Written by: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012

Leadership is an interesting word and concept.  It seems to be that everyone instinctively understands the word and derives significant meaning from it.  That is everyone knows what a leader is and looks like.  At the same time, my guess would be that if you began to ask individual people what exactly a leader is and does (the true meaning of the word) you would most likely receive a wide range of vague answers.  This has been my case over the last several years as I have begun to assume more and more “leadership” roles.  What am I really doing, supposed to be doing, and have been doing?

The current doctoral program that I am in (and currently writing this blog post for) is delineated as a Global Leadership program.  Simple enough, right?  But, really what is leadership?  And more importantly what is global leadership?  That within the global Christian movement the idea that leadership is important and essential is instinctive.  That is obvious.  My question is not to undermine the idea that leadership is part and parcel of our world.  My question is more to ask, what is the way forward in conceiving of and understanding global Christian leadership?  What does it mean for those who lead across the transculturality of nations, cultures, and languages within evangelicalism?   The expansive volume of essays on leadership in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice edited by Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana  begins to delve into these questions and helps us to begin to set a course.

Leadership (or the study thereof) has been dominated by the perspectives of business, social theory, capitalism and of course recently globalization.  Podolny, Khurana, and Besharov’s article entitled “Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership” digs deeply into this issue showing that “leadership” has lost some of its essential meaning and currency to affect change because leadership overtime has become solely linked to and defined as performance.  The authors instead (along with Max Weber) suggest that true leadership be defined as infusing “purpose and meaning into the lives of individuals” over and against the meaningless of postmodern society.  Thus, good leaders affect organizational performance not simply as a bureaucrat or manager, but as someone who can bring real meaning and even life to the goals of said organization.  Leaders should therefore be meaning makers.

 Within a Christian framework, this rings true.  Jesus in fact appears to fit this mold, as a man who re-created and infused new meaning into the lives of his followers, allowing them to form a new “organization” which continues to pass on this meaning to other in order to affect further life and organizational “performance.”  This continues to play out globally in our evangelism, discipleship, and missions on many micro and macro levels.  What is more, this model of thinking about leadership, may in fact be able to unleash an instinctive leadership throughout the church, as a leader is not just a pastor or president, but in fact anyone who can create meaning and value for others to follow in order to enact change.  Could this view of leadership have a great democratizing and pluralizing effect on global Christian leadership?  Who is a leader?  An American mega church pastor and high school educated and a poor woman with a house church in rural China?

At the same time, the volume reminds us that on a global scale, working cross culturally, there are varying conceptions and values within leadership.  That is to say, not all nations and culture agree on what makes an effective leader.  Within my own context working in Spain with Spanish nationals, I have seen this play out.  Leadership in Spain is a complicated issue, affected mainly by the hierarchical and homogeneous top down and all-encompassing structure of the Catholic church within society and the some 50 years of modern fascist dictatorship under Franco.  The converse of this reality of historical leadership in Spain has been the strand of anarchism.  Two extremes have existed, with very little moderation in the center.  Thus, leadership in Spain carries with it very negative and conflicted meanings.  Of course, other cultures carry their own cultural complexities and confusions with how they conceive and enact leadership.  This is to say nothing of my own culture’s fascinations with business models of leadership and our crisis of integrity.  Therefore, working across cultures globally, one must be culturally aware of the difficulties and traps of how leadership is viewed and understood differently.  One must be sensitive to neither impose a culturally derived model of leadership, nor fail to heed the context of those they lead with, lead, or serve under. 

Still, could the definition of leaders as a “creator of meaning” serve as a unifying global principle for Christian leadership?

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