Of Purpose and People
OF Purpose and People
“When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and crushes them.” – Alan Redpath
In the last 75 years, we have experienced a transformation in culture. Community has evolved from an interdependence of responsibility, accountability, and mutual enrichment through relationships, to an interconnected association of high-firing individuals who rally around a purpose, a goal, or an ideology. Likewise, leadership has been transformed from a public trust, an empowering of people, and a strategic visioncaster to a personal mission, an impact of influence, and an autonomous empowerment of self toward success. Bonhoeffer’s timely words in Life, Together seem to ring out in this moment:
“Satan’s desire is to turn me in on myself to the extent that I become a destructive force in community.”
The centering of all things around the self has transformed the way we live, build relationships, and lead others. It has overwhelmed collaborative and cooperative efforts at unity, reframing them through a lens of personal purpose. This has particularly affected the ways communal efforts are participated in and led. Where purpose aligns, we find a tribe and an echo chamber. When someone steps outside the purpose, we label them as opposition to the group or goal. Taking cues from “top-down” leadership methodologies, the center-on-self communities have made for a number of people who approach their community through my-way-or-the-highway metrics or by agreement and acceptance equaling alignment, and conflict or disagreement being grounds to separate from community, friendships, or even family.
One of the byproducts of postmodernism was a healthy distrust or outright dismissal of authority structures. Two of the greatest targets for that were God and the reality of an objective truth that supersedes personal truth or subjective reality. While community has been under siege from billions of destructive forces through self-centric perspectives, the recommended approach to authority has become deconstruction of what is and reconstruction through relativism. That means that community is more about the individual as the main character, along with a supporting cast of characters, and leadership becomes an assertion-oriented discipline, where the surge of influence asserts its culturally relevant message, brings awareness to its perspectives, and builds a community of contributors to support the ideology of its endeavor. That makes for a hard contrast from the wisdom of Simon Sinek, in his book Leaders Eat Last:
“Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.”
The bottom line is that for community to flourish, it needs collaboration, accountability, and responsibility, as well as leaders that shed the high bar of dynamic influence for trustworthiness, transparency, and empowerment. Community is about people thriving together, and leadership is about the people being led. It’s a team sport that can only make the global impact it boasts about if it stops boasting about it and actually walks the walk together.
Losing Utopia
The amount of ideology infused into our daily experience has exploded in the last two decades. We often hear messages about the influence and impact of a particular innovator, the future state revolution that technology will bring, and the cultural progress that is realized will provide a basis for a new level of human happiness and flourishing. For many, these high-minded conversations stir hearts and minds, but do very little to impact reality. The world at large is not one of power, influence, or prestige. The majority of the world’s 8 billion inhabitants live day to day rather than in a future yet to be realized. This is problematic for leadership that has made itself about the leader rather than the ones being led, and, at the core of the issue, makes for a people who may have never experienced real community that empowers and edifies while remaining accountable and responsible.
There is an interesting microcosm of leadership in Western Culture that leads for leadership’s sake. It stands in the public square to assert influence and affirm its own relevance. The past couple of decades have made leadership the pervasive calling of anyone who steps forward and puts forth an illusion about leading a community of people as the natural outflowing of following passions or stepping into a calling. The truth is that leadership is hard. Building community is not as easy as 1-2-3. If we take a Biblical perspective about the convergence of these two, we see Alan Redpath’s message of brokenness.
The message in the West has been that leadership is for anyone who will put their hand on the wheel. Assert your ability, make known your perspective, demonstrate your influence, or cultivate a following, and you “realize” the authority that stamps you as a leader. In the 21st century, we have an abundance of this type of “leader,” yet people do not seem to be achieving the global impact they seek. We have the highest rates of mental health issues, suicide, animosity between social groups, class warfare, political partisanship, and a general level of self-centric values that are turning communities in on themselves. We have decision-makers and innovators who lead without empathy. We have influencers and thought leaders whose impact zone is the spread of their ideas. We have gurus and disruptors who ignite sweeping change for others with little impact on themselves (other than lining their own pockets). We also have visionaries and evangelists who foretell a future of the possible, without a roadmap to safely take people there.
The reality of Redpath’s wake-up call about leadership is that if you want to be prepared to actually be a leader, it takes discipline, transformation, responsibility, accountability, transparency, and the desire to put the people you are leading ahead of personal ambition or accolades. How many high-powered CEOs want financial ruin so that they can learn to responsibly handle billions of dollars? How many political leaders want to go through accusations of scandal to understand how to lead with integrity? How many pastors want to experience worldly indignation in sharing the Gospel, so that they learn to preach Christ crucified alone? How many parents want to suffer the frustration of a headstrong child, so they can know the patience, longsuffering, and faithfulness that helps their child grow beyond an unyielding spirit? In a world seeking to do impossible things, it’s not utopia the future will bring; it is a level of being broken, crushed to the point that we get out of our own purposes, ambitions, and perspectives and can see reality for what it truly is.
The future state, in fact, can only be realized through the unity of reality and truth. The bottom line for those who are seeking utopia is that it doesn’t exist. Sir Thomas More coined the phrase out of ancient Greek, intending a combination of words insinuating that perfection does not exist. You can’t live under future state ideas at the cost of the present. Community has to be something you experience and cultivate, not what you are building to facilitate. Leadership isn’t a special designation for the anointed; it is a purposed position designed to empty itself for the sake of those they lead. We need to let go of utopian illusion and start understanding what the call for community and leadership really is: an invitation to die to self.
More than a calling
When we look to the Bible for wisdom, we can see that, at the coronation of King David (1 Chronicles 11), he was charged with being a shepherd over the people. A king is seen very differently today. As David was a shepherd of sheep before people, he understood that it involved protection, safety, provision, care, knowing them, and being known by them. David knew that care for his flock is what made him a shepherd. And God did not spare him the lessons that he would need to be faithful later. He faced lions, giants, wrongful persecution, melancholy, anxiousness, and even the dismissal from relevance. He was broken so that later, he could do impossible things for the Almighty.
Likewise, when we look at the Good Shepherd, in Christ, we do not see Him gathering savvy, influence-wielding disciples who maximized programmatic success, built cathedrals of access, or leveraged multiplication disciplines in their ministry. Jesus took a handful of teenage boys and young men, spending three years with them, building them up, deepening their relationship with Him, and apprenticing them to His wisdom. As we can read in the book, it was not an unbroken spiral upward to success. His leadership started with breaking down their ideas about what it meant to lead others, what community really looked like, and ultimately showing them that His crushing, broken experience was actually the hope for all humanity to experience community with God and be empowered by His Spirit.
In this, He gave them the greatest commission of His time with them. Go out into the world and show people that the God who allowed Himself to be crushed for their sake calls them to deny themselves, follow Him, and disciple others into that same reality. Reconciled community in Christ is the template for our Earthly communities that we build. Sacrificial and servant leadership is the master plan for seeking to save those who are lost, and growing them into the same type of leaders.
The oddity of the speed and pace at which we demand results today is that, for one leader to be apprenticed like a disciple, in one- to two-hour increments a week with a leadership coach, it would take someone over 20 years to get the time in that the disciples got with Jesus. It takes time to become a leader, not assertion, influence, or (especially) overnight success. In a viral world, that can be tough. In a space where we rely on AI for instant solutions, that can sound counterintuitive.
When the call is to lead where you are (a.k.a. you be you/the world needs what and who you are), we lose the investment of time, wisdom, growth, and reality that makes for good leaders, wise decisions, and steady paths forward, keeping a healthy community intact. It goes beyond intentionality, or a simple bootcamp for leaders. To see Jesus’ example in this, we see Him spending years, day in and day out, cultivating value, accountability, responsibility, faithfulness, wisdom, and truth before He sent people out in His name. He wasn’t building a turnkey discipleship method, but the investment in these men prior to leading was immense.
So what does it mean to be intentional in leadership, as well as in cultivating community? The bottom line is that it takes time, training, unity, and perseverance. The instant society model of success does not apply. God is faithful and teaches us to be faithful through circumstance. The crushing for the sake of what seems impossible to man allows us to experience what is possible only in the Almighty. When faced with the question, will we seek our own will, ourselves, our intentions, our purpose, and our plans, or will we deny ourselves for the good of His purpose, and be disciples of the Most High?
When we think about what transformation like this looks like, the role of a disciple shows us an interesting example of both leadership and community. Like an apprentice, they submit themselves to growing in the knowledge and wisdom of the one mentoring them, so that they (when ready) can do the same with others. Their mission is not for self; their leadership is born out of ambition. Their intent was not for a savvy group of Christian achievers who would go on to build their own ministry of impact or legacy. Simon the magician wanted that and was rebuked for it. Paul dismissed a church of Apollos, Peter, even himself, for the sake of a community with Christ at the center. The disciple’s call isn’t to build kingdoms of influence, prestigious cathedrals, and empires of impact, so that disciple-making becomes a scalable discipline. Discipleship is investment in community; one who leads for the sake of those they disciple. The disciple is one who gives up themselves for the good of God’s purpose. It’s more than a calling; it is an impossible transformation empowered by a God that makes all things possible.
In the final assessment, we need to understand that real leadership is about building community. James 1 says that the man who looks in the mirror and forgets what he sees is akin to deceiving himself. The majority of leaders in the 21st century are doing just that. They tell people one thing, while living another way. They ignore the life in the fishbowl (all eyes on them from all sides) that a leader lives in. They worry less about the health of those they lead so that they can accomplish the mission of their purpose. It is not surprising that there has been a growing movement of people hurt by churches, led by personalities who put their own purpose, ambition, and ego in the driver’s seat and tried to take others to a future that fulfilled their own purpose.
That same hurt is in the workplace, the home, our marriages, our friendships, our schools, and our digital experiences. A world of disconnected leaders, autonomously trying to build a following for their own purpose and passion, is bifurcating our lives and tearing apart the community in our culture. It’s Bonhoeffer’s destructive force at play in the 21st century. The challenge we face is to raise up real leaders in a time we really need them. We need to look in the mirror and be accountable. We cannot be content with merely hearing what is good, true, and beautiful, and repost it on social media; we need to know it, be transformed by it, and live it out in our communities every day. We cannot be content to be hearers and not doers.
The parents who raise sturdy children, who think about their words and actions, believe in what is good, true, and right, and find contentment in who they are rather than what they have. The boss who champions their people, gives them credit for the wins, and builds their morale as people rather than data on the KPI. The pastor who seeks the depth and health of their community, rather than leveraging resources to another building project that doesn’t further the Kingdom. The politician who represents their constituents, rather than using their position as a gateway to accomplish their agenda. These are revolutionary acts of leadership and community: A handful of doers in a land of hearers. A small community of selfless servants in a culture of self-empowered influencers. It would seem that very few leaders could be considered shepherds of the people they lead. Even fewer are producing the goodness, truth, and beauty that they think they are.
Ultimately, the world needs good leadership and real community to become what we all need it to be. The best leaders aren’t the most influential, but they are the ones who make personal and significant impacts in the life of someone who can translate that inspiration into action. The most vibrant communities are the ones that empower their people, and disengage from the self-centric destruction that implodes their unity. We need a different kind of revolution in the 21st century: A transformation of our minds, hearts, habits, and souls. If we want to lead, we need to be ready to be broken – to deny ourselves for the sake of another. If we want to experience the impact of community, we need to die to self. That sounds like an impossible task in our day and age. But, fortunately for us, with God all things are possible, and He is in the business of doing impossible things with those who have died to self for the sake of His Kingdom.
