The Tension of Receiving Praise.

Leadership is an amazing thing.

I am fascinated by it, and always have been. I read leadership books and blogs for fun, I think leadership is vitally important (and inevitable-it will happen like it or not!), and I believe that good leadership is one of the most fundamentally important things in our culture.

Throughout the past couple of years I have had the incredible opportunity to be involved in some very cool leadership capacities. Through these experiences I have come to realize that no matter what area of leadership you are involved with there is always an awkward tension present. This tension is surrounding the object of affection.

A fundamental and elementary definition of a leader is that you have people following you. So, it goes without saying that as a leader your followers will look to you for their guidance, direction, help, solutions to problems and a whole plethora of other things… if your leadership is in a ministry capacity your followers will look to you for spiritual direction, for counseling, and far too often rely on you to be the holder of that spoon which feeds them their spiritual food.

Now don’t misunderstand what I am saying. I think a leader should do all of those aforementioned things. I think that is a beautiful picture of leadership (especially when it is done well!). Where things go awry is when the ego becomes engaged.

Leadership in a ministry setting is tricky because when something goes crazy in an individual’s life they run to you (the spiritual advisor/pastor/friend) for the solution. And, if you take leadership seriously you will quickly understand that YOU don’t have any solutions. So what do you do? (Or perhaps I ought to say… what SHOULD you do?) …

…You point them to Jesus for the solution.

Jesus contains all authority. So if an individual truly listens to your advice and runs to Jesus for help, they will find all they were searching for and far more than they were anticipating. When their predicament is fixed, they naturally, humanly think that you helped them since you were the one that gave the advice. The ‘follower’ thinks YOU are amazing because they think YOU helped them. When the reality is that JESUS was and is and will always be the helper. You did nothing; don’t be arrogant enough to believe you did it! Our job is to do nothing more than point them to THE ONE. Get it?

They may tell their friends that YOU did a good job in helping their spiritual life… they may even bring their friends to you for help. It is fantastic that they bring their friends to you, so long as you bring their friend to Jesus, because He is the only one that will help them.

Your victory was not (is not) in helping them, but in your ability to point them to Jesus.

Sometimes, too often, people miss that. I see far too often people thanking Pastors alone for their incredible message, or only the worship leader/band for the incredible worship (which is very kind of them, and I think pastors should be thanked for the hard work they poured into the message/worship/etc)… But, hear this… Far more than anything else, IT IS NOT ABOUT THE INDIVIDUAL UP FRONT! It is about the sender of that individual.

We are not called to work in such a way that brings the attention or praise to ourselves. In everything that we do we are to bring the praise to God. People thank the leader, which is kind of them (and I think appropriate) but at the end of the day we ALL need to thank God for His redemptive work through Jesus. That is what it is all about.

We are not called to receive the praise, we are called to bring the praise to God, there’s tension when that doesn’t happen.

Blessings

-kAt