Leadership is an interesting word and concept.\u00a0 It seems to be that everyone instinctively understands the word and derives significant meaning from it.\u00a0 That is everyone knows what a leader is and looks like.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This has been my case over the last several years as I have begun to assume more and more \u201cleadership\u201d roles.\u00a0 What am I really doing, supposed to be doing, and have been doing?<\/p>\n
The current doctoral program that I am in (and currently writing this blog post for) is delineated as a Global Leadership program.\u00a0 Simple enough, right?\u00a0 But, really what is leadership?\u00a0 And more importantly what is global leadership?\u00a0 That within the global Christian movement the idea that leadership is important and essential is instinctive.\u00a0 That is obvious.\u00a0 My question is not to undermine the idea that leadership is part and parcel of our world.\u00a0 My question is more to ask, what is the way forward in conceiving of and understanding global Christian leadership?\u00a0 What does it mean for those who lead across the transculturality of nations, cultures, and languages within evangelicalism? \u00a0\u00a0The expansive volume of essays on leadership in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice<\/em> edited by Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana \u00a0begins to delve into these questions and helps us to begin to set a course.<\/p>\n Leadership (or the study thereof) has been dominated by the perspectives of business, social theory, capitalism and of course recently globalization.\u00a0 Podolny, Khurana, and Besharov\u2019s article entitled \u201cRevisiting the Meaning of Leadership\u201d digs deeply into this issue showing that \u201cleadership\u201d has lost some of its essential meaning and currency to affect change because leadership overtime has become solely linked to and defined as performance.\u00a0 The authors instead (along with Max Weber) suggest that true leadership be defined as infusing \u201cpurpose and meaning into the lives of individuals\u201d over and against the meaningless of postmodern society.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Leaders should therefore be meaning makers.<\/p>\n \u00a0Within a Christian framework, this rings true.\u00a0 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 \u201corganization\u201d which continues to pass on this meaning to other in order to affect further life and organizational \u201cperformance.\u201d\u00a0 This continues to play out globally in our evangelism, discipleship, and missions on many micro and macro levels.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Could this view of leadership have a great democratizing and pluralizing effect on global Christian leadership?\u00a0 Who is a leader?\u00a0 An American mega church pastor and high school educated and a poor woman with a house church in rural China?<\/p>\n At the same time, the volume reminds us that on a global scale, working cross culturally, there are varying conceptions and values within leadership.\u00a0 That is to say, not all nations and culture agree on what makes an effective leader.\u00a0 Within my own context working in Spain with Spanish nationals, I have seen this play out.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The converse of this reality of historical leadership in Spain has been the strand of anarchism.\u00a0 Two extremes have existed, with very little moderation in the center. \u00a0Thus, leadership in Spain carries with it very negative and conflicted meanings.\u00a0 Of course, other cultures carry their own cultural complexities and confusions with how they conceive and enact leadership.\u00a0 This is to say nothing of my own culture\u2019s fascinations with business models of leadership and our crisis of integrity.\u00a0 Therefore, working across cultures globally, one must be culturally aware of the difficulties and traps of how leadership is viewed and understood differently.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, could the definition of leaders as a \u201ccreator of meaning\u201d serve as a unifying global principle for Christian leadership?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leadership is an interesting word and concept.\u00a0 It seems to be that everyone instinctively understands the word and derives significant meaning from it.\u00a0 That is everyone knows what a leader is and looks like.\u00a0 At the same time, my guess would be that if you began to ask individual people what exactly a leader is 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