Leadership We All Crave

Every where I look around church or our community, or read on internet news websites, or witness in my own home... reveals the great need in our world for solid, visionary, and trustworthy leadership.  The need for leadership is everywhere.

During my reading this Labor Day weekend, I read this, " organizations decry the absence of quality leaders who can infuse energy and provide creative direction in a highly competitive environment, and efforts to address the need are mushrooming across the institutional landscape."  Schools need leaders.  Teams need leaders.  Businesses need leaders.  Families need leaders.  The Church needs leaders!  

Even my mutant of a dog needs leadership... someone needs to tell him NOT to eat green tomatoes, to stop itching, and to refrain from laying on my daughter's purple bean bag where clumps of his fur remain for days.

Our Bishop it seems is fully aware of the need for quality leaders in church and is attempting to grow great leaders in his new Bishop's Leadership Academy for Clergy Excellence.  You are looking at a newly nominated guinea pig for this experimental group.  We'll see what the next nine months of mutual mentoring, retreats, preaching workshops, conversations, and small groups will bring in regards to developing leadership skills among the United Methodist clergy of Indiana.  As I live and breath, I am sure I'll write about it... and you'll be in on the scoop.

I was reminded this weekend while reading Grace to Lead: Practicing Leadership in the Wesleyan Tradition by Kenneth Carder and Laceye Warner (which is where the above quote came from) that visionary, God-graced leaders are those folks who allow the call of their baptism to continually renew and reshape them.  Being folks who embrace Wesleyan theology it boils down to the sanctification work of the Holy Spirit to continually shape and develop a person into leaders God has intended him/her to be.  We are formed into leaders in other words, not just by our right Orthodox beliefs and theology, but also by the formative process of living out our faith through the various spiritual disciplines.

Hmmm... solid theology AND vibrant practical living.  Yes, when I think of great leaders that I know and want to be like "when I grow up", they too live out this Wesleyan way of leading. The leadership we all crave is leadership that is lived out of a relationship with our Living God in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

Even my dog can appreciate that!  Well, maybe.