{"id":20352,"date":"2018-11-15T13:53:36","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T21:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=20352"},"modified":"2018-11-15T13:53:36","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T21:53:36","slug":"servant-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/servant-leadership\/","title":{"rendered":"Servant Leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

As our cohort continues to learn, read, and share, we have been able to also learn quite a bit about one another.\u00a0 Many of us are proud of the geographic in which we live.\u00a0 I know it is very fun for me to share stories with Mary and Nancy about our Michigan histories.\u00a0 Jenn and Digby clearly enjoy talking about New Zealand and Australia.\u00a0 So many of our California and Pacific Northwest (is it ok to call the Pacific Northwest area Cascadia<\/a> on the blog?) members discuss similar areas and locations together.\u00a0 Many of us have strong affiliations with our communities of faith and denominations.\u00a0 It has been great to get to know one another on a deeper level as the semester has gone on.<\/p>\n

However, we have also learned things that many of us aren\u2019t so fond of.\u00a0 The ordination process. \u00a0\u00a0The speed with which many denominations are willing to make change. The wine selection at the Panda Hotel Sports Bar.<\/p>\n

One thing that I am not a big fan of is the phrase \u201cServant Leader\u201d even though it has gained much traction in the Presbyterian world in the last few decades.\u00a0 Originally created by Robert Greenleaf in a 1970 essay[i]<\/a>, the idea is that \u201cthe servant-leader is servant first\u2026 It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions\u2026The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 I will be the first to say how much I actually love this idea, however when a congregation I served attempted to use this language, by encouraging all our members to become \u201cServant Leaders\u201d it became incredibly problematic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We were in the middle of trying to create a new Vision Statement for the church and the idea arose that we would be a \u201cRelevant Servant Church\u201d full of \u201cRelevant Servant Leaders.\u201d\u00a0 After a bit of discussion the word \u201c\u201dRelevant\u201d was dropped and we all then became \u201cServant Leaders.\u201d\u00a0 All wrapped up in the phrase was a nod to the work of Robert Greenleaf, a tip of the hat to the \u201cSuffering Servant\u201d motif from Second Isaiah,[iii]<\/a> and the well intentioned hope that service would become a more central focus of the church. \u00a0It did not.<\/p>\n

Instead what happened was this terminology added more confusion than clarity.\u00a0 I feel this is because we were failing to connect meaning-making and leadership.\u00a0 We ended up using terminology that signified that church leadership had been \u201cdecoupled from the notion of meaning and inextricably tied to a concern with performance.\u201d[iv]<\/a>\u00a0 The messaging, though well intended, suggested we were more invested as a community of faith in an individual, if that individual was more of a \u201cserver,\u201d and completely took any sort of meaning, or dare I say \u2018relevance\u2019, away from the individual who couldn\u2019t serve, didn\u2019t feel called to serve, or may experience the divine in a fashion other than the models of service the congregation could help facilitate.<\/p>\n

Our season of Relevant Servant Leadership didn\u2019t last very long.\u00a0 We needed to re-imagine who and what we were for a handful of reasons at that point in the church\u2019s history.\u00a0\u00a0 Clearly a significant one was because we removed any sort of meaning-making from the role of merely being a member of the church.\u00a0 The church I currently serve has just finished the process of creating a new Vision Statement.\u00a0 I look forward to blogging about that, what I learned from the mistakes of my past, and what I applied to that process from just this first semester, in a future post.<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> Greenleaf. \u201cWhat is Servant Leadership? Accessed, November 14, 2018.\u00a0https:\/\/www.greenleaf.org\/what-is-servant-leadership\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Greenleaf.\u00a0 Homepage. Accessed, November 14, 2018.\u00a0https:\/\/www.greenleaf.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Wikipedia.\u00a0 Second Isaiah.\u00a0 Accessed, November 15, 2018.\u00a0https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Isaiah_53<\/a><\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, eds., Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: an Hbs Centennial Colloquium On Advancing Leadership<\/em>, ed. Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010) 100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As our cohort continues to learn, read, and share, we have been able to also learn quite a bit about one another.\u00a0 Many of us are proud of the geographic in which we live.\u00a0 I know it is very fun for me to share stories with Mary and Nancy about our Michigan histories.\u00a0 Jenn and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1321,1322,410],"class_list":["post-20352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp9","tag-lgp9","tag-nohria-and-khurana","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20354,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20352\/revisions\/20354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}