Steward Leadership

Hey friends. I apologize again for my long hiatus. My terrible catch 22 is that I love it when people read my blog. But once you have drawn a legion of faithful readers, it becomes quite stressful to make sure that you are constantly satisfying their need for enlightenment and entertainment.

Sadly, because Cortney and I have started "getting a life" down here in Texas, we are busier than we used to be, and my blogposts will likely be less frequent than the glory days of living in my mother's basement. Don't think for a moment that I am debating "killing" the blog, but just know that checking it every morning with baited breath is likely to leave you disappointed more often than not. If any of y'all* are tech savvy enough to have your computer notify you when I post new material, I'm thinking that would be a good route for you to go.

But anyway. I want to talk about Steward Leadership.** I know that by now we have all heard of the idea of servant leadership. And I am not saying in any way that servant leadership is not an accurate view of what we are called to do as Christians in leadership. I just want to take this idea a little bit further and consider "stewardship" to be the particular kind of service we render when we are leading.

Stewardship, as we probably know, is the idea of being temporarily entrusted with something that is not yours, so that you can take care of it for the owner. Jesus references this idea when he tells the story of the men entrusted with the gold talents. They are supposed to put the money to good use so that the master will have more when he returns. Only slightly less well known is J.R.R. Tolkien's example of Lord Denathor acting as Steward of Gondor. The king is away (for generations) but whenever he returns, he will find his realm safely managed. Other examples could include house-sitting or baby sitting.

As Christians we use this idea in many different contexts. Usually you hear it coming up in regards to money. Sometimes I poke fun at Christian sub-culture but I'm not going to do that here. I think that talking about stewardship in these ways is entirely appropriate. But now I want to shift our thinking a little bit and consider leadership as a form of stewardship.

When you are a leader you are entrusted (by someone) with something that is not yours. It's easy to understand this when we are in a business setting. A CEO is entrusted with people's jobs, stock values, and the health of the company. But more often people are entrusted with less concrete assets. Coaches are entrusted with the development of their players, the management of the game, and everything that the season entails. Teachers are entrusted with the learning of students (who are not their own children), and project managers are entrusted with other people's time. A lot of the time leaders are entrusted with "soft" resources, but that doesn't make them any less real. Leaders and followers are connected by a contract, whether it is spoken or unspoken, and they both have roles to fulfill.

The reason I like talking about this in terms of stewardship is because stewardship immediately brings two things to the forefront.

1) Humility
2) Accountability

Stewards are taking care of things that aren't theirs. If you don't know what it means to be humbled by stewardship, I'd like to invite you to imagine a scenario in which you are trusted with something way over your head. Imagine that somebody put you in charge of a fortune 500 company, and you had to figure out how to manage millions and millions of dollars, or else thousands of people would lose their job. Imagine that you have been trusted with the role of general, and millions of lives hang in the balance every time you make a decision. People will die no matter what you choose, but people will question "was it worth it?" Now think a little more realistically, what if a good friend of yours was sick and dying, and he asked you to take care of his family when he was gone.

Are you humbled yet?

Accountability means that you will answer to the people who trust you. House sitting would be a lot easier if the owners never came home. You could let the plants die and let the dog pee all over the rug. You don't care, it's not your house and no one will know. But the owners will come back. People can lose their jobs or their lives, children can have their soccer season ruined, school projects might get a D-, ministries can flounder, and people can have really burnt hot-dogs if you are the one watching the grille. And you are prepared to look at the disgust on their faces when they bite into the hot-dog that YOU so carelessly burned? I'm not...and to think that I trusted you.





*Texas speak
**This was a term I came up with last week. I was pretty sure that I was going to be the next paradigm shifting Christian author but some other guy beat me to it last year. So, read "the Steward Leader" and pretend I wrote it. That will make me feel better about missing yet another opportunity to write a book due to poor timing/lack of talent/lack of initiative.