America loves Leaders. It loves making them, claiming them, and criticizing them. Our culture has developed an obsession with manufacturing leaders through an impressive array of leadership development programs. Before students graduate high school, colleges demand evidence of leadership experience. The cycle accelerates in college as future graduates attempt to stay ahead of their peers through retreats, organizations, seminars, and courses designed to create leaders. Much of our foreign policy political landscape revolves around America’s vacillating role as leader of the free world. Personally, I think most of these leadership opportunities are a bunch of malarkey. For years now “leadership” has evolved into a cliché in our society, and I have long been wondering how we arrived at this point.
While this idea was fermenting in my mind, I showed up in Gainesville, GA for my World Race Training Camp. Wholly unprepared and unsure of what to expect, I was overwhelmed by the amount of love, courage, compassion, and encouragement that charged our atmosphere for the last two weeks. Christians sure aren’t perfect, but they’ll make a darn good effort to make you feel loved. Each day was full of pleasant (and not so pleasant) surprises!
I ate a cricket. I slept under the stars. I got a brain freeze from bucket-showering in the cold. I worshipped at 2 am. I hiked up Blood Mountain on the Appalachian Trail. Most importantly, I got to finally meet my new family that I’ll be working with for the 11 months that I’ll be gone!
Meet E “Easy” Squad – Squad Wars Champions & Most Chill Squad Ever. These are the men and women who will be my community for the majority of 2018!
Furthermore, I would like to introduce Team “His Pride” – Probable Team Wars Champions & Gospel Enthusiasts.
Anyways… So here I am at this training camp trying to process the information we’re getting at countless sessions and scenarios when that same leadership question pops up into the back of my mind. While daydreaming of this leadership problem during one of the speeches, the Holy Spirit really gripped my heart and asked me “Coleman, do you even know who you follow?” My immediate response was that I follow Jesus, but truthfully I was just citing my adherence to Christian ethics. The question remained unanswered: Who do I follow?
I realized that truthfully I had been trying to navigate my world by leaning on my Self. It sounds crazy, but I really marvel at how often I let my Self make the big decisions. The more I thought, the more I realized that trying to lead yourself through this world could easily lead one into a state of perpetual anxiety and fear that ends in an emotional/personal/social/professional quagmire. What the heck do I know about how to live? I could spend the next 200 years on this planet and still have no idea how to make the right decisions in life. All this training on how to lead other people, and I should have spent more time learning how to follow. Assuming that I am a flawed, broken human being, the more effective I get at leadership, the more effective I get at leading others astray. People live aimlessly because their source of leadership is paradoxically their own confused soul. There’s no time to waste in this arena.
Honestly, most leadership development tools address this topic of followership early on in their curriculum. The Corps of Cadets makes freshmen spend the majority of their time following orders, and few organizations give new recruits immediate authority without first testing their ability to follow. The concept was not unfamiliar to me, but it had never been directed at the scope of my whole life before. There are clear guidelines for leading and following at work, but who really knows what to follow in life?
“Follow your heart” seems to be the mantra of many millennials. But this directly contradicts what Jesus demands of his disciples in Matthew 16:24-25…”Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it but whoever loses their life for me will find it.'”
Growing up in church, I’ve heard this verse often, and usually I associated it with carrying a burden for God. Although following Jesus comes at a price, it’s easy to miss the real message behind what He’s trying to say. Taking up my cross doesn’t mean that I need to suffer a little more to be a good Christian; it means that I need to stop following my Self. Carrying a cross was surely a symbol of pain and suffering, but the end result is actual death. Until our Self is completely removed from that leadership role, we will never be able to put Jesus in its place. I evaded that command by pretending that my burdens were somehow enough, but the burdens were only ever a side-effect of the true task: death to Self.
People often attempt to disguise this ego problem by claiming that money or power or lust are the sinister masters we cannot serve along with Jesus. We just use those terms to divert the attention away from our own brokenness because the root is in our Self. I’m curious as to when any of those sinful constructs became sentient, because that entire train of logic reeks of selfish desires. Again, Self is in control when those things become our master.
Being a Christian is so much more than just living right and being obedient. It means you have a powerful, ever-present guide through this world who knows you better than you can ever know yourself. Once we find that direction, all of our leadership begins to take on real purpose.
My voice is just one more in the choir of opinions surrounding essential leadership principles (which makes me grateful that I am not trying to make a career out of convincing people that I’m right). Really, I would ask you to challenge yourself with these questions. Who or What am I a follower of? What are my guiding ethics? When I reach the frontier of leadership, to whom will I look for advice? At the end of the day, I believe we were never made to bear the mantle of pure leadership. We can only lead as well as we follow, and who we choose to follow has a tremendous impact on how we will wind up leading. Human leadership should be a reflection, not a source.
If you go to sleep at night half panicked about the direction of your life, then that makes two of us. If you have a hard time making huge choices under the weight of indecision, then I can relate. If you are exhausted from the effort required to lead your own life with only your heart at the helm, then we can both be tired of navigating this world alone.
Don’t follow your heart. Follow Jesus.
