The Two Signs Of Great Leadership

The most significant discovery unearthed by the leadership literature of the past twenty years is that two signs indicate successful leadership: improving relationships, and the improving stories that are spawned by the improving relationships. Interestingly, these signs of successful leadership constitute two of the three “signs of the Spirit” that were so central to early Christianity.

The early church touted three tests of authenticity, or as it called them, “signs of the Spirit.” First, and the one missing from the leadership literature of the past twenty years, is the Lordship of Christ and the centrality of an apostolic witness.14 For the Christian, everything else pales by comparison to the preeminence of Christ.

The second sign of the Spirit consisted of manifestations in the life of Christians of “fruit of the Spirit.”15 James exhorts us to “humbly accept the word planted in you.”16 The Word of God bears fruit, not when it is comprehended, but when it is lived—implanted and transplanted. And the fruit of the Spirit is proven in relationships. When relationships get worse, things go bad. When relationships get better, things improve. This is true in the corporate world17 just as it holds true when Christians relate to one another in the church.

The third sign of the Spirit was the usefulness of spiritual manifestations to the churches.18 In other words, when relationships get better, there are stories to back up the improving relationships. Relationships, not numbers, show if growth is biblical, healthy, and truly fruitful. Perhaps it’s time to declare a moratorium on statistics in the church. What if the only thing we reported was the answer to this question: “Is spiritual fruit in evidence in your church? Give me the stories, not more statistics.” My dream for the church? God’s people telling more God stories than golf stories. An authentic Great Awakening is when people can’t stop talking about what God is doing.

Leonard Sweet, "What Matters Most"

Bad Situations - Require Rogues

"And Stratonicus asked his host at Seriphus,

for what offence exile

was the appointed punishment,

and being told that

they punished rogues by exile, said,

"Why then are not you a rogue,

to escape from this hole of a place?""

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. First Century Greek Philosopher.

The Massive Crucifixion

"The real life Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt, met his end about a hundred years before Jesus. Many died in the final battle, about six thousand of his followers were crucified all along the 130 so miles of the Appian Way from Rome to Capua (inland from Naples), making it roughly one cross every forty yards (Appian, Civil Wars 1.120)

- N.T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began. 

Stories Help Us Digest Wisdom

"Story is the palm oil with which wisdom is swallowed. "

(Yousufu,  Guinea , West africa. Heard on BBC Podcast about Eola and how story was used to spread messages.)

Needing Old Men With Histories Stories

"The old fellow withthe lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. 

Right there in our cell we read Fastenko's name in a book about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to be one."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

What A Jungle Can Support

"How does one make farms on unproductive earth, on lateritic soil, which, being stirred and work one time too many, will violently revolt against this rape and set up like cement so that overnight it becomes like rock into which a nail cannot be driven? The ecology of the Amazon jungle, fifty times more subtle and complicated than the intricate balancing of a Calder mobile, operated for centuries when each human who inhabited it had ten square miles to roam in and to harvest from; this was what the jungle could support. The land is poor and leached from the incessant rains, so poor in fact that almost its entire richness has gone into the trees that stand up on it. It was the unproductive nature of the Jungle that determine the essential nature of the people who once owned it; they were small tribes not much more than family size, and they were Nomads who claimed enormous territories." 

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers