Grab a towel Blog
The foreman screamed across the shop floor… “Tucker… what the ******* are you doing – you’ll lose a finger”. I immediately realised how stupid I was being… seeking to clear metal shards from the rotating drill with my hand. My safety report that week was somewhat humiliating. Being an apprentice on the shop floor had its ups and downs. This was definitely a low point! But I believe in the principle of apprenticing – I don’t think there’s anything quite like on-the-job training. And this equally applies to being Jesus’ apprentices…
2020 is drawing to a close… I can hear that collective sigh of relief. Although there are clearly concerns about the uncertainty of the future…
navigating crises are a part of life. Perhaps the scale of the Covid-19 crisis is unique – but some of what I’ve faced this year has felt strangely familiar…
It seems to me that part of our expectation of leaders is that they can answer our questions and solve our problems. There is a danger that we want our leaders to be omniscient and fail to recognise that the greatest leaders do not try and be the fount of all knowledge. In fact, I’ve been wondering recently if the power of great leadership rather rests in the ability to ask great questions and to remain curious.
This post reflects on leading The Message Trust through the last 6 months… As we entered 2020, we were full of hope and optimism for the year ahead. Our keyword for the year was expectant… but the one thing we didn’t expect was Covid-19 and the hard lockdown.
If we are to exert godly influence as leaders, then we must prioritise becoming Christ-centred servant leaders which should shape our entire approach to life and ministry… I believe that a critical foundation of servant leadership is that those in leadership see themselves primarily as custodians/stewards. We can get ourselves into all kinds of trouble when we forget this principle.
there is an insidious threat to Christian leaders that looks like we’re putting people first, but it is actually the antithesis of servant leadership. Rather than putting people first, we succumb to the disease of being a people -pleaser.
There’s a scene in the Matrix where Neo first enters the computer generated world and is learning to live counter to what he has been programmed his whole life. He is with his mentor, Morpheus, and they are walking against the tide of hundreds of people on a city’s streets. Morpheus, overcoming the confines of his mind, is able to walk without bumping into anyone – parting the proverbial Red Sea of people. Neo, on the other hand, bumps into everybody and is unable to avoid all the tide of people in his path.
I believe that the experience of a Christ-centred servant leader is more like Neo’s experience than Morpheus’s.
On April 9th 1945, 23 days before the Nazis’ surrender and the end of the Second World War, Hitler’s orders to hang Dietrich Bonhoeffer were carried out. Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned for almost exactly two years. His legacy, however, is not just as an opponent to Nazism through involvement in the active resistance to Hitler’s evil regime, but is primarily as a preeminent theologian and humble Christ-centred servant leader. He was a ‘deep-well’ leader… combining depth of theological insight together with fruitful ministry… the fruit of which has extended into the century beyond his physical life.
The following is an extract of a speech that I gave at The Message Trust’s Urban Hero Awards. The Awards celebrated stories of transformation – men and women who, against all odds, were now exerting a positive influence in society. This speaks to the heart of what Grab a Towel is all about… providing an environment for emerging leaders to flourish in faith and life – this is an ultimate act of service.
In Grab a Towel I write that Christ-centred servant leaders need to have ‘steel in their spine’ – the gritty resolve to persevere through all the challenges they face. One way that God develops our grit is through tough circumstances and situations which test our character and strengthen our resolve to follow Him through thick and thin…
The history of humanity is a litany of devastation and destruction when the ‘us’ rises against ‘them’. Even in leadership speak we have ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’… which risks causing an unnecessary “us” and “them” divide in our organisations, on our teams, and in our churches. Grab a Towel seeks to break down the myth of us and them… recognising that as Christians we are all followers, and we are all leaders – carrying influence in this world. There is no them, it’s only us…
According to most leadership gurus, we all need to have a vision for our life. I don’t necessarily disagree… but what I’ve come to question is the process we undertake to comprehend the vision and calling that God has for us…
This post documents my personal journey in discovering my calling and vision…
Maybe a more critical question for Christian leaders is not ‘are we born leaders’, but, ‘are we effective followers?’ The essential unifying quality of every Christ-centred servant leader is that they are first and foremost a follower…
The premise of my book, Grab a Towel, is that servant leadership provides a Christ-centred critique and corrective to much of the leadership that we see in the 21st Century. This is perhaps most apparent when we look at what I propose is the foundation of servant leadership – character. And given so much of what has been taking place on a global scale in recent times and the dearth of servant leadership on display, I felt it was a good time to post this (summarised) excerpt from the book.