Why Practicing Servant Leadership Is Such A Huge Challenge In Jamaica

Practicing servant leadership is a massive challenge to the Christian community globally. By using examples in your cultural context why would you say is it such a huge challenge and what are the obstacles in the way to live or practice servant leadership in your community?

During the last quarter of 2008, I was approached by the director of spiritual affairs at the Jamaica Theological Seminary with a question that caused me to reflect deeply for many days. The resulting reflection troubled me immensely. The theme chosen for Seminary for the academic year 2008 – 2009 was “Servant Leadership: The way up is down.” I was asked by him to help him identify local pastors who embodied servant leadership to be invited to speak at the chapel sessions throughout the year. Immediately I realized that I had been asked a very difficult question because by all stretches of the imagination I was hard pressed to identify such leaders. This led me to seriously ponder why is it that there are so few servant leaders in Jamaica. Having reflected I have identified the immensity of the challenge to be a servant leader in Jamaica and some of the obstacles that one must overcome there to be an incarnational leader like Jesus Christ. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, therefore I believe that these discoveries can go a long way in helping me to learn to be a servant leader, and to raise up other servant leaders for the transformation of my country and the region.

The first challenge that immediately comes to mind is the inherent sinful nature. David informs us in Ps. 51: 5 that we are sinful at birth and sinful from the moment of conception. We begin life hard wired with sin. This factors into the issue of servant leadership firstly at the level of pride. Pride was at the root of Satan’s rebellion, and pride is at the root of most of our sins. Servant leadership flies in the face of pride, it is an affront to pride. Professor John. D. Volmink describes it as a paradox, because the words servant and leadership are etymologically seen as opposites. He defines it as “a form of leading where the leader is a servant first – then a leader… a group of people mutually submitting to each other for the purpose of achieving something they could not achieve alone.” Pride is perhaps the biggest barrier to mutual submission, it is the biggest barrier to one deciding to work with others for the common good.” I am not sure if this is still the case but as recently as the year 2000 Jamaica held the record in the Guiness Book of world Records for the country with the most churches per square mile per capita. In one humorous case two pastors from the Church of God in Christ couldn’t agree so one went and started a new church less than a hundred away and named it The Church of God (Not in Christ). The details of the church split indicated much evidence of the sin of pride in these men. A similar tale is at the heart of the formation of many of the churches across the island. The destruction of this pride is the only way forward. According the Cassie Casterns “The Lord Jesus cannot live in us fully and reveal Himself through us until the proud self within us is broken. This simply means that the hard, unyielding self, which justifies itself, wants its own way, stands up for its rights, and seeks its own glory, at last bows its head to God’s will, admits that it is wrong, gives up its own way to Jesus….It is dying to self and self-attitudes.

Dan Reiland, a colleague of Dr. John Maxwell has said, “Giving yourself away to others is at the epicenter of servant leadership.” I concur with that statement. Inherent in this understanding of servant leadership is another challenge that is so evident in Jamaica. Humans are by nature selfish, and given the fact that the dominant worldview is secularism, much of what is transferred culturally is that one needs to look out for himself first. Children are told ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ ‘look after yourself because nobody will do it for you.’ This kind of thinking feeds into a kind of consumer society, and surreptitiously infects the way ministry leaders operate. Power, members, resources are viewed in a very parochial manner and few realize that the very selfishness against which they preach, is so much characteristic of their own approach to ministry. In order for our leaders to escape this trap, it would be necessary to engage them at the level of conversation, so as to expose the mental models at work, and lay on the table the Biblical worldview so as to create an atmosphere where what dominates is God’s intention for His leaders and not the dictates of culture.

It seems quite fashionable to name ministries after oneself and there may not be anything

inherently wrong with that, but I have observed in Jamaica where the practice creates a reenactment of the situational context for the book of 1 Corinthians where Paul had to address sectarianism: “I am of Paul, I am of Appollos etc” In his response to this challenge he begins chapter 4 with the words “ Think of us as servants of Christ who have been given the work of explaining God's mysterious ways.” Paul enjoins the bickering saints to view them as servant. Not as captains of the ship but as merely galley slaves, rowing at the lowest level of the ship’s deck, slaves doing the most menial tasks. Paul was particularly fond of the imagery of slaves. In reflecting upon this I believe that there seems to be an extent to which the colonial past of the Caribbean make us predisposed to find the very idea of slavery revolting (and rightly so) but in an unconscious way it seems to make Christian leaders view their leadership from the standpoint of power, and mastery, not in any way resembling that of service and obscurity. The way out of this is for us to redeem the concept of slavery that Paul utilizes, to understand that having been bound to sin, now that we are set free from sin we make a choice to remain a bondservant of Christ. We allow ourselves as it were to have our earlobes pierced to show that we belong to Christ. We therefore serve Christ, and by extention His people with the same kind of manner that the slave does. The slave has no right, the slave does not determine his hours of work etc.

The final challenge and obstacle that I will cite from my context is the issue of the father wound. Over 50% of households in Jamaica are female headed. The Registrar General’s department went on a massive campaign to provide a waiver on registration fees to encourage fathers’ names to be registered on the children’s birth certificates. The absence of fathers in the lives of their children creates among many other things a thirst for power. Many of the Christian leaders of today grew up in such contexts and their rise to power in the church creates the perfect filler for the power vacuum that they never had filled by the affirmation of a father in their lives. As such few ever make it past or even desire to make it past the positional-power driven model of leadership. There is no desire to mentor because of their insecurity, other ministers are viewed as threats rather than colleagues, and some have even abused their power in some very revolting ways. When this is coupled with a church culture that is filled with many illiterate adults and persons who have never been encouraged to think critically there are churches where the pastors have become ‘demigod’ Power has been described by some as powerful intoxicant, and when falls into the hands of persons who have psychological baggage it becomes exponentially toxic. The task of the one who models servant leadership is to help to address this root cause of the power thirst in our nation, and also to help persons understand that Jesus’ approach was the relational one, and that the entire culture needs to be transformed, so that the followers will be so discipled so as to be able to identify the early warning signs of a leader who is power drunk and save him/her from themselves.

There are many other challenges that make servant leadership so difficult to practice. Nevertheless there is comfort in the fact that the Word of God promotes no other model, and as such the ALICT model of learning to be community holds out much hope for the Body of Christ.

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