Christian Leaders and Our Courage Crisis

There’s a quick way for church and Christian leadership teams to gauge whether or not their discipleship efforts are measuring up to biblical standards. Just look for the presence or absence of courage among your followers. If courage is lacking, you’re not doing your job. If it’s present, then genuine humility must constantly be encouraged as well, or else what begins as courage will end up as arrogance.

No one can be a true disciple of Jesus and not demonstrate both courage and humility. The cultivation of these two traits must be the objective of every Christian leader – it’s what people should see in us and replicate.

Our leadership role model, Jesus, was simultaneously an enemy of hypocritical spiritual leaders, while being a friend of “sinners.” If we’re surrendered to our role model, and developing discipleship systems that help others do the same, we’ll have the same kinds of enemies and friends Jesus had. In other words, we won’t just have Jesus’ humility; we’ll also have his courage. Is your leadership marked by these two traits? Regardless of your answer, people are following you. Why not ensure they are following a good, godly example worth replicating?

I’ll never forget when my older son came to me as a boy and sheepishly asked a question that has forever captivated me with a holy haunting. It continually serves as a question I ask myself – and raise to our church leadership teams regularly. “Dad,” he began, “how come when I read the Bible and I compare it to what I see in church, they don’t look the same?” Wow. If a young boy can see it, we Christian leaders must.

Say what you will about divine manifestations, but there’s just no arguing against the fact that when someone is truly filled with the spirit of Jesus, they will lead like him. The biggest difference between the leaders we read about in the New Testament and many Christian leaders we see today is what I call courageous humility. It’s largely lacking these days, and our churches and nation are suffering from its absence.

Like it or not, people are replicating what they see (and don’t see) in you. Are your followers modeling courageous humility or are they cowering? Are the people who are following you as you follow Christ standing up and speaking out about the issues we’re facing in the twenty-first century? Have you mistaken popularity for relevance? There is a huge difference between the two, and I’m afraid many church leaders do not understand how subtle – and significant – it is. Have you mistaken speed, size and numbers for the cultivation of courageous humility among your people?

When we consider that nearly every New Testament book addresses specific cultural and theological issues faced by the target audience (culture and theology go hand in glove), there is a significant lesson we church leaders can glean; the gospel was never delivered in a vacuum. In the Bible, the gospel is always colliding with the issues and people of the day, unapologetically presenting everyone with the decision to follow or reject Jesus and his ways. In order to present the gospel today, without compromise and in the spirit of what we see in the New Testament, it requires humility and courage. If you are not intentional about developing these two traits in your own life, ensuring your life and leadership are balanced with both, your disciples won’t even understand that they are essential, let alone pursue them.

Our nation is in the thick of a massive humility crisis – but so are a great majority of our churches and Christian ministries. Many of us need to get our heads out of our buckets. For all our preaching and teaching about Jesus, we may not be following him as closely as we say we are. If we leaders aren’t, it sets our followers up for far less than their greatest potential.

The great need of the day is for a mighty movement of courageous humility to sweep through our nation, beginning with us Christian leaders. If that’s going to be, we shouldn’t wait for humble courage to be modeled in the White House, the Senate Chamber, the House of Representatives, or the Supreme Court.

Courageous humility is something the world needs to see once again, en masse, as they saw on the Day of Pentecost, throughout the Book of Acts and the entire New Testament.  

Are you passionate about being true to Jesus and his teachings without compromise? Are you bringing the Bible to bear on the issues of the day, as the New Testament writers did? What adjustments do you need to make in your discipleship/leadership paradigm so that you and your teams raise up leaders who are real disciples, truly like Jesus, who emulate humble courage everywhere they go?