There is one social competency more difficult than leadership. That is the ability to follow well. It takes deep intellectual and emotional preparation and skills to follow well. A friend told me one time that if a person thinks they…
Tag: leadership
Individuality and Mutuality in Christian Leadership
Within our Adventist educational community, one Ellen White often quoted passage is Education p. 17: Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator– individuality, power to think and…
Grace & Truth: What Does God do with Bad Goat Leaders
There are millions of leaders in the world. Not all of them do us good. Last week, one of these leaders was sentenced to up to 175 years for sexually abusing girls. This sentence was based on 7 counts but…
How can you shepherd if you are one of the sheep?
The Lord is My Shepherd, sang David. He sang it well. He knew its truth. All sheep know the truth. We know our fragility (at least we should). We can’t see very far. We get tired easily. We suffer raging…
Diversity in Moral Leadership
Not all leaders look the same. Some are quiet. Some are loud. Some plug away at their tasks and draw interested and committed followers by their steadiness. Others use charisma to move crowds to action, using a splash of personality…
Through Sorrow to Joy
There is a lot of learning needed to lead successfully and maybe even more to follow whole-heartily. Doing both well involves moving through sorrow to joy. Both leading and following operate in a social space where courage, deep commitment and…
Him who Justifies the Ungodly
Would you work for a boss who rewarded lazy employees? Would you follow a leader who paid people more after they stole from the company? Would you admire a leader who let people talk bad about him, abuse him, walk…
American Beastly Leadership (5 of 5)-The Last in Long Series
This post summarizes the main ideas of a long series of 17 posts on Servant vs Beastly Leadership. This concludes a subseries of 5 on American beastly leadership. Servant leadership I equate with the “Lamb” leadership of Christ. This has…
American Beastly Leadership (4 of 5)-#16 in Series
This series has contrasted servant and beastly leadership. The last 3 posts brought Adventism and America into this contrast. The prognosis of Revelation 13 is that America could abandon its role as servant leader. How? Here, I explore four ways…
American Beastly Leadership (3 of 5) #15 in the Series
In the last 14 posts, I nuanced differences between servant (godly) leadership and beastly (satanic) leadership. The last 2 posts extended that contrast to America and Adventists. I used Revelation 10-14 and Ellen White’s Great Controversy to show how Adventists…
American Beastly Leadership (2 of 5)-#14 in Series
In post #13 on “servant” or “beastly” leadership, I used Revelation 10-14 to show the emergence of Adventists and America in prophecy and as agents of servant leadership. The strongest match was made for Adventists. The identifiers were: use of…
American Beastly Leadership (1 of 5)– #13 in Series
The last 12 posts contrasted beastly and servant leadership, using scripture illustrations to show a great war wages for our allegiance. One side pulls individuals and nations toward evil and beastly leadership, characterized by lots of speaking, limited or poor…
Post 12-Review of Servant and Beastly Leadership Series
American and Adventist leadership will be our next focus in this long series contrasting servants and beasts. As a review, the last 11 posts covered: Resisting Beastly Leadership: Flowers in the Darkest Hours contrasted Jesus’ representation of God’s leadership on…
Bethlehem’s Mourning: Herod the “Not-So” Great
Christmas celebrates God’s great love to the world. The gift of Bethlehem’s Morning was a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Jesus, Immanuel. God with Us. The King of the Universe stepped down to save his subjects. Jesus would win his…
Brides–Shining from His Light
We should anticipate that the “spouse” of the Lamb and the “spouse” of the Beast to reflect the approach of each of their spouses. And for the most part, they do. The Bride of the Lamb reflects the light of…
The Etiology of Beastly Power
This is post 9 in a 12-part series contrasting servant and beastly leadership. This post reviews two symptoms common in beastly powers–lying and murdering. These symptoms are outward manifestations of a deeper disease process. We discuss those symptoms and the…
John and Beastly Powers
The Apostle John knew something about the contrast between service and lordship, love and hate, divine leadership and beastly powers. He intimately experienced both styles of leadership. First, his family of origin had “beastly” ways of relating. He and his…
Beastly Powers, Delusions and Ethics
For the several posts I have been using Kuronen, T. and Huhtinen, A. (2016). Un-willing is un-leading: Leadership as beastly desire. Leadership and the Humanities, 4(2), 92-107. I have used their work to explain the difference between good (lamb) and…
Four Acts of Divine Leadership
God leads. That is my deep belief. He acts on his creation in love. That is my deep experience. God leads in more ways than we will ever fully be aware. Much of our ignorance of his ways to lead…
Daniel: Servants to Beastly Kingdoms
Daniel was sent as a servant-slave to Babylon. Daniel’s nation, Israel, had been destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar’s forces, but the real ruin started centuries earlier when they rejected God as a leader and asked Samuel to find them a king.…
Servant Leadership in Beastly Places
Greenleaf’s 1977 classic Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness reminds us that the most important characteristic about anything—a cell phone, a boss, even a God– is service. Without good service none of them are…
Crucified and Risen Leadership
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Trembling is an overwhelming, almost uncontrollable, “natural” response to deep cold, fear, emotional exhaustion, or…
Resisting Beastly Leadership: Jesus Flowering in Dark Places
Bad leaders have several ways to lead people astray but there may be only one good way to prevent that from happening. One way leaders lead us astray is when they appear “good” or “strong” but lack moral character and…
Church Leadership: In Season or Out
When Presidents come and go, the church needs to be the church. When Parties come and go, the church needs to be the church. When Nations rise or fall, the church needs to be the church. When Good Times lull…
Called and Sprawled into Leadership: Lessons from DeVos Urban Leadership
I experienced the DeVos Urban Leadership Initiative this week. This training experience serves 50 urban faith based youth leaders from across the country with leadership development events and coaching. It helps them find sanity, refocus on trusting God, and create…
Judgment’s Cure for Judgmentalism
Somewhere in my teens I developed a deep judgmentalism. I can’t blame my family. My parents gave us lots of freedom, were very non-judgmental and their positions as a teacher and a nurse, gave them skills of nurturing. I can’t…
Authority in Ethics 4: Satan’s Power, Jesus’ Incarnation
We are in the middle of a 7 part series on power and authority in Christian Adventist Ethics. I first introduced power as the ability to influence and move people or things and authority as legitimate power. I argued authority…
Education and Redemption are One
Jesus and I are in the same line of work: redemption. At least that is the implication of Ellen White: “Education and redemption are one” (Education, 1903, p. 30). There are several ways people interpret that “oneness.” SAME: Jesus was…
And All the Multitude was Silent
Our university department trains leaders. We mentor leaders who face difficult and contentious conflict and have to make tough decisions. We have to train them to confront but also to find safe places to duck into. A safe place gives…
Jeremiah 4: Grace in Judgment
My first three posts on Jeremiah’s “Adventist” ethic reviewed the role of prophets as moral irritations (post 1) against the status quo. Prophets are holy and morally sober in the presence of widespread moral confusion and intoxication. Such a stand…