A Defective Leader

"He has not a single redeeming defect."

 —Benjamin Disraeli of another British parliamentarian

Warm–up: Exodus 5:21–23

I read somewhere that a Huey Cobra helicopter, practicing auto rotations during a military night-training exercise, landed on its tail rotor, separating the tail boom from the rest of the aircraft. Fortunately, the aircraft wound up on its skids, sliding down the runway doing three-sixties in a shower of sparks. As the Cobra passed the tower, the following exchange occurred: 

Tower: “Sir, do you need assistance?”

Cobra: “I don’t know, tower. We ain’t done crashin’ yet!”

As I look at my life and leadership over the years, I have to admit that much of it has been one resounding crack-up after another. My best–laid schemes have crashed and burned, my brilliant strategies have augured in, and “I ain’t done crashin’ yet.” 

Yet God wastes nothing—not even our failures. He discerns the possibilities in every humiliating debacle and uses them to make us better leaders than we ever thought possible. 

God’s ways are not our ways: We equate leadership with lordship; He equates it with servanthood. We seek power so we can set things right; He strips us of importance so He can do a better job. We want strength so we can help God get on with His work; He weakens us and reveals our ineptitude so He can get us out of the way. We advertise our credentials so others can be sure of us; He lets our assets fail us so others see that apart from God we can do nothing.

Conventional wisdom contends that weakness is a hindrance. We must be strong and able. But in spiritual matters, flaws and frailties are valuable leadership traits. For one thing they help others count less on our leadership and make them more dependent on God to find their way.

Moses is a good example of this notion. His experience, his background, his talents, his training had earned him the admiration of God’s people. They looked to Moses for their deliverance. Ye they soon learned that all such hope was vain, that their leader, at best, was as weak and frail as they. He could not break through Pharaoh’s defenses; he could not reduce Israel’s servitude; he could not set his people free. And thus the way was prepared for Israel to lean on God.

We are inclined to fix on personalities, to be impressed by intellect, education, leadership skills, the passion of a leader’s causes or strength of will. We believe that wisdom and power are vested in that person. Such adulation, however, is nothing more than humanism—making man or woman the measure of all things. What’s worse, it’s idolatry: a false centering on someone other than God.  

And so God lets our leaders fall off their pedestals. Failure, indecision, and inability to achieve what they’ve set out to do bring humbling certainty of their inadequacy and strip their followers of illusion and their dependency. Such weaknesses show us that they, as do we, “shuffle along on feet of clay,” to use Brennan Manning’s phrase. They teach us that the only good thing about us, whatever our position, is the goodness of God. 

Our Lord knew this truth well. He was fully aware that anything good in him came not from his himself but from His Father . When an effusive disciple began to gush, “Good teacher...” Jesus stopped him in his tracks. “Why do you call me good?” He said. “No one is good—except God” (Mark 10:18).[1]

David Roper

[1] There is mystery here for Jesus was fully God. Yet in the Incarnation he was fully man and as such he acted as a man wholly dependent upon God (cf. John 5:19, 30). 

From, Out of the Ordinary, David Roper, Discovery House Publishing, 2015