The Chance to be a Servant Leader

The Chance to Be a Servant leader
1 Kings 12:1-32

One of my faculty colleagues was asked to become director of the chapel in the seminary, and she loved to relate how she needed to go and talk to the provost of the seminary (vice principal in Brit-speak) about her role, and how his opening words were something like “How can I serve you?” When my rector arranged for the replacing of the notice board outside the church, alongside the names of the ministers he put not words such as “rector” but “servants.” Both are great ideas for leaders to live by. We live in a culture that is excessively preoccupied with the nature of leadership, and one of the clichés that we use to try to safeguard against the toxicity of this preoccupation is to talk in terms of “servant-leadership.” Claiming that we just want to serve people can be another excuse for exercising power over them, but it doesn’t need to be that..