The Steward Leader

Transforming People, Organizations and Communities

R. Scott Rodin

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830896677
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Coach. Entrepreneur. Mentor. Executive. Servant. Visionary.Everyone has a different idea of what a leader should be. How can any one person be everything? Scott Rodin brings unity and clarity to this confusing, demanding picture of leadership. He offers a comprehensive model that brings together a biblical understanding of holistic stewardship with the best in leadership studies.Whether in churches, not-for-profit ministries or in business the need for sound leadership is readily apparent. Drawing on his years of experience in development and fundraising and his extensive theological training, Scott Rodin offers a new paradigm--a transformational approach to leadership that is biblically sound, theologically rich and practically compelling.

PART ONE

Becoming a Steward Leader of No Reputation

The journey of the steward leader begins at an intensely personal level. For that reason I want to begin by sharing some personal reflections on my own journey and on what I have learned along the way.[1] This includes a confession.

Over my nearly thirty years in not-for-profit management and consulting, I have held a number of leadership positions, including development department head, seminary president, association president and company president. I have also held important leadership positions such as father, husband and church member.

Here is the confession: in my roles as a leader I have been mostly wrong. Now, I was not wrong about everything. In fact, I believe I have been right about a lot of things I have attempted and accomplished in these roles. I could create the usual list of “legacy” items that we leaders make in justifying our time in leading others. There is much I am thankful for, many moments to treasure and certainly a legacy that I trust will make a difference to generations that follow.

Yet at the very heart of my reflection on my various roles lies the major conclusion: I was wrong in my understanding of leadership in Christian ministry. I was also wrong in my expectations of others and myself. And, what may be the hardest to admit, I was wrong in my motives.

I look back and wonder how I went so wrong. I was brought up in a relatively functional home with wonderful parents and a good relationship with my siblings. My career path had certainly prepared me for leadership: years of fundraising experience, a Ph.D. from a leading school in Great Britain, successful work in not-for-profit 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. 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 went. It felt right, seemed natural and was usually satisfying and challenging. So it was natural for me to take leadership roles as they came along.

My problem was not with preparation, motivation or even with a lack of a sense of calling or sincere desire to serve God with the best of my skills and abilities. The problem lay solely with my understanding of the nature of Christian leadership.

At any moment in my trajectory as a leader, if you had asked me for a Scripture that epitomized the leadership ideal, I likely would 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, no goal too small.

Reflecting back on my leadership experiences and the leadership I have witnessed in my years of consulting, I would now point to a different verse. In speaking of Jesus’ incarnation, Paul tells us that Jesus “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7 KJV). It does not say that Jesus became a man of bad reputation or of 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. It was only in this form that he could serve, love, give, teach and, yes, lead.

In reflecting on my years in the seminary president’s office, the church and the living room, I have come to the conviction that true Christian leadership is an ongoing, disciplined practice of becoming a person of no reputation and, thus, becoming more like Christ. In his reflections on Christian leadership, Henri Nouwen refers to this way as resisting the temptation to be relevant. “I am deeply convinced,” he wrote, “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.”[2] In the past I rejected this idea outright. Today I see and affirm this way of no reputation as the heart of godly leadership.

My journey from the one verse to the other marks a significant progression for me. The former verse was a direct word spoken from God to a specific person, and I extrapolated it to apply to me and to Christian leadership in general. The latter verse was a description of the nature of Jesus, whom I am called to follow—simply and humbly. The former focused on God’s blessing on my work, the latter on my response of obedience and submission to his nature.

This study of the steward leader has grown out of a combination of my work in holistic stewardship, my study of leadership and these honest reflections on my journey. Taken together, I am learning that everything flows from the transformed heart of a godly steward. As godly stewards we do indeed offer only our vulnerable self, but we can do so with confidence and great joy. That is a very different journey from the one I began two decades ago.

In the following five areas, I’ve begun to learn what it is to be this sort of steward leader. In each area I have had to confess my misunderstanding of Christian leadership. I’ve also had to embark on a new journey of transformation that leads to freedom and the joyous obedience of a steward leader.

Anointed Versus Appointed

I know of few Christian leaders today who were anointed before they were appointed. We have mostly 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 give them psychological tests before we make the critical appointment. Once they are 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 seemed most fit for the appointment, but on whom God had anointed for the task. And appointment without anointment always led to disaster.

I have never been asked in a job interview if I sensed God’s anointing for a position. If I had, I don’t know how I would have answered; the question never entered my mind.

Anointing is critical to the task of Christian leadership because of its nature as a unique form of leadership. Christian leadership, which I define as the work of the steward leader, requires nothing less than a complete, wholesale submission of your life in service to God and God only. It is the “losing of your life” to the work that God wills to work in you to benefit your institution, school, church or organization.

And the stakes are high. Nowhere else in the Christian life is the price of divided loyalties so costly for so many for so long. Ineffective and fallen leaders compromise kingdom work, and the effects are both temporal and eternal. Therefore, leadership must be entered with the utmost seriousness and only when you have clearly been anointed for the task. I have no criterion to offer or search process to recommend in determining anointing, but I am convinced that this biblical model needs to be taken more seriously during the selection of leaders.

With God’s anointing comes what every leader seeks: God’s power and presence. A special blessing is bestowed on God’s anointed. It is the blessing of his power manifest in ways only seen through the work of his 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 the souls of the oppressed. God’s anointed do the miraculous because they are servants of the Almighty. Without this anointing, we are continually thrown back on ourselves to make things work. With it, we have the resources of heaven at our disposal if we will be faithful servants.

Anointed leaders do anything God asks. Anything. They seek God’s will with a passion. They do not move without anointing, and they are not diverted from their course once they have it. God’s anointed 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 solidly engrafted into the true vine. God’s anointed are servants first, last and always. And they 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 leadership positions with a clear sense of anointing as a leader, but I now better understand and value the distinction between appointment and anointment. I believe that God’s anointing can rest on steward leaders who submit everything to him. God works through leaders who trust him beyond question and rely on him for the totality of their life and work. Anointing begets submission, and submission is the disposition of the heart of the steward leader.

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” (John 3:30). Most Christian leaders would say they wish that Jesus would increase and they would decrease. But it is hard to decrease in a leadership position. Natural trappings distinguish those in leadership, such as salary, title, prestige, priority, power, influence, honor and advancement. And in each area lie tempting opportunities for increase. There are also motivations to build a kingdom in which we house our growing collection of leadership trappings. Not only must we meet this desire for the fame and fortune of leadership with resistance, but, according to U.S. President John Adams, we must also have “a habitual contempt of them.”[3] 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.[4]

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. As a result we produce churches and ministries that are rife with learned helplessness. By overestimating our worth we help our people depend on us for everything. And that dependence feeds into our need to be needed, to be the visionary, 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 contributes to our increase and expands our kingdom. This type of leader is an owner-leader. This leadership does a terrible disservice to people, leaving them uninvolved and underdeveloped. It wastes resources and limits ministry, all under the guise of strong leadership and the use of God-given talents for “getting things done.” Leadership pioneer Robert Greenleaf reminds us that the difference between a true servant-leader who is servant first and a leader-servant who seeks leadership first lies in the growth of the people who serve under him or her. 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?”[5]

Steward leaders are stewards over the people they serve. They cultivate people. Leadership bent on self-centered increase lacks integrity and is usually dishonest. Integrity bears witness externally to all that we are internally. It does not derive from or depend on what is external, on an external increase. For that reason, godly integrity begins with our inner life in God.

Stephen Covey sees integrity as “the value we place on ourselves.”[6] 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 the promises we make to our own value system. We will see that for steward leaders self-confidence must be founded on faith in Christ and a desire to be like him—in fact to be indwelt by him—in every way. We must seek to be Christlike in our inner being and be confident that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion” (Philippians 1:6). If Christ is truly living in us, as Paul reminds us, we can in turn live for others with integrity in our work.

As steward leaders we have no need to seek to increase in our positions of power. We 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 (see Galatians 2:20). It is only with this kind of godly integrity that we can seek to decrease as we look away from ourselves to see Christ increase in and through our work as leaders.

Steward leaders empower their people, give away authority, value and involve others, seek the best in and from their people, and constantly lift others up, push others into the limelight and reward those they lead—all so that God’s will may 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 desire that Jesus’ face be seen in all they do. Leadership expert Max De Pree’s 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.”[7]

I have come to understand that the call of the steward leader is a call to a lifestyle of an ever-decreasing thirst for authority, power and influence, where our quest for reputation is replaced by confidence in the power of God’s anointing.

Being and Doing

I am a doer. I have the reputation of going one-hundred-plus miles per hour, always focused on accomplishing objectives, meeting deadlines and crossing things off my formidable 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 say I am committed to transformation, but it must 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, our perception of God will necessarily and significantly influence our self-understanding. If we view God as a solitary monad, an isolated being known for power and transcendence, 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. If we see God as a distant and detached monarch, we will lead as monarchs.

If, however, we are true to our trinitarian historical commitments, we learn that relationship is what defines us. We learn...