Some questions do not seek answers. A classic example of this kind of question is probably: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Such a question is not meant to demand an answer, but to emphasize what the speaker wishes to convey through the question itself. However, an obsessive person who feels compelled to declare how faithful a creationist he is, ignoring this rhetorical device, will readily answer, “The chicken came first” (were Job’s friends like this? At times, some Christian leaders ignore the rules of dialogue and push their own claims to the point of embarrassing their counterparts).
Then what comes first: the leader or leadership? Does leadership create the leader, or does the leader create leadership? A more fundamental set of questions might be these: “What is the essence of leadership?” “Can leadership be developed?” “Are leaders born or trained?” “Is leadership an inner quality or an outward fruit?”
It has already been 26 long years since I was ordained as a pastor. Since becoming a pastor, I have served as a pastor and as a seminary professor, and I am currently serving as an evangelist. In the field of ministry, I have continually strived to learn leadership, and to build a systematic understanding of leadership, I completed a Doctor of Ministry program in “Strategic Leadership.” Yet the more field experience I gain, and the more I learn leadership, the stronger my conviction becomes that I do not understand what leadership is. Furthermore, no one can predict that exercising a particular form of leadership in a particular situation will produce a particular result.
If leadership development, as it is generally understood, is by no means easy, then exercising Christian leadership in the pluralistic society in which we live is undoubtedly even more difficult. Servant leadership—indeed, the words “servant” and “leader” themselves seem incompatible! Moreover, in an age when every organization desperately calls for “strong” leadership, the very phrase “strong servant leadership” sounds contradictory. Of course, everyone knows that servant leadership is not synonymous with weak leadership.
Through the lives and ministries of great biblical figures, we can discover the qualities of leaders recorded in Scripture. However, to receive leadership lessons from the examples of biblical figures, a prior assumption is required: we must have an interpretive lens that sees their patterns of action within the historical contexts in which they lived. Such insight is not given automatically. It requires historical, grammatical, and theological lenses—the hermeneutical perspective learned in seminary. Without such lenses, we will fall into the error of interpreting the actions of biblical figures not against the backdrop of their lives, but against the backdrop of our own.
The stage on which leadership is exercised is the very center of life and ministry, not the research laboratory. Even if someone is a university professor specializing in leadership, if he has no field of ministry, one might doubt whether he is truly a leader at all. For this reason, John Maxwell reportedly declined Cornell University’s request to purchase his leadership development program for six million dollars and to establish the John Maxwell Leadership Chair, saying, “I am not inclined to provide the leadership materials I have developed to professors who wrestle with books in laboratories where leadership is not needed.”
For some time ahead, I will be contributing articles on leadership to the Korea Baptist Newspaper of America. The development of Christian leadership is inseparable from the Bible and requires hermeneutical insight. Furthermore, leadership theory without the field of life and ministry is nothing but a fantasy and a ghost. Therefore, in this column, I hope to walk the journey of leadership together with readers, moving back and forth between the dimensions of life, interpretation, and leadership. No matter how well written, a piece that fails to evoke empathy has no value. Yet a piece that everyone agrees with but lacks any provocative element offers readers nothing. Writing that is empathetic yet not so easily agreed with—writing that stirs the heart with a challenging edge—is possible only when writer and reader travel together in dialogue. Those who have topics related to leadership that they would like me to address are encouraged to contact me.