Leadership is a fascinating concept. If you Google “books on leadership,” you’ll get at almost 600,000 links. You’ll discover the 20 books on leadership that you must read; or the five top books of all time dealing with this topic. There are books by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, James Collins, Peter Drucker, and so on and so on. The titles go from Who Moved My Cheese to biographies of Winston Churchill.
You won’t find the Bible listed as a book to read on leadership. And I doubt you’ll find many references to Moses. Yet there are surely some lessons in leadership that can be learned by considering the story of this outstanding Scriptural character, whose name is forever identified with Exodus, liberation from bondage, mediator between God and man, giver of the law, and pathfinder through the desert.
But first, there are many interesting questions to ask if we want to study leadership. Can leadership be learned? The Ohio Department of Education offers an endorsement on a teacher’s license called “teacher leader;” it requires a Master’s Degree from an approved program and an internship. Six hundred thousand books and countless courses, workshops and lectures imply that leadership, indeed, can be learned.
What do we want in a leader? Do we want a person of vision, who shows us a new way to approach reality and to discover a better future? Or do we want a ‘tweaker,’ as some feel best describes Steve Jobs? Do we want an inventor or do we want someone who can make inventions (what we already have)--better, faster, more efficient and useful? Good questions for these next 12 months during which we will be choosing a leader for our whole country.
Do we want someone who knows what they’re doing right away, and can land the disabled airliner in a river? Or can our leader be someone who has failed many times and has recovered from those failures, and who is still learning? Does our leader have to have impeccable moral character, or can he or she have flaws, even tragic ones? Do we want someone we LIKE or someone we will FOLLOW? Finally, do we want someone who encourages US to become leaders, or would that be terrible since there are already too many chiefs and not enough followers?
The Bible may be the absolutely worst place to study leadership. I suppose the same could be said of Shakespeare’s plays. Take Moses, for example. From the Israelite point of view, he was raised by the enemy—in the very court of the man who had enslaved a whole people! He has a violent temper and kills a man. Then he’s a fugitive. He becomes a lowly shepherd. He admits he doesn’t have the gift of persuasive speech. And he fails miserably again and again as he tries to get the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go.
On the plus side, he learns. From not seeming to know much about God except to take off his sandals and hide his face, he comes to know a great deal. He has courage. He confronts Pharaoh even though he keeps failing; he argues with God; he delegates the speaking to his brother Aaron, but tells him what to do based on his own relationship with God. And he leads a very difficult crowd on a very difficult journey for a LOT of years! Talk about earning a leader endorsement!
If Moses were teaching us leadership, my hunch is that his most powerful and most difficult lesson would be stated in very few words. A whole book would NOT be needed. And those words would be something like: “Stay in touch with God, and be prepared to MOVE.”
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