Crying out for leaders

In many places today I hear the deep seated cry for leadership. There is the cry for political leadership at a time of deep concern for the future. Then there is the cry for leadership from the churches, both from those inside the walls and from those outside the gates. The cry is for moral guidance and an engagement with the community that, they say, has become adrift in recent years.

In a short while we will be celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom. This was due to the unstinting leadership of William Wilberforce, who gave twenty years of his life to the cause. Along with William Pitt he worked for the transformation of British society, not just in this area but in a whole range of areas including prison reform, better conditions for children and animal welfare. At a time when the majority of the nation thought it was a horrible but necessary trade he laboured on. Even when his team managed to get enough signatures for the petition parliament dragged its feet until the war with Napoleon made it an unpatriotic thing to even consider he held to his principles. When the cause won the day eventually it was because of political manoeuvring.

Wilberforce was a man committed to the transformation of society. Today we would call him a transformational leader who embraced his place within the community and worked for its transformation from the inside out. What we need today are leaders who will not stand on the outside looking in and directing operations from a safe distance but will share in the life of the people they serve. They will lead in such a way that we can share a common vision. This is the leader who is truly radical and worth following to the very end. Jesus of Nazareth was such a leader whose philosophy was service and that inspired the disciples to follow him. Here are a few thoughts from the pen of Dietrich Bonhoeffer which I find very inspiring:

The leader shares the pain and is at the heart of grief. He describes community as what we have, not what we dream about. It is not the visionary conception but it is the present reality. “If I do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.”

The transformational leader is a person who has a vision to share, and a life to match, which will inspire others to follow. Bobby Kennedy once said: “you see things as they really are and ask, why? I dream dreams of how things could be and ask, why not?

What is our vision for a better Belfast?