Servant Leadership for Slow Learners (J. David Lundy)

from an email December 9, 2005

I’ve been able over the past few weeks to carve out some time and read this great book on servant leadership. The author J. David Lundy was the pastor at my church for around 5 years, (he’s actually the man who baptized me), he’s served as a missionary to India with Operation Mobilization and now he’s the International Director of another missions organization called Arab World Ministries. So ya... he’s a good guy... and a great author. Here’s some quotes to wet your appetite. If you want to borrow this or any other book I have over the Christmas break just let me know, and I’ll be more than happen to lend it to you.

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The spiritual leader instinctively knows what things to be dogmatic about and what things to be pliable about. (pg 32)

The good leader recognizes that only to some extent can he or she be all things to all people and so must learn to ‘lead to his strength and staff to his weakness’. (pg 37)

What you are signalling to your people when you allow them to interrupt you is that you are not in the business of controlling them but, if anything, of being controlled by them. (pg 50)

John Wesley knew the wisdom of this approach to leadership training. Seldom travelling by horseback alone, he deliberately took preachers along so they could observe him up close, thus learning from him. He also listened to these companions preach and critiqued their messages for them. Effective leaders are trained when this kind of exposure to a veteran leader is forthcoming. (pg 53)

Discipleship in action!

Since readers make leaders there are few more influential ways to impact young lives than to get them reading the books and articles that have changed your life! (pg 59)

One of the best ways that people can learn from you as a leader is to invite them into your home to spend time with them over a meal. Hospitality is an increasingly missing virtue in the evangelical church in the west; we have opted for making our homes virtual fortresses, cocooning ourselves so as to escape the pressures of contemporary life. (pg 60)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated ‘The prayer of the morning will determine the day. Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and our relations with other people very frequently have their cause in the neglect of our morning prayer.’ (pg 123)

The person who doesn’t read is not better than the person who can’t read. (pg 134)

Even though they may be action-oriented, as indeed I am, they creatively make time to read in their busy schedule. (pg 136)

Strategic thinking is one of the most critical skills a leader must have. You must view every problem from 360 degrees. You must know your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of your organization, your antagonists, and your supporters. (pg 171)

Harry Truman, American president following the Second World War, perceptively observed that ‘not all readers can be leaders. But all leaders must be readers.” (pg 222)

Let us be then like John Stephen Akhwari of Tanzania, who represented his country in the 1968 marathon. Along the way in this final event of the Olympics, he fell hard and injured both his ankle and his knee. Undeterred, he got his leg wrapped in a bandage that soon became bloody. Nevertheless, he continued the race. Long after an Ethiopian had won, limping into the entrance of the stadium to run the final lap of the 26 mile race, Akhwari completed the race. Asked later by a reporter why he had bothered to finish a race he could neither win nor finish well in, the Tanzanian said: ‘My country did not send me seven thousand miles to being a race; they sent me to finish the race.’ (pg 232)

Good old Tanzania!!!! May we all be like Akhwari and finish well the race set before us!