Fraternity-Testvériség, 1984 (62. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)

1984-10-01 / 4. szám

Page 4

TESTVÉRISÉG

Officiating clergy, Members of the Board of Managers, Bethlen Home: Reverends Paul Kovács, Dezső Abraham, Imre Bertalan, Stephen Csutoros, John Butosi, Kalman Adorján, Zoltán Kovács.

The wrong way of leadership is to lord over the subjects with organizational authority: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord over them and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you!” (25-26.) In these words Jesus condemns all organizational order which seeks advantage rather than service. Lording over people does not deserve the name of leadership. There is no real leadership in the exercise of authority which is demanded rather than earned. “It shall not be so among you!” — yet surely it has been so among us, both in church and Federation. One of the “princes of the Federation” told me when an election was held by tricks and lawlessness and mean tactics: “John, this is how we have done it for decades!” ... This is wicked leadership, false greatness!

The only real greatness and true leadership for the disciples lie in service. “Whoever would be first among you must be your servant-slave” (26- 27 “doulos,” not “diakonos.”) By this statement Jesus is turning the world upside down, but by his example He challenges all of us. “Even as the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (28). True leadership is to drink the cup of Jesus and to be baptized by His baptism. This has two aspects. First, the capacity to feel the pain of others, and second, the willigness to put ourselves into conflict with evil and dangerous forces. This is what we see in Jesus: He exposed Himself voluntarily to the pains and aches and hurts of others so much that their pains was His (Isa. 53). And He was willing

to pay the price of doing good! He could have stayed in Galilee to consider the lilies how they grow (Mt. 6:28), but He preferred to go to Jerusalem to consider the thieves in the temple how they steal... In his conflict He died, but cleansed the Temple of God. That is leadership! Servant leadership in which we are called to share! ...

We are called to be the servant people of God not only in individual, personal leadership, but in corporate, community leadership as well. It was on March 28, 1984 when this challenge struck me with elementary force. On that day, Dr. Thomas W. Gillespie was inaugurated as the fifth president of Princeton Theological Seminary. His inaugural address was entitled, “The Seminary as Servant.” Masterfully he pointed out that the paradox of servant leadership is solved only in Jesus Christ who became our Lord precisely because He was the Servant of God: ministering to human need by liberating them from the powers of sin and death, and by His own death on the Cross effecting that liberation. Out of this servanthood emerges His lordship.

But then Dr. Gillespie raised the question: what is the institutional significance of this servant leadership? Part of his answer was that institutions like humans tend to become self-serving; yet unlike humans, they lack the capacity for self-transcendence. Reinhold Niebuhr made the same point when he wrote about “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” People are moral because they can if they choose serve purposes beyond self-interest; institutions are immoral because they serve only the purpose for which they were created. As a matter of fact, the problem has intensified lately for we are discovering our inability to make our institutions, particularly the bigger ones, serve the purposes they were formed to serve. Instead of being means to ends they become ends in themselves. Thus William Stringfellow identifies institutions with the powers and principalities (Eph. 6:11-12) which falsely claim autonomy from God and dominion over human beings. The “fall” of the institutions means that instead of humans exercising dominion over their institutions, their institutions turn on them and exercise dominion over them. These principalities feed on the undying illusion that at least some institutions are benign, while basically all of them are malignant.

What should we say to this? Perhaps many of us feel somewhat uncomfortable with Stringfellow’s language of biblical realism, but few of us can deny that many modern institutions function in the manner described. However, we as Christian disci-