One of the twelve regular readers of this blog mentioned she liked it when I discuss leadership. I started thinking about this last night as I was refereeing a soccer (football for my international readers) match played by 16-17 year old boys.
Ever watch youth soccer–or other youth sports, for that matter? Look at the coach and look at the team. What I’ve seen countless times is that the team can take on certain personality traits from the coach. Particularly if the traits are negative. If you get a coach that whines and complains constantly, usually you’ll get a team that whines and complains constantly. If you get a coach who is more even-tempered (or knowledgeable), you get at most only one or two kids on the team who need to “act out” as psychologists love to put it these days.
What about other leadership? If the leaders are dysfunctional, don’t you usually see a dysfunctional organization? If the leaders are on a power trip, don’t you see either politics or angst among the people in the organization?
The problem with choosing Jesus as your leader is that he had no fault. He modeled his teaching. Just like Paul kept modeling what a perfect church would look like. But with Jesus, about as close as we get to seeing him acting human was when he cursed the fig tree between Bethany and Jerusalem just before he was killed. That must have been so surprising to his followers that they retold the story enough to get it written in the Gospels.
With Jesus as the leader, we have no excuses. He wasn’t dysfunctional. He didn’t whine and complain. He wasn’t on a power trip.
Now, if we could just be like him.
Faith Venture 
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