Leadership
by James McGregor Burns
Harper & Row, pb $7.95, hb $17.50
and
Servant Leadership
by Robert K. Greenleaf
Paulist Press, $10.95
Reviewed by Vernon C. Grounds
As America enters the 80s, what it needs most is-new sources of energy? A cooling off of its inflationary economy? Weaponny that will put it far ahead of the USSR in the arms race? No! According to Time (Aug. 6, 1979), America’s greatest need today is leadership. Essayist Lance Morrow discusses this need in a cover story on “The Cry for Leadership.” He recalls that five years ago Time in a similar article had said, “In the U.S. and around the world, there is a sense of diminished vision, of global problems that are overwhelming the capacity of leaders.” A halfdecade later our problems have so multiplied in number, swollen in size, and increased in complexity that the cry for leadership may easily change into a frantic clamor for a strong man on horseback, a dictator who, like Hitler, will give unambiguous direction to a directionless nation . even if he marches it into the abyss.
Is it a coincidence, then, that lately books on leadership have been proliferating? Does this proliferation show that the dearth of leadership is being widely recognized? Is it an attempt to help meet a more-than-urgent need on every level of society? Whatever our guesses about this phenomenon, we can profit by interacting with two recent publications, neither of them written by an evangelical. (Anyone in quest of an able, informative, detailed treatment by an evangelical is advised to read Ted Engstrom’s The Making of a Christian Leader.)
I
The first, entitled simply Leadership, is an impressive work of scholarship which runs more than 500 pages. Its author, distinguished historian James McGregor Burns, draws a distinction between transactional and transforming leaders. Transactional leaders are those who manage affairs, keep institutional wheels turning smoothly, and maintain the machinery of the status quo in a condition of good repair, enabling life to be relatively peaceful and productive. Indispensable and praiseworthy, these leaders are engineers rather than creators and dreamers; they are draftsmen and contractors rather than architects. At times of crisis, alas, they disclose their inability to innovate and inspire. Herbert Hoover, for example, was a transactor; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a transformer.
Unlike transactors, transforming leaders are motivators rather than mechanics, change-agents rather than caretakers. They are not only able to handle conflict and bring about collective action, they are also positive and elevating, dedicated to moral ends, if morality is understood as Burns defines it: the refusal to “treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.” Committed to moral ends, transformers can touch a people’s conscience, lifting them out of their humdrum selves. And precisely this, says Burns, is “the secret of transforming leadership.”
Thus transforming leadership is marked by far more than mere skill or even genius in dealing with political, economic, and military affairs. Lasting, persuasive, intangible, and noninstitutional- these are the adjectives Burns uses. “It is the leadership of influence fostered by ideas embodied in social or religious or artistic movements, in books, in great seminal documents, in the memory of great lives greatly lived.”
Needless to say, a Christian resonates to this concept, heartily agreeing that “a person, whether leader or follower, girded with moral purpose, is a tiny principality of power.” And moral power in the long run is the decisive dynamic of history.
II
But how can transformational leadership be produced when, in point of fact, it emerges unpredictably by a kind of spontaneous generation? It is to this question that a second significant book addresses itself. Its author Quaker Robert Greenleaf, relates that, when a senior in college, he was challenged by his old sociology professor’s off-the-cuff remark, “Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become A force for good-from the inside.” Determined to be an inside force for good, Greenleaf took a job with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, starting at the bottom as a common laborer and working his way up to Director of Management Research. Since retiring, he has been a consultant for businesses, foundations, professional societies! church organizations, and universities overseas as well as in the United States. Out of this rich experience have emerged insights and convictions which compel Greenleaf to be a loving critic and a critical lover of our ambition-driven culture. He is remarks Noel Perrin, head of the English department at Dartmouth College, “the only wise revolutionary I have ever known.”
What, then, stamps his approach to the problem of leadership as revolutionary? The title of his collected
 addresses and essays, servant-Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, states his central idea. The leader who is legitimate, powerful, and great must be a servant. There are no doubt many other subsidiary requirements for effective leadership, but servanthood is the prime and basic ingredient. The effective leader-no aloof boss who acts unilaterally, but a primus inter pares who builds a team-must be able to listen, heal, conceptualize, dream, unify, and implement. He must be at once a sort of historian, analyst, and prophet. As an historian, he must have an awareness of the past-where his people, his enterprise, his country may be coming from. As an analyst, he must sift the wheat of essentials from the chaff of routine trivia. As a prophet, he must project and articulate goals. More than that, the transforming leader must inspire trust, empathically accept his followers, and tolerate their imperfections while he himself avoids a stance of condescending superiority. And all these ideal characteristics are rooted in a genuine care for people. “This is my thesis,” Greenleaf writes: “caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built.” Hence his basic criterion for legitimate, great, and powerful leadership sounds absurdly simple.
Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society: will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?
In other words, the servant-leader- people-growing instead of people-using-asks himself continually, ”How can I use myself to serve best?” And he is using himself best when he creates opportunity and provides freedom for his followers to become optimized human beings whose lifestyle is one of “beauty, momentaneity, openness, humor, and tolerance.” Such human beings, Greenleaf ardently believes, are “the affirmative builders of a better society.”
All our institutions, Greenleaf further believes-and here he is indeed a revolutionary-need to operate by the philosophy of servant leadership.
Whereas, until recently,- caring was largely person-to-person, now most of it is mediated through institutions-often large, complex, powerful, impersonal, not always competent, sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servants of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.
He is keenly aware, to be sure, that the caring which he advocates is an “exacting and demanding business.” It requires not only interest and compassion and concern; it demands self-sacrifice and wisdom and tough-mindedness and discipline. It is sometimes difficult to care enough for the immediate person one loves and respects. It is much more difficult to care for an institution, especially a big one, which can look cold and impersonal and seem to have an autonomy of its own.
Yet whether businesses, colleges, or churches, all our institutions must be reoriented to serve because they care, and motivated by caring, thereby serve.
Serve is used in the sense that all who are touched by the institution or its work become, because of that influence, healthier, wiser, freer, or autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants. . . That, I believe, is what the times we live in require.
Greenleaf realizes that his vision is utopian. Some hardbitten cynics will, he knows, scoff at it as absurd. But as he moves in the top echelons of the establishment, he discovers that executives and administrators listen to him with respect, interest, and evidently an almost curious longing. So it is as a visionary realist and a realistic visionary that he projects this optimistic scenario of an industry which has adopted a caring/serving philosophy.
When the business manager who is fully committed to this ethic is asked, “What are you in business for?” the answer may be: “I am in the business of growing people- people who are stronger, healthier, more autonomous, more selfreliant, more competent. Incidentally, we also make and sell at a profit things that people want to buy so we can pay for all this. We play that game hard and well and we are successful by the usual standards, but that is really incidental. I recall a time when there was a complaint about manipulation. We don’t hear it anymore. We manage the business about the same way we always did. We simply changed our aim.”
The obvious roadblock to such an institutional transformation, however, is the dominance of a profit-making, people-using ethic. Even colleges and churches, Greenlleaf is aware, follow policies, programs, and practices-despite official denials- that treat people as means to an institutional end Thus a new ethic will become operative only as there are leaders who dedicate themselves and their institutions to caring servanthood. For instance, the trustees of a university, foundation, or seminary “can add the precious element of caring-a collegial group that is within the institution but that stands apart from the operation and cares. ” In his opinion, consequently, “the most important qualification for trustees should be that they care for the institution, which means that they care for all of the people the institution touches, and that they are determined to make their caring count.”
Greenleaf, not in the role of a theologian but rather that of a sociologist, speaks directly to our churches.
We need a religion, and a church to husband its service, to heal the pervasive alienation and become a major building force in a new society that is more just and more loving, and that provides greater creative opportunities for its people.
In order to do this, two things, he holds, are essential.
The first task of the growing edge church is to learn what neither Luther nor Fox knew: how to build a society of equals in which there is a strong lay leadership and a trustee board with a chairman functioning as primus inter pares, and with the pastor functioning as a primus inter pares for the many who do the work of the church. [The second task, as Greenleaf sees it,] is to make of the church a powerful force to build leadership strength in those persons who have the opportunity to lead in other institutions and give them confident support.
Greenleaf speaks directly, as well, to our seminaries, viewing them as value-clarifying institutions which ought “to harbour and nurture prophetic voices that give vision and hope.’ They ought to provide he remarks further, “shelter and encouragement to the originator.”
III
How does an evangelical react to the insights and convictions of this Quaker revolutionary whose pivotal concept is that of servant leadership? One reaction is enthusiastic endorsement. Greenleaf is echoing New Testament truths, well-known among evangelicals though not necessarily widely practiced. The tremendous kenosis passage, Philippians 2:5-10, affirms that our Saviour in becoming man, “took the form of a servant.” Again, in John 13 Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, dramatizing his insistence that humble service is to be the hallmark of his followers. Once more, in Matthew 20:26, he lays down the principle which is to govern life in his kingdom: “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.” In addition, the advice which Greenleaf offers to churches is in astonishingly close alignment to Pauline ecclesiology in Ephesians 4 and other contexts.
In effect, therefore, Greenleaf is urging all of us to translate New Testament principles of servant leadership from theological shibboleth into operational strategy. And if his urgent counsel were heeded in our evangelical seminaries, colleges, and churches, to say nothing of businesses where committed Christians hold positions of responsibility, a social revolution might be bloodlessly brought about.
A second reaction is that of surprise. Greenleaf never once alludes to the New Testament teaching which he restates in non-biblical terms. Almost incidentally he does refer to Jesus now and then, yet he definitely declares that the primary source of his concept was Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East. Greenleaf, a lover of poetry, and especially Robert Frost’s, speaks knowledgeably about a broad range of theology, literature, philosophy, and psychology. How remarkably strange, then, that he ‘fails to trace the root of his key-idea back beyond Hesse to Jesus!
A third reaction to this stimulating book is advocacy. One wishes he could compel its reading by Christians and non-Christians alike. If industrialists, politicians, educators, pastors, and trustees of every description could be persuaded or coerced to ponder and practice Servant Leadership, what might happen? Well, conceivably Time in another five years would be reporting the emergence of a new breed of leaders who have begun to exert a.transforming influence on national and global affairs.
Strategy for Leadership
by Ted W. Engstrom and
Edward R. Dayton
Word Books, $8.95
Reviewed by Robert W.
Nienhuis
It makes no difference if you pastor a church of 3,000 or 100, if you are a board chairman or committee member; you should read Strategy for Leadership. It’s ably written by experts Engstrom and Dayton (with over ten books and the popular “Managing Your Time” seminar to their credit), and its insights will alleviate some frustrations and help you start accomplishing some goals.
People often say that the local church should be run like a business. It sounds logical-until one realizes the church is not just another business. It is a sophisticated and difficult organization to manage, simply because it must be both goal-oriented and fellowship-oriented. It must care for its members while using them to accomplish its task.
In Part One the authors discuss this dilemma, laying a foundation for a solution. After exploring the distinctives of the “Christian organization” and defining the life cycle of an organization (purpose-goals-planning- action – correction – evaluation), certain terms and concepts are explored. What is a purpose? A goal? How do they differ? How do I plan? What about long-range planning? How do I handle the inevitable problems? The authors lay their foundation carefully and thoroughly; you don’t need a background in management to understand their language or their illustrations from real-life situations.
The best value of the book is contained in Part Two, especially chapter 12, because there the authors tell us how to put these concepts to work, how to discover where our organization is now, and how to introduce new management concepts.
To make the organizational cycle work for your group, your present situation must be analyzed: how do the members of the organization see themselves and the future? Then, recognizing God’s involvement in your organization, gather input and ideas about the future which can then be categorized according to your group’s purpose.
By asking your boards and committees to state five goals for the coming year, you can get a compact picture of your group’s purposes as compared to its goals.
Hold a planning retreat to 1) prioritize your goals; 2) make plans to meet these goals; and 3) decide where the responsibilities lie for each goal.
Planning and scheduling must be reviewed for conflicts and overlap. Check that required resources (money, facilities, and especially people) are available for these plans. And, of course, it’s most important that your organization stays on the track to the goals it has set.
To do all of the above is an awesome and frightening task, to be sure. But do not despair; Part Three provides a host of practical helps for group planning techniques, planning tools, and effective meetings. The final chapter even includes details on preparing and leading a planning conference. An annotated listing of books is at the end of each chapter with a helpful bibliography concluding the book.
I found the book to be practical,
 thorough, readable, and well worth $8.95. But don’t just buy this book; apply it in your leadership strategy.
What Color Is ‘
Your Parachute? v
by Richard Nelson Bolles
Ten Speed Press, 1979
Annual, $5.95 pb
Reviewed by Harold L.
Myra
We had to be impressed when we first heard Parachute recommended by Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker, and Business Week, no less.
So, we picked up a copy, ready to fall in line with everybody else and give it a glowing review. But then we leafed through it-a creatively packaged volume on how to find the job you really want. We began to ask, “Is this really what we want to recommend to pastors and church staff members? It may just stimulate them to parachute out!”
We agreed not to review the book. But as a few days went by, thoughts started germinating. Questions arose. Is it fair to purposely box pastors into a career path with no other options? Should pastors have parachutes when finding themselves in plunging airplanes? Is there just one legitimate color for those parachutes: another pastorate? Are we afraid to let them have options?
Although we applaud commitment to ministry and hope to promote its effectiveness in this journal, we want to go on record that boxing anyone in doesn’t serve God or the minister. The more options a person has, the more secure he or she can be in the exercise of ministry and the more certain he or she can be of following God’s voice, not simply circumstances.
Too often a pastor or staff member is looked upon as “falling” if he or she makes a career shift, and this effectively blocks consideration of a change even at a point of career crisis.
We try to practice what we preach. Here at Christianity Today we have some fine people, and we would be very sorry to see them leave. But we are not sorry to see them get good offers for other jobs. We are happy for them, and if one decides to leave, it’s probably a good growth decision. When a person decides to stay, he’s really decided to stay, and we have renewed commitment. For instance, a few months ago one of our key men was offered a vice president’s spot at the Saturday Evening Post with a considerable increase in salary and a lot more economic potential. We thought he was leaving. We agreed it was an unusually good opportunity. But he and his wife prayed about it a great deal and for various reasons decided to stay with Christianity Today. We’re delighted. He’s happy (his first “new” task was launching the circulation of LEADERSHIP). And he’s not wondering, “Wow, I wonder what’s out there that I’m missing!”
Back to Parachute. It’s a book for job hunters. It’s a fun book, well laid out, issued annually, and updated. And it’s a valuable reference. It walks you through the job hunting process and even gives you specific tips on finding jobs in churches and church-related ministries (a list of counseling centers on pp. 226,7 may be of special interest; most are coordinated by the Career Development Council, Room 760, 475 Riverside Drive, NY, NY 10027).
Although in the ministry you may not get fired in the same way as a corporation employee, there are many ways you can be shoved out. The chapter “Rejection Shock” gives practical advice on how to recover and begin again. In Parachute you’ll find an extensive inventory, which not only helps you pinpoint your marketable skills, but categorizes abilities in a helpful manner. It also stimulates and encourages you by outlining so many possibilities! The book helps you ascertain what you enjoy doing, which is obviously a major factor in job satisfaction. Step by step it takes you through the pertinent data in a manner you can implement. (In a small section that tries to convince us God is not against our enjoying work, we gagged at a misrepresentation of “Puritans.” Just spit out this small husk and keep chewing.)
We suggest you have Parachute on your shelves or, perhaps more wisely, on your public library list for when you need it. It’s okay to look at the grass on the other side: close up, it may not be as green. If it is, maybe it’s your kind of fodder.
Frankly, we trust God to speak to you. His is the voice that counts anyway, not the voice of circumstances and the opinions of others.
They Cry, Too!
by Lucille Lavender
Tyndale House Publications,
$3.95 pb
Reviewed by Sandy
Majorowicz
“In the minds of many, the man sent by God, up there in the pulpit, is sort of unlike those in the pews. He really is a bit strange and different. There is an unawareness that he is a person, and has the same feelings and needs as everyone else” (p. 33).
 This unawareness is what They Cry, Too! is all about. It is a book that grew out of a lifetime of concern and compassion for pastors: author Lucille Lavender adored her childhood pastor; as an adult, she traveled for ten years in an itinerant music ministry, allowing her to get to know hundreds of pastors and laymen well.
This book is a result of those years of observations and experiences. It is also the compilation of data from books, articles, interviews, and surveys that took more than two years to research and a year to write.
Why is such a book needed? For one thing, the average time a pastor spends in a church is three to five years-not long enough to reach maximum effectiveness. It takes years to get to know a congregation and community.
Could it be that a cause of the constant movement and the gap between laity and clergy is due in large measure to a lack of concern and good old-fashioned etiquette on the part of the laity? Lavender thinks it is.
“Ministers [supposedly] have anatomical characteristics that others don’t have. They are built not to wear out as easily as normal creatures. They are more resistant to sleep and relaxation, so they can work a sixteen-hour-a-day, seven-day week. And, if they are awakened in the middle of the night by the telephone and they can’t get back to sleep, they work on Sunday’s sermon.
“There is something unusual about their flesh, too. Their skin is extra thick and tough, so they can be roasted for dinner with a minimum of discomfort. …
“Under this thick skin is a special cushion of insulation that keeps them immune to feelings other earth people have–like never getting angry, despondent, disgusted, or discouraged” (p. i, ii).
How many lay persons have been miffed when the pastor wasn’t properly attentive? From one chance encounter with her pastor, a young woman pronounced him “unfriendly.” What happened? At 6:00 a.m., the pastor received a call from the emergency ward of a hospital; a parishioner had been killed. When the pastor returned from the hospital, he barely had time to collect his notes for a previously scheduled memorial service; after speaking, he came back to the office-without lunch-to find an urgent message from the finance chairman asking which bills to pay this month. A couple awaited their appointment for premarital counseling, and so the day went. In the midst of these crises, this lady came in. Is it any wonder the pastor was preoccupied? Yet lay persons expect the pastor to be the epitome of charm, love, and grace-no matter what the day is like.
Or what about the myth concerning friendship? While the pastor is supposed to be a friend to everyone, how many lay persons realize that he needs friends, too? A pastor needs someone who will let him take off his superman mantle and who will avoid the “look-what-our-pastor-did (didn’t-do)-now” treatment.
Chapter after chapter Lavender skillfully smashes these stereotypes. Gently she admonishes the laity to change its ways. Although she gives specific advice for the various stereotypes, a basic theme runs through the book: learn what God’s expectations and requirements for a pastor really are. More important, realize that while Christians have different functions within the Body, none are exempt from service. God requires the same commitment and the same behavior of all Christians. Lavender doesn’t leave her solutions there, though. Lovingly but firmly, she holds the laity accountable for many of the problems of the pastorate. How scriptural are their expectations? How many expect the pastor to do all the work in the church, rather than fulfilling their responsibilities? Even the best of laymen will show new concern as Lavender lays bare these commonly held attitudes.
Survival Tactics in the Parish
by Lyle E. Schaller
Abingdon Press, $4.95 pb
Reviewed by Edward R. Dayton
“The institutional skill the churches have developed to the highest level of competence is the ability to keep secrets.”
With this provocative opening, Lyle Schaller moves on in his usually competent way to explain not only why this is so, but what we can do about it.
He aims the book primarily at the ordained pastor, but it is also a must fox every church board member.
The general subject is change and how to handle it. Seeing a pastorate reduced to a book with chapters helps both pastor and laity “place” their situation and appreciate the growth and change of the pastor/laity relationship .
The book is particularly useful in understanding the dynamics of beginning a new pastorate; for avoiding some of the difficulties by analyzing the previous pastor in terms of age, leadership style, and the events surrounding his or her departure. Schaller writes three strong chapters on this.
A case study of the pastorate of Don Johnson at St. John’s Church gives us many insights into the need for rewards within the congregation, the need for retraining the congregation to a new leadership style when a new pastor arrives, and the importance of the calling ministry and how to measure it. The book shows how to evaluate the goal-setting process and illustrates the usefulness of a pastoral relations committee.
A congregation needs to be understood as a highly dynamic social organism that is difficult to understand and difficult to manage. The volunteer nature of the local church, its wide span of ages, the infinite varieties of potential ministry, the individual personalities, the background and history of the church-all can interact to produce confusion and distrust. Schaller asks us to avoid the value question of if it should be thus, and to focus on the realities which are there. His illustrations are drawn from experiences with thousands of churches.
Every pastor will be helped by this book. The one, two, three style makes the points easy to follow and remember. Schaller’s use of the case study and the dialogue keeps some difficult subjects from going over our heads.
There are many models of the local church, and a great deal has been written about what ought to be. But eventually what ought to be has to confront what is. Lyle Schaller understands the “isness” of American churches as do few analysts. This book, along with his earlier The Change Agent and The Pastor and the People, needs to be well-thumbed, marked up, and discussed by pastors and church boards alike.
Copyright © 1980 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
