In citing these examples, Magnusson is touching on one of the key reasons for the renewed interest in all things Celtic, and one of the core arenas in which our culture is in crisis—the arena of leadership. Shaped by the uncertainties of postmodernity, and schooled in its ambivalence toward authority, the emerging generations are seeking out models of leadership far removed from the control-and-command approach characteristic of the 20th century. The future is a challenging road for all of us, but the climb is steepest, and the way most difficult, for those called upon to lead.

Of all the charges laid at the door of the church by many disaffected young people who in recent years have made the choice to leave, the most frequent and damning is the charge of controlling leadership. Styles of leadership forged in the certainties of modernity, fitted to the assembly-line routines of industrialism, and built on the linear and literate thought processes of print technology are increasingly alien to a generation in search of new models. Gen Xers, according to Kevin Ford, have been "burned by pathological models of authority."² In the home and workplace, in communities and organizations, the massive changes shaking the foundations of our culture are calling for a new understanding and practice of the skills of leadership.

For too many young people, there has been no distinction made between leading and controlling; to accept leadership and authority has been to accept control. Stifling creativity, stunting innovation and imagination, forcing uniformity, silencing dissent—controlling leadership acts like a blanket thrown over a crowd, subjugating the needs of the many who follow to the needs of the few who lead.

"The remarkable thing," writes Viv Thomas, an international leadership consultant with Operation Mobilization, "is that many leaders feel they can change things which are beyond their control. With this fantasy in place, they lead people towards an initially exciting world of control and power. In the process these same leaders become gods of the naïve, giving the people they lead a simplicity which in the end is deceptive and damaging. Believing the world is a certain way will not help you when you meet the truth that it is not."³

The claustrophobia this produces is pushing many people to seek fresh air and freedom outside the confines of the church—not because they hate the gospel but because they hate the bondage that the gospel has been made to bring. As Meic Pearse of London Bible College asks, "Are we equipping the saints or fostering their dependency on us? Can we let go of our scarcely admitted itch to control or bolster our positions? Pastors and preachers, housegroup leaders, Sunday school teachers, worship leaders, youth workers: we all want our egos fed. It’s time to start asking, ‘Who’s feeding whom?’ "⁴ Whatever else the current wave of social change calls for, it calls for a reformation in the church’s understanding of leadership.

Jim Partridge is a young leader in his twenties who has observed leadership at close hand in a range of church and parachurch organizations in the United Kingdom. Like many younger and emerging leaders, he is convinced that the new situation into which we are moving will require new models of effective leadership and a new attitude in those who exercise it. Surveying the current church scene, he has identified four key demands that the 21st century will place on its leaders: (1) a willingness to listen and change, (2) a willingness to take risks and move forward, (3) a willingness to serve and obey, and (4) a willingness to trust and delegate.⁵

Together, these four will form a matrix of priorities for those exercising leadership in church and society: the essential leader’s checklist for the early decades of millennium three.

The shift in industry from "hard" to "soft" skills is now well documented. At its heart is the drive for cooperation, for leadership built on negotiation, motivation, and mutual benefit rather than coercion, control, and fear. The Industrial Society, a nonprofit foundation, is one of the leading organizations in Britain in the arena of leadership, management, and employment issues. In 1999 they commissioned a survey of 3,000 people from businesses across the U.K. to determine what they saw as the best and worst traits of leaders. The five weakest areas of less successful leaders were cited as the following:

• They fail to be sensitive to people’s feelings.

• They fail to recognize other people’s stress.

• They fail to develop and guide their staff.

• They fail to encourage feedback on their own performance.

• They fail to consult those affected before making decisions.

Parallel research has not been carried out among those attending (or leaving) churches. But can we really believe that, if it were carried out, it would not produce very similar results?

Viv Thomas insists that "leaders are measured by their influence on people. This is the only way in which it is possible to sort out the Hitlers from the Teresas. Charisma, skill, education, background are all neutral in assessing a leader’s potential. … The measure of how well the job is done will be the effect it has on people."⁶

Beyond the immediate "soft" skills of listening for the sake of cooperation and motivation, 21st-century leaders will also be called upon to look, listen, and learn for their own survival in a changing environment. In a static culture it is enough to learn skills once, perhaps in college, and to dedicate a life to practicing them. In a culture reinventing itself every five to seven years, this is untenable. "A new paradigm means that everyone goes back to zero," advises the Dallas-based Leadership Network, the fast-growing network developed by Bob Buford to link and resource new churches. "You lose any leverage you had in the old paradigm. Anticipatory, not reactive leadership is required."⁷

To be a leader in the coming decades will mean, by definition, to be a lifelong learner—not only gaining new skills, but being able to adapt existing skills to new situations with dramatic frequency: with one eye on the task in hand and one eye on the horizon. "We need to become experts at reading and understanding cultural maps," author David Fisher has advised.⁸ The shifting sands of our cultural environment are not only the context in which we must work; they are also our most potent source of up-to-the-minute learning. Twenty-first-century leaders will find themselves asking constantly, What have I learned today? this week? this year? Those unable to listen and to learn will soon find that they are unable to lead.

Leadership that doesn’t inspire the imaginations of those who choose to follow is little more than cleverly disguised bureaucracy. "The greatest leaders are those who explain the world," leading British politician Tony Benn writes, "and thus help us to gain control of our destiny."⁹ If human beings did not need help in understanding their times and inspiration to overcome fear and inertia, they would not need leaders. It is crucial that leaders see this and take seriously their responsibility to inspire—to switch on the imaginative functions of those they lead. This is just the opposite of closing down creativity because it is too much of a threat.

The capacity to inspire courage, to give vision against the odds, to create dreams out of the raw materials of fear and uncertainty is more needed than ever in a context of fluidity and change. "Leading people (as opposed to simply managing them) in a new direction," writes David Nadler, "means reshaping their view of the world. It means shattering their sense of stability, tossing out their old standards of success, and prying them loose from the status quo. And then it means replacing what you’ve wiped out with a new, coherent and energizing vision of what you believe the future can and should be."¹⁰ Every institution in our culture, not least its churches, is crying out for the kinds of leaders who will take risks and foster innovation, finding new solutions to old problems and meeting new problems head-on.

Over the generations, many different symbols have come to represent the power and role of leadership—the five stars on a general’s uniform, the huge executive office and chauffeured limousine, the bishop’s miter, the short words Senator and Congressman. Yet the only symbol that could be said to capture the essence of Christian leadership is one that rarely arises—that of the towel. Jesus’ act of foot washing is the fountain from which the resources of Christian leadership arise and flow. There is no New Testament model of leadership that is not servanthood.

As the new generations struggle to come to terms with their own brokenness, their disillusionment with authority, the dysfunctionality of their home experience, they stand more than ever in need of the kind of leaders more attuned to washing feet than making speeches. This may well be the greatest contribution that the church can make to the whole arena of leadership development, that it has a framework that makes sense of the very acts of service and love the culture is looking for. The mysterious balance of power and powerlessness evident in the life of Jesus, his capacity to be single-minded yet open, to move resolutely forward in the pursuit of his destiny and yet not violate the destiny of others, to hold to nonviolence and yet be strong, even strident, when needed—in short to serve and yet lead—these are the very qualities 21st-century leadership calls for.

It is ironic that some of the leaders who ask most insistently that those who follow should trust their vision without questions struggle themselves to trust those around them. But trust is a leadership commodity increasing in value by the day. Leaders who are unwilling to trust those they lead will never see them break out of low-skill patterns of dependency: growth comes through being given something to achieve.

"Hire talent!" is one of Tom Peters’s key principles for new-paradigm leadership. Leaders need to see themselves increasingly as those who recruit, resource, and release the gifted people who are going to get the job done, rather than as the lone heroes who are out to achieve.

Overly complex control systems, micromanagement of tasks, and an atomistic approach to delegation will all serve to stifle initiative and suffocate talent. Charles Handy speaks of the creation of a "culture of consent." "Whereas the heroic manager of the past knew all, could do all and could solve every problem, the post-heroic manager asks how every problem can be solved in such a way that develops other people’s capacity to handle it. It is not virtuous to do it this way, it is essential."¹¹ How might the culture of our organizations change if every leader were asked to walk, each day, through a doorway over which is written the words "I am not the answer"?

If these four challenges offer a framework within which to reevaluate the approach to leadership in the light of a culture in transition, there is at least one further attribute essential to the effective leader: a focus on the future.

In a sermon given to a group of priests in his care, Archbishop Oscar Romero touched on the very essence of effective leadership. "It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view," he said. "The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. … We are prophets of a future not our own."

If leadership is not about a focus on the future, what is it about? In a culture in transition, leaders are by definition those who see the future first—and those who are prepared to work for deferred rewards. Our culture is crying out for leaders, regardless of gender, age, and social background, who are ready to look ahead, to grasp intuitively the outlines of an emerging landscape and to chart a course that they and those who travel with them can follow.

To chart such a course will mean, very often, to miss out on the rewards of staying put. There will be many in leadership who are just not ready for a frontier-town culture, who have invested too heavily in the acquired status of a settled life. But there will be others—some thrown into leadership for the first time—who thrive on the gold-rush mentality of social change and bring a flood of new thinking to their responsibilities. These are the leaders who will break the cultural ice and blaze a trail into the future. Given the choice, which leaders would you follow?

Consider this a call for the Christian faith community to focus on a future not our own, to invest our emotions, our intellect, our strength, and our resources in the lives of the rising generations. They—and only they—have the right and responsibility to bring to birth a church for the 21st century. They do so in the sure knowledge that the God they worship is out there already, walking the planet, tasting its cultures, swimming in its streams. Our strategy must not be for survival but for rebirth. Not the church we know today protected into its old age, but a new church born in the fields of tomorrow—a church that springs up from the ground on which, unknowing, we have thrown seeds.

1. Magnus Magnusson, Lindisfarne: The Cradle Island.

2. Kevin Ford, Jesus for a New Generation: Reaching Out to Today’s Young Adults.

3. Viv Thomas, Future Leader: Spirituality, Mentors, Context and Style for Leaders of the Future.

4. Meic Pearse, introduction to Who’s Feeding Whom?

5. Jim Partridge, "Spring Harvest."

6. Viv Thomas, introduction to Future Leader.

7. Bob Buford, "When the Horse Is Dead, Dismount."

8. David Fisher, The Twenty-First Century Pastor.

9. Quoted in "Leadership into the 21st Century," The Times (London).

10. David A. Nadler, Champions of Change.

11. Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason.

Copyright © 1999, 2000 Gerard Kelly. Taken from RetroFuture, soon to be published in the U.S. by InterVarsity Press. Originally published in Britain as Get a Grip on the Future. Used by permission of Monarch Publishers.

Gerard Kelly is a writer, speaker, missionary, youth worker, and poet living in the West Midlands, U.K. He chairs the youth and rage programs of an outreach ministry called Spring Harvest. He and his wife, Chrissie, have four children.