Followership

We can't go anywhere now days without running into books, articles, lectures, seminars, videos, and probably a few delivery devices I've forgotten, about Leadership Development. Create material on the topic and you have a hot product. I think, for a Christian, the focus should be on Followership Development.

A Christian is supposed to be a Christ follower. Period. Every Christian leader should ultimately be a Christ follower. Of course there are sincere Christian leaders who fail, but I think there are many more so-called Christian leaders who are not following Christ and who ultimately will fail spectacularly at being a Christian leader. It may sound like I'm quibbling but I think it is serious for a couple of reasons.

When we put so much focus on "Leadership Development" we fail to adequately develop other gifts even though we don't mean to. We need to be helping people develop their gifts no matter what they are. Some people do have leadership gifts that we need to help them develop, but we need to do that right along side those who need to develop their serving gifts or hospitality gifts, or whatever other gift God has given them. I know that developing these other gifts is championed in a few corners but, by and large, leadership development takes center stage. This is probably due to a thinking that developing leaders will lead (aren't I clever there) to the development of the other gifts. But I'm not sure this has been the experience. Instead it causes people to develop a superiority complex that doesn't do anyone any good.

That leads to the other concern and that is that failing to recognize our ultimate need to be a follower causes us to end up in the weeds more often than not. Using leadership gifts needs to be understood in terms of humbly serving Christ as a follower. Instead we can easily end up at the other end of the spectrum, haughtily dispensing our leadership talents on our followers as an egotistical maniac, or worse.

So I propose that we do away with Leadership Development and focus on Followership Development. It will include Leadership Development, but everything else as well.