3H Leadership (Complete text of my keynote talk at BASIC:Live)

We’re going to talk about leadership in the Kingdom of God for the next few minutes.

The world needs leaders. Our ministries and the people entrusted to us are looking for leaders.

And you’re listening to this because you’ve answered the bell. You want to lead. You want to grow your leadership capacity.

But as you’ve found, it can sometimes be frustrating. Confusing. Difficult—more difficult than you imagined.

What if I told you that that’s because Jesus designed it that way?

Yes, God loves you and has a difficult plan for your life.

When we come to leadership in the Kingdom of God, we find that it turns our conventional understanding of what it means to lead upside-down and inside-out. And even if we’ve heard this before, its something we need to hear again. And again.

One place we see this clearly is this fascinating scene in Mark 10:35-45, where two of Jesus’ disciples, James and John, approach him with a question: “Jesus, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” Has there ever been a greater combination of faith and arrogance?! They believe Jesus is capable of anything they could ask or imagine, but it’s all for them. They ask Jesus if they can sit next to him in glory. It’s a miracle Jesus didn’t strike the “Sons of Thunder” with lightning right then and there. Instead, he patiently responds, “you don’t know what you’re asking.” He goes on to explain that the path to glory goes through suffering, a suffering so great that they can’t imagine it. Then he proceeds to teach them about the nature of leadership, and how different it is from worldly definitions:

Jesus completely flips over their understanding of leadership. They had thought that greatness, glory, and advancement would go to the ones who were most aggressive about it. They even enlisted their mother in the behind-the-scenes campaign, according to Matthew,—she’s the original helicopter parent. I love how it says “When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John.” The Twelve were like a little fraternity or sorority, with gossip, backstabbing, drama, and shifting alliances. The disciples are refreshingly and (scarily) familiar like that.

Jesus basically says, “Wow, you really don’t get it. It’s the Gentiles who go for all that power-tripping, controlling, look-at-how-great-I-am status stuff. Not so with you! You should operate completely differently. Whatever you think you should be doing, flip it upside down. If you want to be great, it doesn’t mean climbing the ladder, it means going to the bottom. If you want glory, don’t make other people serve you, serve them. If you want a title, make it “slave.” Do you want an example? Look no farther than me, the Son of Man.” He came to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. He did this when he washed their feet, and ultimately when he died on the Cross to purchase their lives with his blood.

Jesus, here in Mark and elsewhere, models a different type of leadership, Kingdom leadership, which is in direct conflict with the kind of leadership taught and encouraged by the world. I call this 3H leadership: Humble, Hard, and High Impact. Jesus’ leadership was humble, hard, and high-impact, and therefore anyone who would follow him should pursue the same things. Let’s start with humility.

One of the most powerful and vivid leadership lessons I received wasn’t in a classroom or a church, but on a golf course. During my summers in college, I worked on the grounds crew of a local country club. My boss, the supervisor, was a deacon at my church. People liked working for him because he was good, reasonable, and fair. One day, during our early morning mowing of the putting greens, one of my co-workers came back to report he had found something…interesting on one of the greens. The night before, some neighborhood kids had partied on the course, leaving beer cans and trash all around. This wasn’t anything new. But they had also left behind something else. I believe the exact words were, “There’s #2 in the hole on #13.” Ewww.

Now Sumner, my boss, would have had every right at that moment to tell any of us “Go get some gear and clean up that mess.” We were just summer employees–he had advanced degrees in golf course management. We were just college kids, and he was the boss. He had important things to do, and we were just hired help. But instead of making one of us do it, Sumner grabbed some gear and cleaned out hole #13. Thankfully, before any golfers got there. He did it because he was a humble leader, and because he loved the course more than any of us did. That’s leadership!

The world conditions us to pursue positions of power and influence, because then we’ll be loved, respected, even feared. We want an excuse to flex our ego a bit. We’d like to feel a little pride in our accomplishments. But Jesus says, “Not so with you!” To lead people like Jesus means that we are humbled, humbled so that we’ll willingly go into the mess and deal with the #2 on #13 or wherever we find it.

On campus, I was reminded of this while doing what we called “toilet evangelism.” On Saturday mornings, our Christian group would head to student apartment complexes and offer to clean people’s bathrooms to show Jesus’ love to them. As we cleaned their toilets, we told them about Jesus. Shock and awe was the usual response. We were in shock at the state of their bathrooms; they were in awe that we would clean them.

Sometimes I wish leadership and caring for people wasn’t so messy. But we need leaders humble enough to clean up the mess.  That’s not what people expect, but its Jesus’ design, as Paul describes well in Philippians 2:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, ⁴ not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Leading like Jesus isn’t just humbling. It’s also hard. This is also by design.

Without a doubt, one of the hardest things that humans do every day is give birth. Well, half of humanity! I’ve never given birth, but I’ve been there supporting my wife through the birth of our three children. Now I’ve been in severe pain before. I got pretty sick when my appendix ruptured and I was hospitalized for 10 days. But that didn’t make me a hero: I didn’t do that intentionally, and the only thing my body produced was a ruptured appendix. Now, women are amazing! They undergo the ordeal of a 9 month pregnancy, with the morning sickness, back pain, ever-changing body, swollen ankles, and then culminating in labor where the pain can only be described as off-the-charts! How hard is giving birth? Well, when’s the last time you tried to exit your car through the tailpipe? Exactly!

And yet they willingly do this, many giving birth multiple times. Why? Because it’s worth it! In fact, its quite common for a new mom in the delivery room to say, “I want another one…let’s do this again!” Because after all that agony, you have this beautiful new life, this person, this eternal being that you’re holding in your arms! There’s nothing like it! If we miss the hard things, we’ll never enjoy the great things. We must go through some times of agony to taste the ecstasy.

This is upside-down, because our world tells us to stop doing things that we don’t like to do, things that are “beneath” us. We want other people to do the grunt work, so that it can be easy for us.  But Jesus says, “Not so with you!”

Do you think leading others in the Kingdom is supposed to be easy? No, in fact the more leadership you take, the harder it will be. It’s not supposed to be easy! It’s supposed to be hard! Paul says in Galatians 4:19 ^“My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you,”—he’s feeling the pain, the agony for them.But like childbirth, on the other side of hard things lie great things! Agony before ecstasy—but its worth it!

Now all this humility and hardship as we’ve said is by design. This is the way of Jesus. But its not just Jesus’ example we’re after: We’re actually seeking the greatest impact, the most lasting impact, and that’s through not only Jesus’ example, but Jesus’ power.

How do we make room for Jesus’ power in our lives?

To make a high impact, we have to get out of the way!

Those of you who have been doing this awhile know that one of the greatest challenges for the competent, successful leader is learning how to get out of the way. If you’re doing your job, you’ve raised up other people who can do the things that you’ve been doing. That’s part of making disciples.

Maybe not as good as you—at least not yet—but good enough that you can hand them off. You can delegate it. Not just tasks you don’t want to do, but important things, things you love!

And to truly empower them, you need to get out of the way.

This too Jesus modeled! Yes, even Jesus

How can this be good? Thing about what the disciples have seen him do…

Now, in one sense Jesus is never getting out of the way—he is still central to everything we do. “Everything is by him and for him,” Colossians 1 says.

But Jesus knew that for his saving work to go viral, he needed to return to the Father, and allow the Holy Spirit to work! As long as he remained here in his body, that was a limiting factor in the spread of the Kingdom. But when he returned to Heaven, he sent the Spirit, “for God gives the Spirit without limit.” John 3:34.

Friends, I don’t want to be the limiter in the expansion of God’s Kingdom.

Give them Jesus, get out of the way, and make room for the Spirit to work in ways far beyond our ability!

You and I are highly replaceable. The Kingdom of God will continue to spread without us.

Humility—are you willing to go to the bottom of the org chart, the ladder? Becoming a servant?

Hardship—are you willing to persevere through the hard things, the hard conversations, the hard people, for the good resulting on the other side?

High Impact–Do you want your life to matter? Do you want your work to matter?

Look to Jesus’ model of 3H leadership to guide you.

Humility and hardship, in the hands of Jesus, leads to high impact!