samuel 8:5–6.
The problem is that Saul isn’t God’s choice. Nevertheless, God tells Samuel to give the people their wish and anoint Saul as King. God says: They aren’t rejecting you, Samuel; they are rejecting me—1 Samuel 8:7. If one continues reading the story told in 1 Samuel, one sees that Saul struggles as a leader. In fact, God eventually commands Samuel to replace him—with King David. (Read the story of David’s anointing by Samuel in 1 Samuel 16:1–13.) David has to battle the jealous, rejected, deposed King Saul before he can assert his rule.
Now, unlike Saul, David wasn’t the “obvious” choice to be a leader. In fact, he’s the youngest of eight of Jesse’s sons. His family considers it so unlikely that he would be the “chosen one” that he isn’t even in the room initially when Samuel comes to visit. He’s an afterthought, out tending the sheep. But wonder of wonders, David, the youngest son, is in fact the one that God has chosen.
As God reminds Samuel: The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart—1 Samuel 16:7. Although the stories in 1 and 2 Samuel reveal that David is far from perfect, he is also described as a man after God’s own heart—1 Samuel 13:14. He possesses the inward qualities of leadership that are the best indicators of God-ordained leadership.[1]
The takeaway from this message was that the people’s choice is not always God’s choice. We must exercise discernment when choosing a leader—which requires us to look beyond exterior qualities to try and understand the inner life of the individual. We should choose leaders who will rule less like Kings and more like Judges (shofets), who will point us beyond themselves to the things of God, and who will seek the welfare of those who put their trust in them.
After setting the stage with King Saul, the following four weeks focused on qualities of God-ordained leaders. We first considered how true leaders are visionaries who help people “lay down” whatever holds them back from moving toward the future. We focused on a story from Numbers, where the Israelites, on the cusp of entering the Promised Land, learn (from spies sent to investigate) that the land they are entering was already occupied and that they will have to fight to take possession of the land. Upon learning this, all the people became fearful and anxious. They want to “turn back” to Egypt…
Well, not quite all the people… Moses and Aaron, both seasoned leaders, are troubled by the people’s outcry to “go back.” They “fall on their face” before God to seek discernment. Meanwhile, younger visionaries like Joshua, and Caleb speak against the prevailing sentiments of fear. They insist that there is no turning back! They assert that the land they are about to enter is “exceedingly good” and they implore the people to let go of their past and trust God to provide what they need to move forward into a new future. The people, however, remain skeptical.
In this message, Rev. Laurie also talked about the Jewish practice of tashlich, which involves casting breadcrumbs in water on Rosh Hashanah. The brushing of breadcrumbs from one’s garments into water (where they dissolve) symbolizes a “laying down” of the sins that burden them as they prepare for the day of atonement on Yom Kippur. She asked us to think about what we needed to let go of as individuals—and as a community—to allow us to move forward less encumbered into the future God has for us.
The next week’s message focused on how leaders prove themselves to be trustworthy. We considered the wisdom contained in Jesus’s parable of the dishonest manager. Like the middle manager facing loss of his job in this story, a leader must be shrewd, wise to the ways of the world, and able to navigate the challenges of living faithfully in a world that bombards us with messages that tell us to focus on ourselves and turn away from God. Even under intense pressure, God-ordained leaders trust in God’s unwavering reality. (There are four lights!) They prove themselves “faithful in small things” every day, and over time, people entrust them with bigger and bigger roles and responsibilities.
The following week, we discussed how we entrust leaders as connectors. Good leaders are gatekeepers—but they don’t use the gate to regulate who’s in or who’s out of the flock. No, in fact, as Jesus says of himself, they are the gate. Rev. Laurie described how shepherds in the time of Jesus would literally lay their bodies in the entrance to the sheep pin to protect the flock from intruders. The shepherd protects those under his (or her) care. They welcome members from multiple flocks into the sheep pin. They connect with one another—and with other flocks—and celebrate the diversity of sheep within the sheep pin. The flock knows the shepherd’s voice and can distinguish it from other voices that compete for their attention. Good leaders celebrate their diverse flock and unify them behind common goals to work toward the common good of all.
In the final week of the series, the focus was on leaders as peacemakers. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “blessed are the peacemakers.” What does it mean to be a “peacemaker” in a world where one news headline after another promotes the paucity of peace on our planet? Well, here’s the secret: The media feeds on the absence of peace. From their perspective, peace is boring—not newsworthy, and yet how deeply our souls long for it. True leaders grasp this reality and guide followers toward God’s peace—the “peace that was meant to be.” They point us beyond the absence of violence to the very heart of God.
Well, that’s my take on The Heart of Leadership series. Does one of these qualities stand out to you? I don’t think this list of leadership qualities is exhaustive. What other qualities do you look for in a God-ordained leader? Maybe it’s a good topic to pray about before you vote on November 5. Maybe you could find some friends and have a dialogue about this? We can learn much from our conversations with others when we take time to genuinely listen to them.
As Howard Thurman reminds us in The Sound of the Genuine: Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.
Leadership is an important topic for all of us to think about. The choices we make for those who lead us have lasting consequences. I pray for discernment as we (in America) cast our votes on November 5, and as we move forward toward the “future with hope” that God promises to give us.
[1] For context, the last several paragraphs go beyond the scope of the first message, which focused on 1 Samuel 8:1–9.
