Can Leaders Sit On the Back Row?

In school, I was never elected class president. In fact, I never ran for office. When nominated for something, I hated the uncertainty—going out of the room for the discussion, the voting, and the waiting.

One high school honor came to me by ballot: the citizenship key awarded for leadership.

Gradually, I came to recognize leadership that comes from behind, from the ground up. Such leadership may be voiced (mine was) not in speaking but in writing. As a columnist for my college paper, I had plenty of chances to voice (and shape) opinions. Soon I was well-known on campus, without becoming cheerleader or homecoming queen. Eventually I was listed in "Who's Who Among Students" because I had contributed to campus life.

Today I think leadership is often a matter of sensing—intuitively, not through logic—where the right path is for a given group or community. Leaders analyze a situation. They sense what is lacking. They point to right courses of action in the midst of confusion. In the business world, I remember the rules of engagement: "Don't come into my office with a variety of options until you're willing to recommend what to do." Sometimes leadership consists in walking carefully between dangerous alternatives. Sometimes a leader knows what to flee from, as when Shakespeare's King Lear says: "No, that way madness lies. Let me shun that."

Many gurus are making a killing today with books on leadership and conferences offering magic bullet leadership styles. I am wary of these. Still, I know that leadership is vital to a people and especially to the people of God.

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . ." People like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin took their lives in their hands because they saw a new path unfolding, one that would offer both freedom and responsibility.

In the Bible, I think "leadership" is akin to prophecy. God raised up the prophets for a purpose of his own. He whispered to them, called them, told them what to say. What the prophets had to say was for the sake of a people, a people often wandering off course, panicky and confused. Israel's prophets were not themselves rulers but gained the ruler's attention. Sometimes they were king-makers, not wishing for kingship themselves. Always they were driven by the Spirit. Often, like Moses, they were reluctant and afraid.

But when the Lord called them, they went. Like Winston Churchill, they might have waited a lifetime to function in a certain moment, when their special kind of rhetoric could stand between their people and destruction.

Genuine leaders may sit in the back of the room. They may be, as the British say, "back benchers" until God calls them forward.

Yet, when the time comes, they have what it takes: the fight and the sinew to take stage and say, "This is what I think is right. This is what we should do."

No question, Jesus (that small-town prophet) was often dismissed. Nathanael asks, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" But Jesus is our best example of leadership, a man who came from nowhere to transform the known world. From him we can learn how to whisper and how to shout: "This is the way of salvation."