This is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an awesome church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which lies here in this post. Buckle up for the ride and I hope you listen!

The Missing Component

Leadership is three dimensional. All our work on gifts, and even context, leave us still missing a third component to real transformative leadership. Intensity. I might be a gifted pastor or evangelist in the right place at the right time with the right people and the right gifts but I still have to wake up and go lay down my life. These variables are all (in my opinion) nothing without wholehearted, burning obedience. And that element is more a feature of our organizational culture perhaps than we realize. It is captured in the sometimes overlooked biblical exhortation from Romans 12 (one of the most relentless chapters in the bible) “Never be lacking in zeal…”

Serving God is more than finding my place or becoming personally fulfilled. Fervency means what I have been called to do is simply the place where I am supposed to come and die. Some communities value zeal while others downplay it. Knowing the gifts and calling of God in your life and how they work in your context is critical but the third is the intensity or gravity with which you then engage those things. And much of our view of zeal comes from the people who lead us. Because it is not seen as a skill to learn or a capacity to cultivate, zeal is something that we absorb from the culture of our churches or organization. And too often these contexts fall short of the biblical norm.  And all organizations have their leaders to thank or blame for their culture.

The Mentor

For the sake of simplicity let’s consider two kinds of leaders, who are alike in every way except spiritual intensity. The first we can call the mentor. He is an everyman kind of leader, who leads by walking one step ahead of everyone else. I think of a mega church pastor in my city. You may know him or someone like him. He is humble, kind, and simple in his approach to leadership. He looks, thinks, acts and lives a lot like the average person in his church, just a little better. He is a leadership archetype. He works out every day, tries to be a good husband, a supportive father, reads his bible for 10 minutes every day and loves to share the gospel in coffee shops and through his hobbies. His evangelism wiring drives him into his humanity. His core values are relevance and relatability. He wants to be like you, to lead you from a few steps in front. Just a little better. Giving you hope for your own life and work and struggles. He is a mentor for life and the mentor is an inspiration reminding every day people that they can live a life that includes God. I don’t want to discourage this kind of leadership. Only to point out its limitation to draw us into a biblical ecclesiology and a biblical missiology.

The Mystic

The second kind of leader we can call the mystic. This kind of leader appears to be so many steps in front of us that we can barely see them at all. This kind of leader is also humble but in a way that seems more weighty. Ordinary superlatives don’t seem to apply. He is not just kind, he is sacrificial, he is not just good husband and father, he is something else entirely. This leader defies conventional categories. He is an inspiration because he is NOT like you. His prayer life is extraordinary and it seems to pay dividends for him in ways that seem to transcend everyone elses experience. He seems to have locked eyes with God in a way that has changed him and that intimacy with a transcendent God seems to rub off a little.

This kind of leader inspires us because they remind us of mystery. That the pursuit of God is not, strictly speaking, about living a slightly better life but it is about an engagement with eternal realities. These people are other worldly and they can’t hide it. They are rarely relevant and we almost never “relate” to them. And that is their gift. If the mentor leader makes you think you can do it, reminding you of the goodness of God’s principles, the mystic makes you shake your head and just say, “Wow. I am not like that, what would it be like if i were?” One provides inspiration the other aspiration.

The question that is nagging at me is, what is more needed in our time? In this generation, with this world and these challenges, which is the more deeply needed?

Who’s at Home in the American Church?

The archetype of the everyman leader has found a home in the American megachurch. Taking a practical, principled approach to talking about God these leaders have attracted droves of seeking people who want a relationship with God in hopes that it will improve the visceral realities of their lives.

In that environment they must lead as examples, embodying a goal to be reached, and like all goals their lives must be attainable and measurable. But is that good enough? Will we win the world by being just a little better, a little more stable and a little more healthy than our neighbors?
The archetype of the mystic has found a home in some of our less traditional movements. They lead from a place of mystery and communion with God. You don’t always know how they do it and that is part of the mystique.

The Telling Difference

But perhaps the most telling difference between these two kind of leaders is zeal. The zeal of the mystic drives them into the unknown, and deeper into the depths of God. They do some of the same things just with an unaccustomed intensity. They are not just curious they are inscacible.  They are not just ready to make a sacrifice they are ready to die. The mentor is held back by the need to relate to people. Their orientation to lead by example actually inhibits what should be their first priority which is to chase God. Christian leaders should not be ordinary. Their lives should cripple our notions about a safe simple and sane life. A mystic isn’t defined by leadership or family or career or hobbies (it’s hard to know if they even have those things), they are defined by their relationship with God. They lead us with a zeal for the presence and preeminence of God and his kingdom.

Of course both are needed. And maybe the answer to which we most need can only be answered by assessing the community from where we come. But in our time, and in our context the mystic is missing. Those of us who follow a mentoring model are encouraged for a time.  But the same simplicity that drew us in becomes frustrating as we grow and develop. Life itself compounds complexity over time, and certainly in my experience, growing in a relationship with an eternal God produces more questions and less obvious answers. Maturity is harder and harder to contain in an easy to remember acrostic. Cancer and divorce defy alliteration. Simply put, God IS mysterious. The more time you spend with him the more he changes you, humbles you and deepens your tolerance for mystery.

I guess I believe we need more leaders who spend so much time gazing on the face of God that they are broken and reshaped by it. We need people who love you madly but who don’t mind if you don’t like them in return. We need leaders who are wildly different than us. We need some martyrs and mystics who hear the voice of God because they wait long enough, because they hunger for it hard enough. We need some people who reject the world and its way, who never capitulate. We need some leaders who don’t care how they dress, not because they are prophets but because their fascination has been so captured by Jesus that they forgot to care about temporal things like fashion or fame.

Still, I understand in the rare cases that these are the only leaders in our lives, we can become discouraged and maybe even give up. The cold realities of carpooling and homework, of incompetent bosses and strained marriages drive us down deep into the frailty of our human flesh. And in that case, if we don’t have practical heroes, men and women who stay friends with God in the midst of life and seem joyful anyway, we are not going to make it.  The mystic makes a lousy mentor, and of course we need many mentors because mystics may remind us of something far away and beautiful, but they are not much help with doing the dishes.

Faith in Jesus must be practical but it must be impractical too. Because being a Christian is about being like a God who became a man…about transcendence in everyday life. But even more than that, it is about a master who did not just join us in the mundane but who found mind boggling intimacy with God and transcendent holiness in the midst of it. The sheer force of the life and heart of Jesus means that, as leaders, our model will always be the martyr bridegroom who died for love and of whom it was remembered, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

All our many mentors should be looking for a mystic to lead them.

Which kind of leader are you? Which do you aspire to be like? Why? Please share in the comments.

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