A sermon on the ordination of elders.

120304.doc

4 March – Second Sunday of Lent.
What is the nature of our leadership and why the conventional political or business models don’t offer much help to a community seeking to serve in the pattern of Christ.
The temptations of being “the” leader are very attractive. It means you get jobs completed the way you want them done (though not necessarily the way the community needs them done); you get to cast and define the vision and all the people have to do is buy into that. Far harder it is to work with a semi-formed multi-faceted vision and mission that is not constructed by theologically aware people which has the potential to push the community in many directions at once. Is the job to choose only one? An interesting take on this came in the book The Cost of Authority by Graham Shaw where he explored the servant leadership model underlying Mark’s gospel – even such a flat structure still needs an agreed leadership model which has authority validated in some way.
Alistair