The Call to Servant Leadership

Jesus taught his disciples that the one who serves the others would be the greatest among them. These moments in the gospels happen as Jesus announces his own impending death, even as the disciples jockeyed for positions of authority amongst themselves (Matthew 20:17-28; Mark 9:30-35, 10:33-43; Luke 22:22-27). Jesus’ pathway of suffering inverted his followers’ expectations about what it meant to be revered and honored: the path to “greatness” includes a cross and a tomb. But it also demonstrates what service should look like -- it is about imitating Jesus. Just as his initial call beckoned them to watch how he fished for people, their ongoing discipleship should also be about doing things the way he did them (Matthew 4:19; Mark 1:17). This calling to discipleship is still about following Jesus, especially in two essentially sacramental ways: we follow him to the river and to the table.

When we follow Jesus to the river to share in his baptism, we are reminded of the commonness of our calling. Through our baptism we become a part of the family of various others. As Rowan Williams puts it in Being Christian, “to be a Christian is to be affected -- you might even say contaminated -- by the mess of humanity” (p.6). Our initial calling is to be baptized, and in doing so we plunge into the chaotic waters of this world and join with God’s other creatures. Only after we accept this general calling of baptism do we receive a specialized, individualized calling. It is quite easy to invert this, as James and John do in Matthew 20:20-23, and assume that as called ones we are necessarily entitled to specialized positions of privilege. Instead, by following Jesus into baptism we are reminded that our individual callings are for the sake of others. Os Guinness writes in The Call that we have individual giftings for the very purpose of giving them away -- that specific and individual callings must be balanced by our general calling to serve others (p.48). It is only within the context of worshipping and serving with our baptized brothers and sisters that we can flesh out an individual calling.

This is one of the things I love most about being a pastor, and it is also one of the role’s biggest challenges. It takes work to invite others into new roles and responsibilities, especially if they haven’t yet caught a vision for how God is calling them. If pastoral leadership was about racking up individual accomplishments, it would be easy to run everything as the pastor. But centralizing everything in the pastor’s own individual abilities would fall short of the responsibility to “build the body of Christ as a caring and giving community, extending the ministry of Christ to the world” (United Methodist Book of Discipline, p.270). As one who shares in Jesus’ baptism, I’m forced to see my primary accomplishments in what we do together. It is at the baptismal font that we lay aside aspirations for authority and position that come at the expense of others, because our calling is for those others.

The servant leader also follows Jesus to the communion table. In celebrating the Eucharist we are reminded that all are welcomed, and the leader imitates Jesus by extending this invitation to everyone. Jesus instructs the disciples to welcome even little children, and he does this in the middle of his discourse about his death and inverted leadership style (Mark 9:36-37). Who could be more on the periphery than a child? Without marketable skills, a young child isn’t even worthy of being a commodity -- only an expense. There is nothing to be gained in a consumer society by including children. But in imitating Jesus we learn that his welcome extends to all whom we might consider unlikely disciples -- the unmarketable, the inconvenient, and the annoying. Rowan Williams remarks that the sacrament of communion “obliges you to see the person next to you as wanted by God” (emphasis his, p.51 in Being Christian). God’s invitation is not simply an acquiescence that we need to accommodate the less fortunate. It is a call to desire to be with the other in the same way that you invite your friends to a dinner party.

It can become easy to see someone else as a project to be fixed. My own call to cross-cultural mission was, at least in part, motivated by a concern for those who did not have what I have. In a position of relative power and wealth, I thought that being a missionary was about choosing to surrender my privilege in order to provide people in developing countries with what they lacked. My value came in what I could give away, and on the surface this seemed to be like real service. But this concept broke down at the point of invitation. In order for me to be a missionary, I had to be invited to enter into the lives of the people I was trying to serve. As such, I found myself receiving many more invitations that I was able to extend. More than once I dined on a family’s last chicken so that they could serve their best meal to a guest. People with relatively few resources were giving them to me -- not the other way around. The communion table reminds us that Jesus not only inverted the sense of who is important, but he also turns upside down conventional ideas about who is desirable. He personally accepted invitations to the homes of people who were not well-liked (Matthew 9:10-11). And then he rebuked his detractors for trying to fix things instead of living into the hospitality that is behind every invitation: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (9:13, NRSV). As ones called by Jesus, he invites us to follow him to where he is (John 12:26). At the river and at the table -- that’s where we learn from him how to serve.