The Most Basic of Leadership Qualifications: Love.

by Dan Holloway

I serve on the board of a church-related nonprofit organization that provides residential housing and health care for approximately 1000 older adults in the state of South Carolina. This organization recently elected a new Chief Operating Officer and the board met her recently for the first time in person. During her opening remarks to the board, this new executive leader took a few minutes to share both her joy in coming into this position and the process she used in deciding whether this was the right job for her. Among her words were these:

“I attended the retirement celebration of Kathy (the previous CEO) a few months earlier and listened to her talk about her deep passion for the ministry of this organization. It was clear that even after many years of working for this organization, this was not just a job for her. This was a calling. She had not just a deep commitment to our ministry, a word she used with great intentionality, but in fact had a great love both for the people she served and the people with whom she worked. I found myself inspired by that obvious love and decided then and there that this was the kind of place I needed to be and that my greatest aspiration was now to love in my job like she had done in hers over so many years.”

I continue to believe that one of the keys to effective leadership in the church is this most basic of qualifications: Love. Do you love the people? Do you love the mission to which you are jointly called? Do you love the chance to help people grow and mature as disciples? Do you love the opportunity of working in partnership with other Christ-followers? People will not follow you until they know that you love them.

This is not to suggest that other gifts are not also required for leadership. Training for the work at hand, the possession of necessary technical skills, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and a solid theological understanding of your place in God’s world are likewise crucial. Yet more important than all of these is the knowledge that we are ourselves loved unconditionally and are called to love others in the name of the One who makes that possible. It still remains our basic calling no matter what our individual vocations may be: “See these Christians how they love one another.”