Pause for thought

Pause for thought, BBC Radio 2 - Joel Edwards, 29 September 2005 

LOOKING FOR LEADERS

A friend of mine once said that the greatest challenge of the 21st century is leadership.

Well, if you look around at what’s happening in our political parties – here and abroad – you really can’t escape the point. Will Blair hang in there, or will our Gordon push into poll position? And what of the Lib-Dems and Charles Kennedy? Not too much confidence around there! And as the Conservative Party Conference kicks in, we’re all waiting to see if the jazz loving man with the cigars will steam into first place.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so much of the talk about leadership has so much to do with the language of power. Politicians talk about “being in power.” And so increasingly, in our do-it-my-way culture we set up these tensions between those of us who try to lead people, and the people who want to be led like a hole in the head!

But suppose leadership wasn’t about power? And what if it had little to do with who’s in charge? Or who’s better than whom?

Suppose leadership was about serving other people? The ‘servant of the people’ idea. That has to be the best way to lead.

A long time ago, Jesus was in the middle of an argument about leadership. The six million sheckle question was this: “Who’s going to be the greatest amongst us?”

What Jesus did was really interesting. He put a child in the middle of them and said something like: “Unless you behave like one of these you really can’t lead anyone.”

And that’s really challenging, because I still can’t cope with my kids giving me lectures or showing me how to work electrical appliances! But the Bible is really like that. It tips things on its head. It talks about societies in which wolves, lions and scorpions would be led by a child.

It’s not so much that public life and leadership would get reduced to kindergarten games. It’s about things like attitudes and an absence of power play. For although toddlers and infants all think that the world revolves around them, they all make it plain that they need other kids to play with.

The one thing you can’t do is to stop a child needing another child.

As we drill deeper into what some people describe as a crisis of leadership we should remember two things: leadership is grown up business. But we’ll do it better if we approach it in a child-like way – without being childish about it.

JOEL EDWARDS