Becoming Servant Leaders:

Hearing the Call
By Parrish W. Jones, Ph D.
©All Rights Reserved. 2005.

 

1 Corinthians 12:1-13
Matthew 4:18-22

 

Last week I introduced the notion of being Servant Leaders. In concluding that sermon, I spoke of a woman in my church in Pennsylvania who found her call in God’s realm as caring for the nursery of the church. In this way she became a servant leader within the life of the church without doing anything flashy. She cared for children as others did the flashy stuff we usually connect with leadership.

Being Servant Leaders is first about being servants as we follow Jesus. Being leaders is not about taking any particular set of responsibilities, it is about serving Christ in such a way as it leads others to him. That was Mrs. DeLisa’s sole contribution and should be all that matters to us. Therefore, Servant Leadership is about leading others to Christ through our pursuing God’s peculiar call to us.

Now in the Reformed Tradition, the notion of call or vocation has had two components. The first component is the general call of all of us to be disciples of Jesus. Such is the call that we discover in the Gospel lesson. We believe that the call of God to be disciples is general and goes out to each and every human. We know that not all humans respond equally to that call. There are many reasons why persons reject Jesus which demand both our consideration and in some cases some repentance and reforming. We cannot get into that today.

There is though this call to be a disciple, to be faithful to Jesus and to follow him. In many respects, this call is the same for all of us. However, it differs in the way we experience it and in the way we respond to it. The differences have to do with our individual characters. The response required of Peter was different from the response required of Levi or of Zaccheus. Peter had to surrender pride and arrogance, belligerence and zealotry while Zaccheus had to surrender wealth, greed, prestige, position and power. From the point of view of Jesus, it was not so much surrendering as liberation. Jesus came to liberate us from those things that enslave us.

So all of us are called and all of us have things from which we need to be liberated. Some of us have been liberated from one thing only to discover that we needed to be liberated from something else. So it was in the Bible. We could go through the catalog of biblical characters who were called by God and discover a laundry list of things that they needed to be liberated from that were dragging them down spiritually and endangering their relationship with God. That relationship was not endangered because God had given up on them but because they were not responding to the liberating power of God in their lives. Consider Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samson, Ruth, Esther, the prophets, David, and so on. Therefore, call to discipleship is a call to be set free from dominating forces in our lives, so we may follow Jesus and be free to love as Jesus loved.

The second part of the call is our specific call as a Christian. In our lesson from 1 Corinthians, we hear about that call. It is closer to what we call vocation, but we are mistaken if we limit vocation so that it does not include the general call to be disciples. When we turn to the idea of our individual gifts, we discover an essential element of being Servant Leaders. That element is committing our special, peculiar gifts to the ministry of the church in such a way that we lead others to Jesus.

This plays out in our lives at work, play, home, and community. If you were asked, “What drives your life?” what would you answer?” “My work!” “My Children!” “My Parents!” “My school work!” or some activity. If any of those were your answer, it is not a good one. To be driven by any of these indicates you have lost your spiritual focus. If that is so for me, and sometimes it is, I am no good to my family, my community, nor to my employer.

What keeps our focus is to recall to what we are called, because when I am faithful to my call, others see Jesus in me.

You see, evangelism is not just about telling. Some of us are called to evangelism, all of us are called to discipleship. However, I can pursue my peculiar call in such a way that others see Jesus in and through me. That call may be keeping the church buildings clean or it may be becoming a commissioned lay preacher, it may be teaching children’s Sunday School or tending the finances of the church, it may be any of a thousand things including leaving your present employment to start a new ministry that meets a need such as low income housing, homelessness, migrant workers, single parenting, addiction rehabilitation. Whatever it is, it is not necessarily high profile. It is not what we do, but the intent with which we do it and the way in which we do it.

The point of 1 Corinthians is that the church cannot be the church without the variety of gifts that are dedicated to the ministry of the church. None is to be lifted above another for all are given by the Spirit.

The challenge we face is to help you find your call and then to draw it out in a meaningful way for the building up of the body of Christ. Whatever your call, I believe that your call is an essential aspect of your spiritual relationship. If you feel somehow disconnected from God, perhaps you need to reflect on and pray about your call. What is God calling you to do in the ministry of the church? Is your life moving in the direction of that call or not? What in your life is standing in the way of pursuing your call? Without pursuing the call of God in your life, you separate yourself from God’s gift to you and thus from God.

Now we can pursue our call in a manner that tears down instead of builds up. So it is not just pursuing what God has called us, but the manner in which we pursue our call. In Galatians 5:16-26, Paul provides a couple of lists. One list leads us to broken relationships, despair, hopelessness, and spiritual poverty. The other list leads to wholesome, intimate relationships that provide hope and meaning and a quality life of spiritual abundance. The first list blocks out call and our pursuit of it and the second list feeds us and nurtures us and others around us so we can freely pursue our call.

Once we get beyond looking for or thinking that good Christians are spectacular, we can actually get down to work. God’s call to you usually leads you to deal with the things in your life where you need God’s liberating power. When Jesus told Peter to feed his sheep, Jesus challenged Peter as he lifted him up. Peter did not want to feed sheep, he wanted to own the sheep and boss the feeders of the sheep. Peter excelled when he surrendered wanting to be spectacular, zealous, ambitious.

The point of call is to call us out of our addictions into faithfulness and service to God. Now this may be a new way of talking about sin for you. However, in our culture the word addiction is clearer than the word sin. Sin has generally meant those things in our lives that hinder relationship with God and with others. We are pretty good at keeping the Ten Commandments, so we think we are good and righteous.

Addictions are manifold. Besides drugs, alcohol and sex—the easy ones we like to point out because we do not have them—there are the addictions to power, prestige, success, ambition, being spectacular, money, things, self-indulgence, and the like. Just recently, I became aware of a new one: addiction to emotions. I learned about it from the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” that Bill Kapes loaned me. When I started thinking about that, I was not happy. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were some emotions I expressed a lot that were destructive of my relationships. That’s sin. Yet, I apparently like these emotions or what they do to me.

God’s call leads to liberation from all addictions and into closer relationships with God, family, and community. I cannot tell you what your call in the realm of God is. I can only council you and guide you. We can also begin a process to help guide you through this process in small groups. Yet, God is calling you into discipleship and into servant leadership so that you become more intimate with God and give witness to your faith.