Serving as Volunteer Worship Leader at my church in Maryland. Serving before that as an Associate Pastor in Texas while I was in seminary at SWBTS. Coaching middle school soccer teams in Maryland and Missouri. Mentoring counselors-in-training as a doctoral student. My first ministry position as a youth minister in Maryland. My current position as a College Dean. Over the course of my adult life, one of the privileges I’ve had is to serve in positions of leadership, and based on my experiences I’ve learned one key thing.

Leading like Jesus is hard to do.

Imagine this scenario, for instance. You spend a couple months praying over what direction to take with those your leading and recognize that God is telling you to spend a year just focusing on edifying your people. You take the time to plan short devotions to start off every meeting with a passage of Scripture focused on building people up and moving toward unity. And as you start leading one of those devotions, you notice a disgruntled individual sitting arms crossed with a smug look on his face, phone laying on the table in front of him obviously recording every word you’re saying to try to catch you up with it later.

It’s all too easy in a position of leadership to let people you are leading get under your skin. When you have had multiple experiences over the years with frustrating people, uncertainty and self doubt start to creep in. And for anyone trying to lead Lone Ranger style where they’re going it alone, that’s a tough place to be.

So, how did Jesus do it? How did He maintain His leadership for three years in the face of Pharisees who wanted Him dead? How did He handle close followers who regularly didn’t fully understand what He was saying and doing? And on top of all that, how did our Messiah deal with masses that grew to demand more and more of His time and energy for healings, signs, and wonders?

These are the points where I come to appreciate Lead Like Jesus: Revisited by Ken Blanchard, Phil Hodges, and Phyllis Hendry. As we have been going through this book together at the Center for Christian Faith and Thought, one particular concept stood out to me today.

God’s love will change you… You will see leadership differently: it becomes less about power and control and more about the stewardship of the people you touch and of the work God has given you to do. You will see people differently, too: rather than seeing them as a means to accomplish the results you want, you realize that God has the same love for them that He has for you.

Blanchard, Hodges, & Hendry, Lead Like Jesus: Revisited, p. 93

In Part III of the book, the authors focus on Being Habits. They discuss five habits that work together to enable people to lead the way Jesus did. They describe the central habit as being the capstone and the other four as the pillars that support it. According to the authors, if an individual focuses on maintaining supportive relationships, experiencing solitude, practicing prayer, and knowing and applying Scripture, they will naturally move toward accepting and abiding in God’s love. Every component is important, and some people are better at some of those skills than others. For me right now, the more challenging two are practicing prayer, and maintaining supportive relationships.

More than anything else, I have come to recognize that if I have any hope of leading like Jesus, I have to be in connection with a few brothers in Christ that are willing to grow alongside me. Brothers that are growing in their own ways as well. Growing in leadership, growing as men, and growing as Christ-followers. As we work on these things together, we sharpen one another and grow. As I read this section and looked at those four pillar habits, I realized that Maintaining Supportive Relationships and Practicing Prayer are the two areas that need the most attention from me right now. That hasn’t always been the case, but right now, those are the two areas that require greater focus. Being intentional about meeting together has helped the first. They will help keep me accountable on the second.

This really caught me in the introduction to the idea on page 87. There is a simple quote there that hit home for me: “…the truth is that you can’t keep your heart in its right place by yourself.” That may seem obvious to many of you, but that day I just needed to see it in plain black and white, so I rewrote it in first person at the bottom of the page.

”The truth is that I can’t keep my heart in its right place by myself.
No one can!”

If you are reading this looking for applications, there’s the first one. Get a group of people together who are just as interested in growing as you are and grow together. That’s all we did, and it’s been fantastic. I think this is our 5th book to go through together. It’s our first one on leadership, and we already have our next book picked out to continue diving deeper into what it means to live in this world as a Christ-following man growing deeper with our God.

That’s probably the second application: Read good books. As you take the opportunity to read and talk together about books that point you back to “the author and perfecter of our faith” you have the chance to gain insights you likely won’t gain on your own. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I’ve grown from comments made by my friends. Find some. Study together.

This book in particular is a great place to start if you are involved in any kind of leadership, and no, I don’t get any kind of kickback for saying that. I do get the satisfaction of knowing that pointing anyone to this book means I’m giving someone a good tool to use in ministry, parenting, or wherever else God has you leading. It’s definitely worth the read, but more than anything, get connected and don’t waste your time trying to just figure all of this out on your own. Working through things with peers, knowing others and being known, is infinitely more beneficial, and it’s not even that hard to figure out why that is. The wisest, all-knowing being in the universe, upon creating the earth and everything in it said that in His original design there was exactly one thing that wasn’t good. Man is not supposed to do life alone.