Leadership In The Big Wide World

Leadership 8 – In the big wide world

3 min script for            UCB

I have been looking at leadership in these short talks in the context of those who are followers of Jesus.  However I  hope that I  haven’t give the impression  that these skills of servant leadership are  only relevant and appropriate to the church community.  If I have given that impression let my try and correct that today.

I have spent a large chunk of my life establishing some independent schools, we have two in North London, one in Sri Lanka and one in Nakuru, Kenya.  When people ask me what is their purpose, I answer that I am interested in affecting the thinking of young students, but also I want to produce tomorrow’s national and international leaders.

I hope you don’t think what I say next is too strange, but even if you do, I believe it to be so. If you really are a follower of Jesus, and you are walking with him then certain things will apply.  First of all you are in touch with wisdom, I do not believe that wisdom comes from any other source but from God, he is the source of wisdom. Knowledge on the other hand can come from a variety of sources.  If you are a follower of Jesus then you should have a world view that gives great credibility to any leadership role into which you enter. Followers of Jesus also have a clear perspective about the future, where it’s all going, why we are here and what is our human purpose is.  You are also in touch with the ultimate law giver, ruler and therefore understand what it means to have a moral base.  Scripture talks about our thinking producing who and what we are, and that can, should and does reflect into the wider culture locally, nationally and internationally.

I learned a lot of my leadership skills as a follower of Jesus rather than from management training, or other training schemes. But I have discovered that it is very easy to transfer those skills into what we sometimes call the secular world, although I don’t like the word secular, as I know that the Kingdom of God can be found in every area of life and do not like the false dichotomy of secular and spiritual. I have been able to use the leadership skills obtained as a follower of Jesus in social service, education and business to name but a few.

Just the other day I was listening to a discussion about an emerging economy and they were talking about how the country could be improved by business, by politics, and by new laws.  But there was an element that was missing from the debate, there was no mention of how people think, the philosophy of a nation if you will.  In the UK, whilst I would never want to call us or think of us as a Christian nation we do have a strong Christian heritage which can be seen in our laws and the way the country works.  This heritage is, I believe, currently being rapidly squandered, but some of it is this is still there, which tends to make us generous and caring; and affect levels of honesty and corruption. If you look at national cultures in other parts of the world then you will see clear differences to the UK culture, due to the underlying philosophy, for some there is a lack of concern for others outside of their own country, some place a low value on human life and some have very corrupt systems.  Now I am sure business, law, politics and education can all help those things if they are wrong, but ultimately you don’t really change things unless you change the thinking and the underlying philosophy.

As one American president once said, ‘if you educate an evil man who was stealing from the railway, it doesn’t change his actions it just makes him clever, so instead of stealing from the railway he steals the whole system’.  What we often see as requiring a structural change actually needs a change of heart, or from my point of view, Jesus style leadership in all areas of life.  So how about you, where do you lead?

Adrian Hawkes

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3 min Script for UCB

Difficult People - and the Leadership of Them

Leadership 7

DIFFICULT PEOPLE

UCB 3 MIN SCRIPT

Let’s be honest there are difficult people around aren’t there?   And there are people who claim to be followers of Jesus who think we need to be nice to everyone.  The problem with being nice is that sometimes nice means, in modern parlance, untruthful.   When we are untruthful we need to ask the question are we really helping the other person?

 Let me illustrate where I am going with this; Have you noticed how people who tell you they are Christians sometimes say, and usually very loudly and firmly, ‘you need to accept me  as I am because God says he accepts me just as I am and He tells us to come to him just as we are, so you should do the same’.  And that is the problem with sound bite truth. Of course what they are saying is true, but  it’s not the whole truth or the whole story, but we so love those sound bites don’t we?  The truth is that  God loves us and calls us to come to Him as we are, but then he also calls us to change. This is made clear in scriptures like, ‘be transformed by the renewing or the changing of your mind’ or ‘he plans to conform us to the image of His son Jesus’. These scriptures give us the clear understanding that although God accepts us as we are it isn’t part of His plan to leave us as He finds us.

Can I be honest?  Thank you. Sometimes when people say, ‘love me as I am,’ I’m thinking, (but of course I don’t say it),   you really are horrible and you need to change!’  Then there are people who say, ‘do you know I never have these problems at work or at my book club I only have them when I am here in the church community.’  And the first thing that goes through my head is, ‘Uh oh, they are not telling the truth’. Perhaps they think they are, but actually they are not. 

For many years I have run a school, and sometimes I have a parent sitting in front of me saying ‘do you know I never had this problem with my child in their last school.’ What they don’t realise is that I have a  file on the child from the last school describing the behaviour issues and can also read the problems that the staff at my school  are experiencing;  and I know my staff!  Sometimes, of course, people don’t realise what they are doing, at other times, let’s be totally clear, they are not being honest; they are trying to circumvent their own problems.

That leads me to my next issue with people, that of their problems. There are those who want to dump their problems on others, especially if those on who they are dumping have assumed any form of leadership role.  What happens is this, someone will share their problem with you, and because you care you really put your mind into it. After they have poured out their problems to you, they go home and sleep soundly while you toss and turn and worry about their problem.  It is not good to allow people to dump their lives on you. We need to try and help people to find ways through difficult passages in their lives, and be as helpful as possible, but ultimately it is for them, to work out a resolution.

Scripture tells us that we are to work out our own salvation. That, again, could be a sound bite but of course God is there working with those who have problems, and, no doubt if you are caring leader you also will be alongside them. But don’t allow people to make their lives your responsibility.  God wants us to grow up, to be mature and work with Him as we work through difficult periods in our life, and he promises to turn them round and help us learn from them.  Maturing us and changing our thinking.

Finally to help any of you listening who do lead, and go through those terrible times when some person you have been trying to help turns around and blames you for the problem that they have, even though the problem was there before you even met them. Or they list the terrible problems that they are having with you that sends you home feeling a complete and utter failure and a really useless leader in fact a useless person.  Here is my little formula which I hope might help you.

Ask yourself, ‘do other people have this problem with me?’ If the answer is yes then perhaps the critic is right and you do have a problem.  If the answer is no, and I have to say it usually is no, then you  need to say to yourself, ‘well now as other people do not have this problem with me then it is probably  not my problem but theirs.’

Then ask yourself, ‘in my observation of this person, do they have a similar problem with other people that I know?’ if the answer is yes, again it confirms what I have just said. It is not your problem it is theirs.   Often we end up beating ourselves up when we should not do so simply because we haven’t thought through the situation, we have just reacted negatively to critisicm, and blamed ourselves for something that is not our fault or our responsibility.

I hope today that I haven’t caused you to no longer want to lead, or help those difficult or problematic people. God does love them; I just don’t want you to live in condemnation.  Happy helping and be blessed.

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Adrian Hawkes

Leadership And The Cost

Leadership and the cost - in time and space

It seems to me that there is a great gulf in our understanding of Biblical style leadership. In many ways those of us who think of ourselves as follower of Jesus are more often than not influenced by Greek thinking and philosophy than we are by Judeo-Christian thinking and  influence.  What is worse is that we think that the Greek way of thinking and its philosophy is actually Judeo-Christian and it isn’t!

We are talking at this time about leadership, and the whole Judeo-Christian Greek thing is another issue, but I have mentioned it now because of the way that Jesus led and I contrast that with what is often perceived when we leading in today’s world.  What we tend to do is preach, or perhaps we would use the words teach or even lecture.  Usually that takes place from the front of some building and what is really happening is information is being passed from someone’s brain though their vocal cords out of their mouth and into, they hope, their listener’s ears.  This then is regarded as leading, and of course it is, but actually it’s a Greek style of leadership.

In contrast the Judeo-Christian style of leadership is much more involved, and we see it very clearly in the servant leadership style of Jesus. From out of his many disciples he choose twelve of them, then said ‘follow me’, and for three years they followed him, or if you like followed His leadership.  That ‘following’ is very involved, for Jesus and for the disciples; they are living together, walking together, eating together, watching what Jesus does, sometimes helping him do it, like distributing baskets of bread and fish, and then sometimes Jesus will say ‘off you go and do it by yourself’, and then when they hit problems, they go back to Jesus and say, ‘we can’t seem to do this, please help’.  Jesus also regularly spends time in what perhaps we would now call a tutorial group, talking to them and answering some of their questions, often to our modern frustration, with new questions.  Yes, Jesus occasionally preaches, but actually that is quite rare, most of the time he is walking, talking, doing and showing.

Here is a couple of my stories to illustrate what I’m talking about; some years ago one of our leaders said to me ‘why does so and so do what you ask them to do, but they often don’t when I ask them, and yet I am a leader just like you’.  I didn’t go into detail about leadership but responded, ‘well actually they lived in my house for two years, I saw them every day, they had breakfast with me almost every morning, they came home at night and I was there, in fact I was probably with them more than they were with anyone else so perhaps my life input to them has influenced them strongly and they are therefore willing to help me, or to do what I ask’.  The leader replied, ‘Oh but I don’t want other people living in my house and to be involved with them to that extent.’  To which I replied, ‘well then you don’t get the response from them that I do, which is how it works!’

The second story happened some years ago, a young lady came to me and said, ‘this is my brother’, I said, ‘Hi,’ and then she said, ‘I want to give him to you.’  I looked a little surprised and said as polity as possible, ‘that’s fine  but thank you I don’t want him.’  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t understand he has been to a Christian camp and he has become a Christian.’ I said, ‘I think that is great, fantastic!’ ‘No, no!’ she said again, ‘you still don’t understand, that happened to him last year and the year before and the year before that, and two weeks after he gets home he is a bad as ever, I know that because I am his sister.’ By now I was very curious and said,   ‘so what do you want me to do?’, she told me, ‘I want you to look after him and take him with  you wherever you go. ‘

And so I did, much to the disgust of my girl friend at the time,  because every time we went out the guy was in tow, it was a pain, but I did try to share with him what little bit I knew, and so wherever I went he went too.   And just in case you’re wondering,  he isn’t following me around anymore but he is still a strong follower of Jesus, and leading others.

Now what I am trying to say, and hoping you get it, is that this kind of Judeo-Christian leadership has at its heart the servant lifestyle to start with, but also it is quite costly, costly personally I mean, for it will take our time, our commitment, and to have people  us a lot can sometimes be a real pressure.  What you are really giving to the  people that you are leading is, in fact, your life. When you think about it the person we so often claim to be following did just that, gave us his life, that we might live, and lead others.  Do you want to be a leader? Can you give your life?

Adrian Hawkes

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Leadership - Investment Into People

Leadership 5 - Investment into People

3min Script for UCB

One day, a little boy was being driven by his Mother along a motorway.  In front of them was a large lorry filled with rubbish, it was obviously not going very far as lying spread-eagled across the tarpaulin sheet used to cover the rubbish, was a man.  At a guess he was doing this to save the time and trouble it would have taken to rope the tarpaulin to the sides of the lorry, instead the man lay on top of it to stop it from flying away as they drove along.

The little boy studied the lorry and the man spread out on top of the rubbish, he was puzzled by the almost lifeless form of the driver’s mate, suddenly a gust of wind lifted one corner of the tarpaulin causing the man to react quickly to bring the large sail under control by throwing his arm over the offending, flapping corner.  The little boy turned to his Mum and said in a horrified voice, ‘look mummy, somebody has thrown away a perfectly good man!’

Leaders must never throw away perfectly good people.  Scripture reports that Jesus said, ‘I will not quench a smoking flax nor break a bruised reed.’  What exactly does that mean?  I reckon it means that Jesus will not put on one side even the weakest or most damaged person, rather he will use them; they too are leadership material.

Sadly many are tempted to throw people away because they’re not clever enough or too clever by half, the wrong colour, the wrong culture, funny, silly awkward or just plain weird.

Leaders work with people and need to get them motivated, activated, committed and following us because we are following Jesus and of course helping them to develop into leaders themselves. If we, even in our thoughts, dismiss people, mentally throw them away then that is completely opposite to the Jesus style of leadership.  Scripture is full of success stories about people whom others had thrown away. If you want to lead Jesus style then you will want to discover people whom others have thrown away that, if taken and carefully nurtured and polished, will turn into diamonds whose bright light will dazzle you.  These people, you will find by careful handling, will not only become useful kingdom seekers but also powerful leaders, kings, prophets, priests.

We must learn to love others, be good at directing people, never deriding them, there to help in whatever way possible.  Jesus came, we need to remember, to lift people up not to push them down.

We actually need to make people, other people, our offering of worship to God.  God has great things in store for all of us, we are called to be his leaders, his prophets, his priests, he kings.  All of us! God has put great value on us. He seems to know the value of every person and he is never willing to discard them, he will never throw them away.  The only way they can be thrown away is if they throw themselves away. Jesus never throws people away, he died for people, all people and we should never forget that.

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Adrian Hawkes

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Honest Leadership

Honest Leadership – i.e. in the family

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For many years I lead large youth camps both in the north and south of England.  I often feel I have spent almost as much time camping as Abraham!

What has camping to do with leadership? Which of course is the subject we are discussing; well on those camp sites, with almost 400 teenagers thrown together in close proximity, there were many human problems.  One of the camps regularly had young people who were referred from various departments within Social Services, so you can imagine there were lots of pastoral issues and much time spent just talking, answering questions and dealing with issues.

It may surprise you to know that the group of young people I probably spent the most time with, due to their unruly behaviour, usually after midnight sitting on a hill around a fire (well it was a summer camp) was the church leader’s kids.

My conversations with many leaders’ kids over the years became very repetitive, it went something like this. ‘I know your father and mother, they lead that large church in Anyshire, now why is it that amongst all these young people you are giving me the biggest problems?’  And their response was invariably, ‘Huh,’ they would say with a teenage shrug, ‘you might think you know my Mum and Dad, but you only see them when they are at a church meeting, you don’t live with them. You don’t see you how my Dad treats my Mum, and you don’t see how my Mum speaks to my Dad, you have no idea what they are really like!’   And of course they were right.

Out of the hundreds of disciples who followed Jesus, he chose twelve of them, then he lived with them, this was the basis of his teaching.  He didn’t give them a lecture now and then for a couple of hours, he was with them 24/7.  It’s a well known saying that you don’t really know someone until you have lived with them.  When I was at college sharing a room with 5 other students, one of the guys had a very appropriate rhyme which was, ‘to live with the saints in heaven above I’m sure that will be glory, but to live with the saints down here on earth beneath boy that’s another story.’

When we’re at a church meeting and someone asks, ‘how are you doing?’ it’s so easy for us to put a smile on our face, be very spiritual and say, ‘I’m fine.’  But when you get home, the façade drops and the real you appears. That’s a rather hypocritical lifestyle. At home it’s much harder to be a Christian, a true follower of the way, a leader who maintains consistency in words and actions.

Does that mean it can’t be done?  I don’t think that’s true, but we do need, however, to change out thinking, we need to put on the mind of Christ, we need to have a servant attitude in our heart and we certainly need to loose the ‘lording it over you’ approach that so many of us pick up so easily.  Its funny isn’t it how quickly we learn to boss people around and take the high ground and I’m not just referring to leaders.

Next time you are at a Christian function, take a look around at the people who have been given some responsibility, they may be sporting a badge, or a walkie-talkie; notice how quickly they begin bossing people around, putting others down and making small rules seem like mountains to climb or an instrument with which to whack others.  This bossiness is in us all and we need to be on our guard when it rears its ugly head.

If we desire to be a Jesus-style of leader, we need to be honest with ourselves, we need a heart make-over, and we need to say to Jesus, ‘help me to be a servant-style leader that effects real change in your world.’  We need to consistently seek to maintain that attitude in the most important place, our home.

Adrian Hawkes

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Leadership of Self

Leadership of Self

Script for UCB

Leadership

The most important person we need to learn to lead is our self.  In other words, we need to be in charge of ourselves. The thing is if we cannot govern, control and lead our self, how would it be possible or even thinkable to lead others?

It is obvious from scripture that Jesus thought of himself as under authority, that is, under the authority of his father and was doing, saying and being all that his father wanted him to be and do.

In servant leadership, the style of leadership that is required by God, the phrase ‘do as I say not as do’ just does not hold water!  Self discipline is a must, but what does that mean.  Well it includes things like controlling our tempers, or should I say temperament.  The excuse that I often hear from people who loose their temper is, ‘well that’s just how I am’, that excuse will just not do.  It might be how you were before, but now that you are a new person in Christ, as it says in 1 Corinthians 5 verse 17,  ^‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come’.

Many times I hear people say, ‘accept me for who I am, God does!’  Well of course, in some senses, that is true, God does not wait for us to change before we come to him, so in that sense he does accept us for who we are and just how we are,  as the old hymn says, ‘Just as I am, I come’.    But hang on, it doesn’t stop there, the scripture is very plain about this, God’s plan for us is to change us.  There are many references similar to the one I quoted from Corinthians, here is another example, Colossians chapter 3 verse 10, ^‘and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.’  So it’s obvious that God does not plan to leave us as he found us in that ‘just as I am’ state.  The plan is to change us and to make us like his son Jesus.

So how does he do that, or how do you or I do that, that is, how do we change to be more like Christ?  It’s not as complicated as you might imagine, though it does take some action on our part, but God is alongside us helping us, encouraging us, strengthening us, being with us every step of the way.  I often ask people what it is that God or we use to change and I get  a variety of answers including: praying, going to church, reading the bible, the Holy Spirit. They are all good answers, but not the right one methinks.  The right answer is ‘think’.  The battle ground from God’s perspective and from a biblical perspective is our thinking, our minds, and it is the changing of our thinking and our minds that makes us into good leaders, in control of ourselves, able to lead ourselves and therefore others.

The bible has lots to say on this subject, about ‘putting on the mind of Christ’, there are so many references in the New Testament about having the mind of Christ that I decided to encourage you to get hold of a concordance and have a look for yourself.  You could start with Philippians 4 verse 8, ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy think about such things.

 And you could also take a look at Romans chapter 12 verse 2 which tells us we need to renew our minds. ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will.’

If you do that it changes everything.  Computer geeks say that if you put rubbish into your computer, then you will get rubbish out, they call it GIGO, Garbage in, Garbage out.  It’s the same with our minds, what we need is right thinking; that will change us so that we can lead ourselves and then lead others.

Adrian Hawkes

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Leadership - Servant Style

Leadership – Servant style

UCB 3 min script

I was in one of those meetings where the preacher goes and on and the more he went on the more irritated I got, not because he was going on, but because he was getting it so badly wrong. He was preaching from Luke 7 v 8 where the centurion seeks healing for his sick servant. The preacher had obviously not read the passage, or at least had not paid attention when he read it because he kept saying that the Centurion said to Jesus that, ‘he could see that Jesus had authority like he had authority.’  How embarrassing, what the centurion actually said was that he was under authority and perceived that Jesus was also under authority.

Jesus saying he was under authority is a very interesting and enlightening fact, he was telling us that the things he was doing were at the command of the will of his Father and not his own will.

In Matthew 20 it’s interesting to see that there were those amongst the twelve disciples who wanted to be in the top tier of leadership, and they asked Jesus if they could be at his right hand and left hand, (actually they got their Mum to ask, but anyway, I digress) But Jesus demonstrated a completely different style of leadership, one I am afraid that the church as a whole still does not seem to grasp, the style is called servant leadership.

Jesus outlines the style very clearly, both in words and actions in Marks gospel, chapter 9 verse 35, when he says if you want to lead or be the first, you need to be the last, or rather the servant of all.  Then he demonstrates this very process as he takes a towel and a bowl and washes the disciple’s feet.   In the account in John chapter 13 verses 5 Peter is very upset, he does not think that master Jesus should be washing people’s feet.  But Jesus carries out this act to clearly underline and promote the servant style of leadership.

It’s helpful for us to understand who, in the culture of the time when Jesus was here, would be doing the foot washing.  I’ve walked around in Africa quite a bit and I can understand the need to wash my feet, even when I am wearing socks and shoes my feet still need washing, my socks need changing and my shoes need shining because the roads are so dusty.  So who exactly would have had the responsibility of washing feet in that culture?  It would have been the job of the very youngest, most junior servant, if the home did not have servants, then the youngest child would do the job.  I guess now we can see how mind-blowing it would have been to the disciples to see Jesus taking up a towel and washing their feet.   The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the creator of all things, in fact the very reason why all things were created, is now washing feet!  It’s mad isn’t it, but that is the kind of leadership that those who lead in the church need to practice.

Being a follower of Jesus is unusual, if it’s real it is counter-culture and so at odds with what people would think normally, and that’s what makes it so fantastic.  It is so very different; totally opposite of what is the expected norm.  The trouble is we are so influenced by our culture and the way the world runs that we don’t realise how different we are called to be. The early church had the same struggle, as we can see in 1 Peter 5v2, ‘Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

’ Have a look at it and you’ll see the words ‘serve’ and ‘not lording it’ (that is being the big heavy handed boss) all in one sentence.

So you feel God has called you to lead, but its servant leadership that he’s called you to and that is so different to what we see in the world around us.  But it’s God’s way; this is the way he wants us to lead in his world.  Are you ready to lead?

Adrian Hawkes

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