The way Jesus taught his disciples is a brilliant model for anyone who wants to be a Christian leader, and a useful topic for this first Pastor's Brief. The time Jesus spent with his disciples, the way he called them to follow him, his personal authority and prayerfulness, his sense of calling and purpose, his encouraging of followers to count the cost"”all these and more tell us volumes about Jesus as a leader, trainer, and manager of men and women. Why turn to a secular leadership or management tool, when in the pages of the Bible we meet through firsthand accounts the greatest leader who ever lived?
There is a massive amount to be learned from the example of Jesus as a teacher. Unlike the leaders of today, he put the interests of others ahead of himself. He singled people out for special training. Also, the training he gave was not just in the skills of ministry, as amazing as his ability was. He shared his very life with his followers for three years. What a contrast to the cocooned existence of today's leaders.
And what a teacher he was! The bits and pieces of daily life, both the regular grind and the occasional shocking surprises, became material for profound reflection on the nature of God and salvation. And when he was free to teach in more sustained and systematic ways, he summarized and taught the doctrines of God's grace with a clarity and force that have not been improved upon for 2000 years.
Now, we could go on in this vein but unfortunately, this whole line of thinking comes to a crashing halt with the always infuriating apostle Paul. At first sight, it feels like we are on solid ground. This is the apostle who said, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ". How could we go wrong, with Jesus and Paul in our corner, helping us fight the good fight and training us as Christian leaders?
But consider these points. Paul too was a follower, that is to say a disciple, of Jesus. And as he continually reminds us, even though he was "untimely born", he was no less of a genuine apostle than the other twelve. Indeed he is deeply sensitive to the accusation that he is any the lesser for not having been one of the original followers.
He thumps the table in Galatians and insists that his authority comes direct from God and not from any of the other apostles"”who, by the way, all recognize him as genuine. He even records the occasion where he had cause to rebuke the apostle Peter publicly for his lack of consistency with the gospel (Gal 2:11-14).
In fact, you could argue on purely secular grounds that despite an unusual start to his apostolic career (the headline might have read: "5 minute conversion: Killer of Christians becomes Lord's servant"”read all about it in Acts 9") he was the most successful of them all. Of all the apostles, he wrote more of the New Testament, reached more pagans, covered more ground, and even suffered more deeply than any of them (see 2 Cor 12). It's not to take anything at all away from the other disciples to point out that they started as second-rate losers. Then, even after the coming of the Holy Spirit, they seemed to confine most of their evangelistic efforts to within the world of Judaism. If numbers, diversity, and geographical coverage are the measure of success in ministry (they're not, but they are not insignificant either) then Paul wins every time.
What's the problem here?
Well if you remember, the point we started trying to make was what a wonderful trainer of leaders Jesus was, and how his earthly ministry is a model for our leadership. Yet Paul, the most humanly successful of the apostles, spent a grand total of"”well let's say 60 seconds in the presence of the earthly Jesus. Sure, it was a weird and wonderful 60 seconds recorded in Acts 9:3-9. We might even allow that Luke has compressed the incident, and Paul spent anything up to ten minutes on that road to Damascus with Jesus. And even Paul acknowledges that his conversion was very odd, speaking of it in 1 Corinthians 15:8. Yet the entire content, shape, authority and impetus of Paul's apostolic ministry explodes out of the starting blocks from this very point (as Paul keeps reminding us in Acts 22:6-11, 26:12-18, and implicitly in passages like Romans 11:13, 15:16).
In other words, we are forced by Paul to consider this slightly naughty suggestion: that the less time spent with the incarnate Jesus on earth, the more potentially effective your ministry. Or perhaps, when Paul said, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ", we should take him to mean that we should travel to wherever we find an audience for the gospel, quickly and concisely deliver the message, and leave detailed follow-up to others.
The real point is nothing like this, of course. The best thing to do is to acknowledge that the ministry of Jesus is not in any way meant to be a blueprint for the "how-tos' of contemporary church leadership. We don't imitate Jesus' methodology as leader or teacher, any more than we imitate him as the greatest carpenter and woodworker in all history, or"”in terms of facial hair"”as the Jewish rabbi with the flowingest beard. All right, that last example was poetic licence, but I'm going off all the pictures I've ever seen.
That leaves us free to imitate Jesus in the way we really should, in the areas that are fundamental to his character and (human) nature and should be fundamental to ours. As the perfect man, he is the image of the glorious and invisible Father (Col 1:15). As sinful yet forgiven human beings, we are being transformed into his glorious image (2 Cor 3:18). In him, we are a new creation.
Now, for those of us who are pastors, leaders, and Bible teachers this will of course lead to a complete overhaul in the way we lead and teach others. Yes, it will even affect the "how to" of our leadership. We probably won't want to wear robes or pompous religious clothing (Luke 20:46), and we certainly won't lord it over people, as do "the kings of the gentiles" (Luke 22:25). But we will show more than a passing interest in whether our hearers are doing more than absorb lots of information because of our surpassing communication skills. We will want to know if they, through our example and biblical teaching, are being transformed by God's word of grace into people who reflect Christ's glory in word, character and action.
The imitation of Christ is, after our conversion, the most fundamental and basic thing we do as Christians in response to God's salvation and to the gracious activity of the Holy Spirit in our lives. But it's more than a superficial imitation of a way of speaking, or a methodology of ministry. It's a rediscovery of what it means to be created, and then re-created, in the image of God.
