10. Building Community
| The servant-leader senses that much has been lost in recent human history as a result of the shift from local communities to large institutions as the primary shaper of human lives. This awareness causes the servant-leader to seek to identify some means for building community among those who work within a given institution. Servant-leadership suggests that true community can be created among those who work in businesses and other institutions. |
| Larry Spears |
Leaders do not work in isolation, but they lead groups of people who have something in common, a particular interest or belief, a work location, a neighborhood. In other words, leaders exist only in the context of communities. Building community is hence a natural part of being a servant leader.
God did not create us to be alone or to function in isolation, but to live and work in community with others. After God created man (that is the first man, Adam), we read in Gen 2:18:
And the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a companion who will help him."
In the twelfth chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, he talks about the need to be in community, because we all complement each other with our different strengths and talents. Paul draws a comparison between the human body and the body of Christ, that is the church, or the community of believers (Rom 12:4-5):
4Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, 5so it is with Christ's body. We are all parts of his one body, and each of us has different work to do. And since we are all one body in Christ, we belong to each other, and each of us needs all the others.
Paul treats this concept of community again in his first letter to the Corinthians (1Co 12). He points out that we have received our godly gifts not just for our own good, but for the common good (1Co 12:7):
Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. (NIV)
Moses was the preeminent leader of the people of Israel, and formed the community of God's people in the Old Testament. Moses got his commission from God in the book of Exodus (Exo 3:7+10):
7Then the LORD told him, "You can be sure I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries for deliverance from their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering.
10Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh. You will lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."
Four large books of the Bible (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are filled with the accounts of how Moses led the Israelite community over more than 40 years, until they reached the promised land (Deu 34:4-5):
4Then the LORD said to Moses, "This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land." 5So Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, just as the LORD had said.
Most importantly, Moses held the community together in times of quarrels, such as when the people rebelled against him for lack of food in the desert (Exo 16:1-3):
1The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the LORD's hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death." (NIV)
God then promised and promptly delivered bread and meat in the form of manna and quails, and Moses addressed the grumbling Israelites (Exo 16:6-7):
6So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you will know that it was the LORD who brought you out of Egypt, 7and in the morning you will see the glory of the LORD, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?" (NIV)
Dealing with discontent and divisive issues is a most important part of building community, because if left unchecked they can be so destructive. It is not surprising then, that this is also a prominent theme in the New Testament. In the chapter on awareness, we already examined how Jesus addressed arguments in the small community of his disciples.
After the death of Jesus, the Christian community arises, that is the community of believers in Jesus as the promised Messiah. (See the book of Acts, and especially its second chapter, Acts 2, for the beginnings of the early church.) Peter and Paul become the foremost leaders of the Christian church in its first decades. In his many letters to individual churches, Paul often stressed the importance of harmony, for example in 1Cor 1:10:
Now, dear brothers and sisters, I appeal to you by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ to stop arguing among yourselves. Let there be real harmony so there won't be divisions in the church. I plead with you to be of one mind, united in thought and purpose.
New communities usually start as groups of like-minded individuals, in this case as a group of Jews who believed that Jesus was the Son of God. As those communities grow, they have to deal with the question of diversity, that is essentially the question of how inclusive they want to become. This was true for the early Christian church, which debated whether the Gospel should be preached only to the Jews, or to the Gentiles as well. In the tenth chapter of Acts (Acts 10), we see Peter's struggle with this issue, and how God intervenes through a dream (in which Peter was told to kill and eat "unclean" animals), and Peter's encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius. The following verses summarize how Peter's beliefs were turned around (Acts 10:28,34-35):
28Peter told them, "You know it is against the Jewish laws for me to come into a Gentile home like this. But God has shown me that I should never think of anyone as impure.
34Then Peter replied, "I see very clearly that God doesn't show partiality. 35In every nation he accepts those who fear him and do what is right.
Paul was clearly the strongest proponent of taking the Gospel to the Gentiles, and making the Christian community a more inclusive one. We read that Paul was trying to convince the Jews and Greeks alike (Acts 18:4), and his three missionary journeys attest to his efforts of reaching out to many nations.
Paul made it clear, that the body of Christ, the community of believers, is a diverse one with respect to race, cultural heritage, gender and social status. First, in 1Co 12:12-13 we read:
12The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up only one body. So it is with the body of Christ. 13Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into Christ's body by one Spirit, and we have all received the same Spirit.
and again, in Gal 3:28:
There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. For you are all Christians - you are one in Christ Jesus.
Most organizations nowadays are very large and accordingly diverse. This diversity is an asset, but also a liability. A diverse group of people can only become a true community when all are willing to look past their differences and to focus on what they have in common. I work on the campus of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), which is a community of more than 50,000 people from all over the world. UCSD has a set of principles of community, which include such values as quality of life, dignity, cultural diversity, tolerance, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, and decency.
A characteristic of today's urban America is the separation of work and home. Long gone are the days of store owners living on top of their family owned businesses. Instead, the typical American may belong to two or three separate communities, a work community in one location, a living community in another, and perhaps a worshipping community in yet a third location. This separation is dangerous, because it diminishes the time spent in each community and hence in each case decreases our sense of belonging and identity.
A sad case in point is the apartment complex in which my wife and I lived for the first six years of our marriage. In all those years, I barely got to know our next door neighbors, yet our building alone had 16 apartments, and I never even met most of the other inhabitants. Our current townhouse complex feels much different. Within six weeks of moving in, we had met more neighbors than in the six years of living in the apartment complex. Perhaps it is the fact that many of our neighbors are retired and spend more time at home. Perhaps it is the common sense of ownership that helps create a stronger community. Nonetheless, I must confess that I should be doing more to establish and strengthen ties with our neighbors.
On the other hand, I do try to diminish the separation between home and work. I live only two and a half miles from the office, and walk to and from work most days. My wife is a gourmet cook and she loves to entertain. We have had most of my co-workers and bosses over to dinner at our place at least once. Recently, a woman from our New Jersey location spent a three month sabbatical in San Diego. We had her over for dinner several times, and she told us that those dinners were her only home cooked meals outside of her San Diego apartment. More importantly, though, my already good working relationship with her has been strengthened even further, and my wife has gained a new friend.
As I finish this essay on servant leadership, I contemplate my challenges for the months and years to come. First, I pray that God will help me to grow as a servant leader, and to serve those whom he has put in my care. I hope that as I serve others, I can spread the concepts of servant leadership, and hence contribute to a better world in which to live and work. May I be measured against Robert Greenleaf's [2] definition of servant leadership, in which he wrote
The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?
For Thought and Discussion
- Think about the various places where you have worked, and about the neighborhoods in which you have lived. How much sense of community did you feel in each of those places? If some were stronger than others, what were the differences between them?
- Make a list of the desirable qualities of community, such as safety, strength, trust, etc. As communities grow, how are each of these qualities affected?
- Consider the disciples during Jesus's ministry. What did Jesus do to build this community? What principles of community were evident from Jesus's interaction with the disciples? Please support your answers with Scripture references.
