As I’ve watched the presidential election unfold I have been
thinking a lot about leadership. The candidates display a wide variety of
leadership skills and styles, but what type of leadership is necessary for
today? Which candidate possesses the right leadership mix for our nation’s
future?
Most would agree that we are in a great leadership crisis. While we are faced with enormously threatening problems – terrorism, AIDS, drugs, poverty, the threat of nuclear conflict, global warming, and the real possibility of economic disaster. Yet on none of the items listed does our response acknowledge the urgency of the problem. We appear to be sleep-walking through a dangerous passage of history. We see life-threatening problems but do not react. We are anxious but immobilized.
Many of the problems that confront us have discoverable, though extremely difficult, solutions. But to mobilize the required resources and to bear what sacrifices are necessary calls for a leader with the capacity to focus our energies and a capacity for sustained commitment.
As Christians we know that all of these problems in one way or another lead back to man’s separation from God. We were created to by God and when the work of creation had been completed he called it “very good” (Genesis, 1:31). Yet because of God’s great love and his desire to have a truly reciprocal relationship with mankind he created us with a free will -- the ability to choose Him or reject Him (Genesis 2:16, 17). And beginning with Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3) mankind has consistently chosen to reject Him. Through that choice and the separation from God, sin entered the world as a curse upon mankind and all of creation. But God has not ever given up. He has sent angels and prophets and Kings and finally his own Son, Jesus Christ to redeem mankind so that all who call upon His name will be saved (John 3:16)
In Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) he says that “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”
And yet it is leadership that Christ has called into. He has called us to be a light to the world and salt to the earth. We are all called to be his ambassadors and to go into the entire world and preach the Gospel. Essentially we are called to lead others to Him.
This type of leadership must be transformational, and yet it is never we who do the work of transforming. It is only in Christ and the work of His Holy Spirit that any human will be truly transformed. And so it is up to us, as Christians called by God into this world, to lead others to his transforming love.
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