Feed My Sheep

I am more than a month into the internship at the Wesley Foundation, and it is quite the experience! It is often exhausting, radically illuminating, and truly fulfilling. It is showing me what it means to be a Christian leader. I’ve had a faulty understanding of leadership, but during the past year, and especially these several weeks, my understanding is being corrected. I am growing into someone who is leaving behind personal pretenses and learning what is most important to discipling God’s people.

Everyone is told to become a leader, because our culture values independence and the ability to control/influence others. When asked what the most significant characteristics of a leader are, most will say charisma, competence, or some variation thereof. Leaders, we are told, are the best at what they do, and they succeed when they influence large amounts of people. Even in common Christian circles, this is the unspoken understanding of leadership. Christian pastors, Sunday school teachers, and small group leaders try to make themselves one who has exhaustive theological knowledge or faultless actions.

Even after coming to the Wesley, I would slip into skewed assumptions. I would not want to share the temptations I faced, because I feared my small group would trust me less. I would need to wait for the right moment to speak in small group to appear the most intelligent. But in actuality, we aren’t perfect and we don’t need to be! We don’t want to create a persona when we lead others; we don’t need to be some guru with all the answers. What we should do most is love them enough to let them see who we are. As Nouwen wrote in In the Name of Jesus, (which you should totally read), “He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as “professionals” who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved.”

When we admit our faults, we create trust amongst ourselves. Remember we will always have not only our own demons, but also failures as leaders. Already I have made mistakes when caring for new students and with leading my discipleship group. But I want to be a child of God who will admit my failures and not hide them from my brothers and sisters. We are fortunate enough to have a director here who leads by example in this, and who will regularly admit his fears or mistakes. Staff meetings are surprisingly candid, and while it shatters the infantile assumptions we have that our leaders have all the answers, their openness invites me to love and trust them more. This doesn’t mean that we tell everybody everything, but that we trust others in our community if we want them to trust us. We must be vulnerable, not only with those we lead, but especially with those who lead alongside us.

This is key because we tend to want independence in our Christianity. Yes, it is important to learn and teach deep theological concepts and to develop a mature faith, but sometimes we hide behind our knowledge as if it were a mask. What students and interns alike deeply need is a place to share their struggles, fears, and anxieties. We must care enough to ask what is hurting others, and we must encourage one another when they need it most. To quote another great book: “What I did not yet understand was that while Jesus does offer a personal relationship to every one of his disciples, he never promises any of us a private one. … The Church, according to the New Testament, is not a loose confederation of individuals. The Church is a body — a living, breathing organism whose members are so intimately connected that they can only move together. On any given day, every member of that body needs help, and every member has some help to give.”

— Sampson and the Pirate Monks

We are learning to be leaders who are loving and vulnerable. We are learning to care deeply and sincerely. We are learning to set aside our pride and to pursue the heart.