Becoming a
Leader of No Reputation
R. Scott Rodin
R. Scott Rodin is
President of Rodin Consulting of Spokane, Washington and part of the
John R. Frank Consulting Group of Seattle, Washington. R. Scott
Rodin is the former president of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
/Journal of
Religious Leadership,/ Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 105 - 119.
I have been asked to
reflect on my five years in the presidency at Eastern Baptist
Theological Seminary, and to do so honestly, I need to begin with a
confession. I was wrong. That is the most accurate
statement I could make in summing up my experience in this
position. Mind you, I was not wrong about everything. In
fact, I believe we were
quite right and
accurate about a lot of things we attempted and accomplished during my
tenure. I could make the usual list of ‘legacy’ items that we
former presidents do in justifying our term in office. There is much to
be thankful for, many moments to treasure and certainly a legacy that I
trust will make a difference to generations of students and faculty at
our seminary.
Yet at the very heart
of my reflection on my service lies this one major conclusion… I was
wrong. I was wrong in my understanding and preconceived notions
of leadership in Christian ministry. I was wrong in my
expectations of others and myself. And I was wrong in my
motivations, which may be the hardest thing to admit.
I look back and wonder
why I was so wrong. My career path had certainly prepared me for
leadership in an educational setting: twelve years of fundraising
experience, a Ph.D. from a leading school in Great Britain, work in
educational administration and a knack for strategic planning and
vision casting. I had good experience in managing effective teams
and working with not-for-profit boards. And my four years at the
seminary as VP for Advancement had introduced me to the idiosyncrasies
of theological higher education, which I felt I had negotiated quite
well. There was no lack of preparation for the task.
Nor was there a lack
of motivation. I had long believed that God had gifted me for
leadership. I rose naturally and quickly into key leadership
positions wherever I had gone. It felt right, seemed natural and
was usually satisfying and challenging. So it was a logical move
to take a top spot in theological education.
My problem was not
with preparation, motivation, or even with a sense of true calling and
a sincere desire to serve God with the best of my skills and
abilities. The problem lay solely with my pre-determined
understanding of what Christian leadership is really all about.
Five years ago, if you
had asked me for a Scripture that epitomized the leadership ideal, I
would likely have pointed you to Nathan’s directive to King David,
“Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with
you.” (2 Samuel 7:3) I could identify with David as ‘God’s man at
God’s time’ and I believed that God would pour out his wisdom and favor
if I could be such a man. After all, there were kingdoms to
conquer and people to be led. There were great things to be done
for the Lord and no vision was too limited and no goal too small.
Now, five years later,
I would point to a different verse. In speaking of Jesus’
incarnation, Paul tells us, “he made himself a man of no reputation,
taking on the very nature of a servant.” (Phil 2:7) The verse
does not say that Jesus became a man of bad reputation, or questionable
reputation, but simply of ‘no’ reputation. That is, reputation,
image, prestige, prominence, power, and other trappings of leadership
were not only devalued, they were purposefully dismissed. Jesus
“became” such a man. Not by default or accident, but by intention
and design. And it was only in this form that he could serve,
love, give, teach, and yes, lead.
In reflecting on these
past five years, I have come to believe that true Christian leadership
is an ongoing, disciplined practice of becoming a person of no
reputation, and thus, becoming more like Christ in this unique
way. In his reflections on Christian leadership, Henri Nouwen
refers to this as resisting the temptation to be relevant. He
says, "I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is
called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with
nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self."[1]
Five years ago I rejected this idea outright. In doing so, I was
wrong. Today I see and affirm this important notion that lies at
the heart of godly leadership.
I will speak here to
five areas where I have begun to learn what it is to be this sort of
Christian leader. In each area I found that I began with a
misunderstanding of what true Christian leadership looked like, and I
have been on a journey of transformation, introducing me to a new way
to serve as Christ taught us to serve.
Anointed
vs. Appointed
I know of few
Christian leaders today who were anointed before they were
appointed. We have employed the business model of doing careful
searches looking for Christian leaders whom we can appoint to
office. We check their credentials, put them through rigorous
interviews, and even give them psychological tests before we make the
critical
appointment.
Once in place, we then anoint them and ask God to bless their work.
The Biblical evidence
seems to indicate that God selects leaders in the opposite order.
Samuel anointed David before appointing him King. The selection
criterion for leadership was not based on who would most likely get the
appointment, but whom God had anointed for this task. And
appointment without anointment always led to disaster.
In 1997, I was
satisfied that I had met the criteria for the job and was pleased to be
appointed for the position of president. And while our board said
a lovely prayer and laid hands on me, in retrospect I think the process
was backward. No one asked me if I sensed God’s anointing for
this position. I don’t know what I would have answered, but the
issues and criteria to consider in forming an answer to this question
were ones that I never considered in my response to my appointment.
The reason that
anointing is so critical to the task of Christian leadership lies in
its nature as the most unique form of leadership on earth.
Christian leadership requires nothing less than a complete, wholesale
sell-out of your life in service to God and God only. It is the
‘losing of your life’ to the work God will do in you to benefit your
institution, school, church or organization. And the stakes are
high. Nowhere else in the Christian life will the price for
divided loyalties be so costly for so many for so long.
Ineffective and fallen leaders compromise kingdom work, and the effects
are eternal. Therefore, it is a field that must be entered with
the utmost seriousness, and only when one has clearly been anointed for
the task.
With God’s anointing
comes God's power and presence. There is a special blessing
bestowed on God’s anointed. It is the blessing of God’s power
manifest in ways only seen through the work of God’s chosen.
God’s anointed shout and walls fall. They lift their feeble staff
and seas part. They speak God’s word boldly and movements are
begun that free men’s souls. God’s anointed do the miraculous
because they are the servant of the Almighty. There is a unique
presence of God in the lives of those God anoints and calls to
leadership through that anointing. Without it, we are continually
thrown back upon ourselves to make things work. With it, we have
the resources of heaven at our disposal if we will be the faithful
servant.
For this reason, God’s
anointed are incredibly unique people. God’s anointed will do
anything God asks… anything. God’s anointed will seek God’s will
with a passion. They will not move without it and they will not
be diverted from their course once they have it. God’s anointed
will love what God loves and hate what God hates. That means
loving God’s people, God’s church, God’s environment, God’s resources,
and God’s plan. It also means hating sin in every form and coming
against anything that stands between God’s loving plan and its
accomplishment. God’s anointed are people of keen discernment,
they are branches who are solidly engrafted into the true vine.
God’s anointed are servants first, last and always. And God’s
anointed have only one passion, to know and do God’s will that He might
have the glory. In this way, God’s anointed are people of no
reputation.
I did not come into my
leadership position with a clear sense of anointing but in these past
five years I have come to better understand and value the distinction
between appointment and anointment.
Fighting
the Need to Increase
When John the Baptist
saw Jesus walking in his presence, he made the declaration, “He must
increase, but I must decrease.” Most Christian leaders would say
that in their hearts they would wish that Jesus would increase and they
would decrease. But it is hard to decrease in a leadership
position. There are natural trappings that distinguish those in
leadership such as salary, title, prestige, priority, power, influence,
honor and advancement. And in each area there are tempting
opportunities for increase. There are also pressures to increase
and motivations to build a kingdom in which we house our growing
collection of leadership trappings. This desire for the fame and
fortune of leadership must be met not only by resistance, but,
according to John Adams, we must have "a habitual contempt of
them."[2]
Nouwen is even more
direct, “The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward
mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of
downward mobility ending on the cross… Here we touch the most important
quality of Christian leadership in the future. It is not a
leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and
humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made
manifest.” [3]
Perhaps the hardest
place to decrease is in the influence and the power we hold over people
and decisions. For this reason we find Christian leaders who are
overly directive at best, and autocratic at worst. And as a
result we produce churches and ministries that are rife with ‘learned
helplessness’. By overestimating our own worth, we help our
people depend on us for everything. And that dependence feeds
into our need to be needed, to be the “idea person” and visionary, and
to be in control. We tell ourselves that the more we lead in this
way, the more our leadership is valued and our presence desired.
Of course, this is not
real leadership, but a counterfeit that gives us our increase
and expands our kingdom. It also, however, does a
terrible disservice to our people, leaving them uninvolved and
under-developed. It wastes resources and limits our ministry, all
under the guise of strong leadership and the use of our God-given
talents for ‘getting things done.’ Robert Greenleaf reminds us
that the difference between a true servant-leader who is servant first,
and the leader-servant who seeks leadership first, lies in the growth
of the people who serve under them. The test question is, "do
those served grow as persons; do they, while being served,
become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves
to become servants?"[4]
For this reason,
leadership bent on increasing the leader lacks integrity.
Integrity is the attribute of honesty, moral behavior and a
value-centered life. Integrity witnesses externally all that we
are internally. And for that reason, godly integrity begins with
our inner life in God. Stephen Covey sees integrity as, "the
value we place on ourselves."[5] By that he means that we first
must keep faith with ourselves if we are to be trusted and trustworthy
to those around us. We must keep promises we make to our own
value system. For the Christian leader this means that our
self-confidence must be founded in
our faith in Christ
and our desire to be like Him in every way. We must seek to be
Christ-like in our inner being and be confident that "He who began a
good work in you will be faithful to complete it." (Philippians 1:6) If
Christ is truly living in us, as Paul reminds us, then we can in turn
live for others in our work. We will have no need to seek for
increase in our positions of power. We will have no desire to
build our own kingdoms and advance our own reputations. Our lives
are hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3) and therefore it is no
longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us (Galatians 2:20).
It is only with this kind of godly integrity that we can seek to
decrease as Christ increases in and through our work as leaders.
Truly godly leaders
empower their people, give away authority, value and involve others,
seek the best in and from their people, and constantly seek to lift
others up, push others into the limelight, and reward those they
lead. All so that God’s will might be done in a more powerful
way. They seek no glory for themselves, but find great joy in
seeing
others prosper.
They take no account of their reputation, but seek that Jesus’ face be
seen in all they do. Max DePree's famous definition is worth
repeating, "The first responsibility of the leader is to define
reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the
leader is a servant."[6]
I have come to
understand that godly leadership is a call to a lifestyle of an
ever-decreasing thirst for authority, power and influence, where the
quest for reputation is replaced by the power of God’s anointing.
Being and
Doing
I am a doer. I
have the reputation of going 100+mph always focused on accomplishing
objectives, meeting time-lines and crossing things off my infamous
‘to-do’ lists. I like results over process, action over
deliberation, the tangible over the theoretical. And I like to
lead people to accomplish goals and realize vision. What gets in
my way are processes, people with ‘issues’, using time inefficiently,
and undertaking work that seems irrelevant. I am committed to
transformation, as long as it can get done on schedule and show some
real results.
The problem with this
style of leadership is that is denies the truth of the gospel and our
creation in the image of God. If we are truly made in the imago
Dei, then our perception of God will significantly influence our
own self-understanding. If we view God as a solitary Monad, an
individual being known for his power and transcendence, then we will be
leaders who reflect those characteristics. We will be lone
rangers, seeking power and focusing on /doing/. We will see
people as means to an end and value the product over the process.
We will see relationships as tools for our productivity and community
as an asset only when it contributes to the bottom line. This
productivity model of leadership is the result of a conception of God
as the sovereign, detached monarch. In that image, we lead as
monarchs.
If, however, we are
true to our Trinitarian historical commitments, we see instead a God
who in his very nature is defined by relationship. We see Father,
Son and Holy Spirit as distinct persons yet also interdependent in
their
perichoretic relationship. The mutual
indwelling of the
three persons of the Godhead gives us a different understanding of what
God values in us and desires from us. Here we learn that
relationship is what defines us. We learn that to be God’s people
we must focus on who we are as people in relationship. We learn
that leadership must be concerned with the whole person, and that God’s
intent is for us to do
the work of the kingdom within and through the community of believers.
All of this we come to
know from only one place, namely, in the person of Jesus Christ.
If our epistemological starting point is solely in the incarnation,
life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then our focus as leaders
must change drastically. For Jesus was concerned about people over
product, relationship over output, and transformation over
transaction. And from beginning to end, Jesus was a servant.
We learn from a proper
understanding of our creation in the imago Dei that what is
most important to God is not what we do but who we are. Secular
leadership experts are waking to the fact that the key to leadership
effectiveness is self-awareness.[7] In Christian terms this means
that the leader is transformed first!
Greenleaf recalls the
story of a king who asked Confucius what to do about the large number
of thieves. Confucius replied, "If you, sir, were not covetous,
although you should reward them to do it, they would not steal."
Greenleaf goes on to say, "This advice places an enormous burden on
those who are favored by the rules, and it established how old is the
notion that the servant views any problem in the world as “in
Here”, inside himself,
and not “out there”. And if a flaw in the world is to be
remedied, to the servant the process of change starts “in here”, in the
servant, and not “out there”."[8]
Before God can do a
great work in an organization, that work must be done first in the
heart of the leader. And again this is especially true in
Christian leadership. Unless God has taken our hearts captive,
all of our good ‘doing’ will lack spiritual integrity and
authority. Our work will expose the absence of God’s
anointing. And it is at the exact moment that we think we ‘have
it all together’ that we cease to be useable in the work of the
kingdom.
If I could put one
Bible verse on the desk of every pastor and every Christian leader in
the world it would be this, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8) As Christian
leaders we must be engaged in a constant process of self-evaluation and
repentance. It is so easy for us to be tempted in a variety of
directions, and when we stray, we impact our entire ministry.
Godly leaders undertake their work with a deep humility and a keen
awareness of their own weaknesses and shortcomings. They know
themselves well, seek accountability, pray fervently and watch
carefully for red flags and warning signals.
Nouwen challenges us
to seek this central and defining characteristic of Christian
leadership, "The central question [of the heart of Christian
leadership] is, are the leaders of the future truly men and women of
God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God's presence, to listen
to God's voice, to look at God's beauty, to touch God's incarnate Word,
and to taste fully God's infinite goodness?"[9] For this reason, the
greatest tool for
effective Christian
leadership may be a mirror, and a group of friends to be sure you are
looking into it with clarity and focus.
Becoming a leader of
no reputation means not being afraid to stare down your weaknesses and
uncover the messy stuff in your private world. It means letting
God transform you. And more importantly, it means knowing how
much you need that transformation, far more than anyone else in your
organization. I have come to understand the development of
self-awareness and personal transformation as a critical aspect of
Christian leadership. When this ongoing transformation is added
to the desire to decrease while Christ increases, all under the
anointing power of the Spirit, the Christian leader begins to
emerge.
Leadership
is a Miracle
One of the greatest
gifts I received during my term as president came from my colleague Ron
Sider in the form of a book entitled, "Leadership Prayers" by Richard
Kriegbaum. The honesty and humility in these prayers bear witness
to the heart of a godly leader. In his prayer for trust,
Kriegbaum offers these words,
I love you, God.
You know I do. How natural it is to love you. You are
perfect. You are beautiful, pure, powerful, absolutely truthful,
and kind. You have been so generous to me that just saying thank
you seems pitiful sometimes. But far more powerful in my life is
knowing and feeling that you love me. You know exactly and
completely who I am - all my ugly thoughts, my mangled motivations, my
pretending, my irrational fears, my pride, and my unfaithfulness - and
you still love me. I know you love me. You know me, and
yet, because you love me, you let me lead others. I do not
understand it, but I am grateful. [10]
In reading these words
back through the lenses of my experience I have come to the conclusion
that when God uses any of us to lead effectively, it is nothing short
of a miracle. When we place the complex and demanding role of a
godly leader next to an honest self-awareness of our own sinfulness and
incompetence, we are thrown wholly upon the grace of God and his
faithfulness if we are ever to lead anyone anywhere.
There is a corollary
here to the miracle that occurs in both the efficacy of Scripture and
in the effectiveness of our preaching. In both, human words are
taken up by the power of the Holy Spirit to become the words of
God. In both its inspiration and its interpretation, the words of
Scripture are completely reliant on the activity of the Spirit of
God. When the Spirit illumines the human word, hearts are
changed, people are transformed and God's work is done. The same
is true in our preaching. We study and prepare as we are trained
to do, but in the end, our preaching only becomes effective when the
Spirit of God takes up our feeble human words and uses them to touch
hearts and change
lives. When it
happens it is a miracle!
Conversely, when we
seek to have the written words of Scripture or the spoken words of the
preacher stand alone apart from the work of the Spirit, our ministry
loses its power. It becomes our words, our
interpretation,
our exegesis and our proclamation. And slowly and
naturally into these words of ours will seep the ugly thoughts, mangled
motivations,
pretending, irrational fears, pride and unfaithfulness of Kriegbaum's
prayer.
I have come to learn
that we must approach leadership in dependent humility.
Throughout history God looked to the least, the weakest, the outcast,
the untalented, the sinful and the rejected to give great leadership at
historic times. And He hasn't changed that approach today.
If we are honest as leaders, we know that we are not capable of
leading as the size
and complexity of our call demands. We know that there are others
more talented, more prepared, more spiritual and more courageous than
are we. But great godly leaders have always worked at that
miraculous intersection where humility and faith meet the awesome
presence and power of God's Spirit. And the miracle of leadership
happens. It doesn't mean that we don't prepare ourselves, hone
our skills and seek to be the best we can be for the kingdom.
What it does mean is that in the end, all that we bring will fall
woefully short of what is required, and we will be ever thrown again
into the grace and faithfulness of God to work the miracle of
leadership in and through and even in spite of our small pile of skills
and talents.
When God uses us to
lead, and lead effectively, we should fall on our knees in wonder and
thanksgiving that we have seen again this miracle worked in our
midst. However, it is far too easy for us to take ownership of
this miracle and to believe that these results are due to our own
wonderful abilities and leadership qualities. If and when we make
this subtle yet devastating shift, the efficacy of our leadership for
the kingdom is over. We are on our own, cut off from the power
and preservation of the Spirit. Every leader finds himself or
herself there at some point in their work, and it is a terrifying place
to be!
Godly leadership is
the miracle of God's use of our earthen vessels for the glorious work
of His kingdom. To miss this miraculous aspect of leadership will
threaten everything we do as leaders, and our office or study will be
the most lonely place on earth. I have come to understand the
miracle of godly leadership, and its connection with self-awareness,
the need to decrease and the power of God’s anointing.
Seeking the Right Applause
A bookmark of mine
carries a thought that stayed with me throughout my term as president
of Eastern Seminary. It reads, “It doesn’t matter if the world
knows, or sees or understands, the only applause we are meant to seek
is that of nail-scarred hands.” Leaders are exposed to
opportunities to generate applause. It can come in the form of
commendation from the board, approval of our decisions by employees,
recognition of our institution’s work by constituencies, admiration of
our leadership abilities by co-workers, and words of appreciation from
students.
As public figures, we
receive both the undue criticism for the failures of our institutions,
and the unmerited praise for their successes. The true calling of
leadership requires us to accept the former and deflect the
latter. That is, our job is to take the blame for mistakes made
by those under our leadership and to deflect the praise and re-direct
it to those most responsible for our success. In this way we keep
ourselves in balance, never taking the criticism too personally and not
accepting the praise too easily. But this balance is often very
difficult to maintain.
One axiom of
leadership I have come to appreciate reads, ‘leaders do not inflict
pain, they bear it’. In the same manner, leaders to not absorb
praise, they re-direct it. The success of any Christian leader lies
significantly in their ability to keep this two-fold movement of
leadership in balance. Leaders who inflict pain lose trust and
dishearten their people. Leaders who absorb praise produce
resentment and sacrifice motivation.
Returning to where we
began, this is why God’s anointing is so important to the Christian
leader. Only with God’s anointing can the leader listen intently
for that one source of applause that really matters. Only
anointed leaders truly “seek first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness.” If we seek our affirmation elsewhere, the
distracting noises that vie for our attention and tug at our hearts for
allegiance will drown out all else. And if we seek for this other
applause, we will never hear the one from the Master’s hands.
Two significant
temptations come to play here. The first is the fear of rejection
that causes us to run from confrontation. The second is the
desire to make everyone happy and to measure our performance, our
effectiveness and our ‘leadership’ on that scale. The two are
very closely related. The first temptation is motivated by the
idea that
good leaders will not
generate conflict, and that rejection of our performance in our role as
leader is a rejection of our personhood and character. These are
significant pitfalls for a leader. They are generated from that
deep-seated desire to hear the applause of all with
whom we work.
The second temptation
is to lead by reacting. We see which way the wind is blowing and steer
that direction, regardless of the situation. We do not want our
people to be anxious, to question our decisions or disagree with our
reasoning. We want harmony and unity, which is commendable.
But left unchecked, this desire will cause us to sacrifice courage,
vision and
risk-taking. It will bring us momentary applause, but will ruin
us in the end. To use a variation on a quote from Ralph Waldo
Emerson, "Some leaders worry themselves into nameless graves, while
here and there some forget themselves into immortality."
So we must ask
ourselves just what kind of applause are we seeking? If it is
human applause that validates, that affirms and that encourages us, we
will also find that same applause binds us, boxes us in and ultimately
strangles the life out of us. When our daily self-worth and the
measure of our effectiveness come primarily from the reaction of
those with whom we
work, then we are finished as Christian leaders.
I was always amazed at
how many decisions I was called upon to make in any given day; some in
private, some in meetings and some in the public arena. Every day
there were multiple opportunities to make ‘applause-generating’
decisions. And sometimes the temptations to make them were
enormous, especially when considering the price that would be paid if
other alternatives were chosen. However, I was equally amazed at
how often God’s will and following His word took me down a different
path. It is at that intersection between doing what God was
telling us to do vs. doing the expedient and popular that true
leadership takes place. It is there that we know to whom we are
looking for our affirmation.
The goal of the
Christian leader must be to go to bed every night with a clear
conscience and a right heart with God. God only asks one thing of
leaders, that we seek with all our heart to know and do His will.
Before taking on my
leadership position I spent a couple of hours with a man whom I respect
for his wisdom and leadership abilities. He gave me encouragement
and good advice, and before I left he told me something that both
inspires and haunts me to this day. He said, “Scott, in whatever
you do, always strive to be a man that God can trust.” I
now believe that a man or woman that God can trust is one who seeks
only the applause of nail-scarred hands. It is also one for whom
the cultivation of reputation carries no value.
I did not have a clear
understanding of this need for balance in the life of a Christian
leader, and I have come to see it as an essential component for
leadership in the kingdom of God.
Leadership in Transformation
My five years in the
presidency is a study in transformation. I came in with a wrong
set of expectations, values and ideas about Christian leadership.
I was not thirsty for power or obsessed with the trappings of
leadership, but I also was not seeking to be leader of no reputation,
nor was I responding to the call because I was a servant first.
And it was here that I was wrong.
I used to reject the
notion that good Christian leaders were only those who were brought
kicking and screaming into the position. Or that anyone who
‘wanted’ to be a president should be automatically disqualified.
I still believe that God prepares people for His work, and some aspects
of this approach are not in keeping with our giftedness. However,
the truth in this view is that servant leaders are servants first, and
only as true servants are they called to lead. For those who see
themselves as leaders first, these temptations to stray in leadership
are enormous. "The long painful history of the Church is the
history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love,
control over the cross, being a leader over being led. Those who
resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us hope are the
true saints." [11]
I have left my years
in the presidency with a dramatically transformed understanding of
godly leadership, and one that continues to be transformed today.
In the end, our work as leaders is all about lordship. Before it
is about vision-casting or risk-taking or motivating others or building
teams or communicating or strategic planning or public speaking, it is
about lordship. Where Jesus is singularly and absolutely lord of
our life, we will seek to be like him and him only. That will be
our sole calling. We will be called to our work and that work
will carry God’s anointing. We will be called to decrease that
Christ may increase. We will be called to be people of
God before and as we do the work of God. We will be
called to pray and look for the miracle of leadership that God may work
in our midst. And we will be called to strain our ears for that
one sweet sound of two nail-scarred hands affirming all that we do in
his name.
In these ways, in
responding faithfully to this calling and striving after these ideals
at the cost of everything else that may tempt us, we become
leaders. And as we do, we will be transformed into the likeness
of Christ, becoming leaders of no reputation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
R. Scott Rodin is the
former //president of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He now serves as president of Rodin
Consulting of Spokane, Washington and part of the John R. Frank
Consulting Group of Seattle, Washington.
[1] Henri
Nouwen, /In the Name of Jesus/ (Crossroads: New York, 1996), 17.
[2] John Adams,
in David McCullough, /John Adams/ (Simon and
Schuster: New
York, 2001), 19.
[3] Nouwen,
62-63.
[4] Robert K.
Greenleaf, /The Servant as Leader/ (Greenleaf
Center: Newton
Center, 1970), 7.
[5] Stephen R.
Covey, /Principle-Centered Leadership/
(Fireside: New
York, 1990), 61.
[6] James
O'Toole, /Leading Change/ (Ballantine Books: New
York, 1995), 44.
[7] Among the
many authors who are championing the cause of careful self-awareness
are James O'Toole, Stephen Covey, Noel Tichy, John Kotter, Peter Block,
Warren Bennis, Max DePree, and Peter Drucker.
[8] Greenleaf,
34.
[9] Nouwen,
29-30.
[10] Richard
Kriegbaum, /Leadership Prayers/ (Tyndale House:
Wheaton, 1998), 22
(italics mine).
[11] Nouwen, 60.
