“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”—Jesus1
Most staff members in the for-profit, business-model, leadership-centric culture adapted by the majority of churches could not possibly conceive of an easy yoke and light burden. In fact, it is fashionable to take almost toxic pleasure in burning oneself out in the church, leaving behind ashes, not dust. And we wonder why so many “leaders” crack up, burn out, break down, and drop out.
In posing the paradox of the ox with an easy yoke and a light burden, Jesus is inviting followers to “walk alongside me. Just be with me, and the doing will come naturally.” Jesus paints a picture of himself as the larger ox, and the weight of the yoke is carried by him when we cease striving in our own ways, methods, and ideas to do it our way. When we stop striving to lead, in other words, and relax into following. To be pressed into service may entail being pressed out of shape but not pressured and pressurized.
The leadership myth pervades our structures, our personalities, and our language—in terms like senior pastor, lead pastor, and executive pastor. We have created entire categories of titles to enforce the leadership diversion at best, the leadership perversion at worst.
“To emphasize followership is not to eliminate the notion that we need leaders. It is to flush the definitions, concepts, and practices of flesh-based leadership down the sewer they came from. Leadership within a followership culture is a totally different animal than leadership within a leadership culture. It comes from the kingdom of God, with one and only one Lord. No flesh glories in his presence. And all stand before him as children of the heavenly Father, as we become like children to follow Jesus into the kingdom way, truth, and life. Just as little kids follow their moms and dads, so we follow Jesus as he leads the way. A healthy child is somehow very much like God. A hurting child, His son.”—Calvin Miller2
When leaders shuck their follower identity for something more glamorous, dichotomies and hierarchical positioning rear their ugly heads. Hierarchical positions bend upward while relational postures bend downward. Leadership is a functional position of power and authority. Followership is a relational posture of love and trust.
In 1814, Adelbert von Chamisso wrote a children’s book called Peter Schlemihl, the tale of a man who lost his shadow by selling it to the devil in exchange for a bottomless purse.3 The metaphor of losing one’s shadow is a powerful one. People without shadows are those without a past and thus without a soul.
Is this not the perfect metaphor for the church that has fallen for the leadership myth? We have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. We have lost our identity and our sense of belonging. Even today the word schlemihl is a Yiddish moniker for an awkward, clumsy person who doesn’t belong anywhere. A person without a shadow is a person of no consequence.
A schlemihl church casts no shadow. A schlemihl spirituality casts no hope. Does your church cast a shadow? Is your shadow still with you?
We need a new conversation: a hands-on, brains-plugged-in, soul-alive, no-holds-barred conversation on what it means to be a follower. And that conversation begins with Jesus.
Choseness
Two things make Jesus so unique among teachers—two statements he made to his disciples that define the Leader/follower dynamic of his kingdom.
First: “You didn’t choose me. I chose you.”1 What makes us first followers is not that we love God but that God loves us.
And who did Jesus first choose? Jesus didn’t choose members for his team who would make him look good. Jesus didn’t choose the best and brightest. Jesus didn’t choose the cream of the crop but the curdled milk, the skimmed milk, and the dregs at the bottom of the cup.
It has almost become a truism that we live in a choice culture, that who we are is the sum of our choices, and that one of our human rights is freedom of choice. We are even now in the process of making sex, our very gender identity, a matter of choice. What makes Western culture such a Babylon is not its suspicion that there is no divinity shaping our ends but its satisfaction that this is so and its choice that this be so. The idea of a godless universe is not just accepted but chosen and celebrated.
In “I chose you,” Jesus critiques our Babylonian “choicefulness.” We are not the primary authors of our lives. Indeed, the most important facts about us and the key features of the events that mark us most deeply are unchosen. The world into which we were born, our parents, our first language, our home environment, our genetic makeup—these are not our choices but part of the sovereignty and providence of God’s choice for us. The majority of what shapes our most portentous relationships is unbidden and unpredictable.
The incarnation is the story of Jesus inviting himself into our homes and hearts, our lives and our world. There is a quality of randomness about his pickings, almost as if he used a net and not a fishing line: businessfolk, salespersons, homemakers, tanners, butchers, religionists. But remember this. Before he went out and made what looks like random choices about who his disciples would be, Jesus spent the night in prayer. How much love did it take for Jesus to choose Judas that the Scriptures might be fulfilled?2
Now, as then, it is Jesus who does the choosing. We don’t choose him. He chooses us. But we must be ready to be chosen. Followership can only be a call if we are first “on call”3—available to be summoned: trusting, alert, watchful, open, ready. Before you can be called, you need to be on call.
Which brings us to Jesus’ second defining statement: “Follow me.”
Not my teachings. Me.
And not “listen to me,” but “follow me.”
In contrast to the other rabbis, Jesus didn’t merely invite his students to be attached to his teaching about the Torah. He invited them to be attached to himself. Indeed, Jesus was seen as an opponent of the law just by commanding individuals to follow him and not just the law.
Let’s look at each of these statements a little more closely:
You Are Chosen
Some have styled the Puritans, who started the “chosen nation” notion of USAmerica, the “Taliban of Protestantism.” Not true. Ask me about bundling boards sometime. But for the Puritans “chosenness” was the opposite of randomness. In fact, the worst thing the Puritans could say about someone deceased was that he or she “lived a random existence.” By random they meant dissolute, deficient in self-control and moral graces, a life given over to self-indulgence and excess. The notion that you would actually encourage random anything, much less have it be a synonym for awesome, would have turned their favorite color (red) to scarlet.
Part of our problem with what appears to be Jesus’ purposive purposelessness is the myth of the center and the myth of diagnosis that is part of the same myth. The notion that “Jesus is the center” is contradicted on every page of the Gospels, although we are driven to center thinking because we are looking for the one right answer, the one bull’s-eye solution. A journey to the center is a journey away from Jesus, who is found on the margins and in the edges and around the periphery. The cornerstone is not the center. To find and follow Jesus, we must decentralize our thinking and decenter everything.4
Similarly, we must rid ourselves of the notion that we need a diagnosis before healing can occur. There is an old medical saying that “90 percent of treatment is a proper diagnosis.” Philosophers are notorious for trying to accurately state the nature of the problem. But diagnostics and definitions are key only when the system you are looking at is a mechanical one. In an organic, decentralized system, you can forget diagnostics. You can start anywhere and arrive at treatment. You don’t have to figure out what the problem is to solve it. Triune God is a sphere whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere.
“An accurate statement of the problem is about 100 percent of the solution.” Attributed to Danish philosopher Piet Hein:
“On many levels God does not operate without our consent. Even Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to give her consent for Jesus to be born in her. Love came down at Christmas, but for Love to accomplish his purpose in Mary, she had to say yes. Mary had to say, ‘May it be done.'”5
Each one of us is chosen. We have free choice to decline our chosenness. But each one of us is still summoned to follow. A follower is one who has said yes to being chosen and who announces that human chosenness to the world.
When Jesus was on earth, of course, he called his chosen followers in person. Now it is the Holy Spirit who serves the summonses, and it is other followers who must make the delivery. And we followers aren’t issuing enough summonses.
You Are Chosen to Be a Follower
To follow a person means you are following someone who is alive: you “serve a risen Savior; he’s in the world today.”6
The key issue for Jesus followers is our ability to spot where “he’s in the world today” and our agility in conjoining ourselves to the living Christ. Aligning one’s life with the attributes and activities of God is the highest form of holiness.
Everyone follows someone or something. The only question is, who or what will we follow? Everyone’s life vibrates to some tune. The only question is, who is the singer? The question is not whether we will be religious but only how we will be religious.
No one can escape the suction of the infinite.
An old sailor’s blessing went like this: “Fair Winds and FollowingSeas.”7
When you are sailing in the winds of the Spirit, there indeed will be “following seas.” Do you leave a wake? Do you have any following seas?
Why? Because when you are leaving a wake, that means you are making waves. When you are a first follower, you will make waves that will leave a wake.
Jesus doesn’t want us just to follow in his wake. He wants us to make waves and leave a wake ourselves. Anyone can make a splash. Jesus makes waves. Don’t make a splash with Jesus. Make waves. Look behind you…anyone there? Don’t fear those behind you but embrace them and train them in how to follow Jesus.
Be on the lookout for any hint of a “Saul spirit” in yourself. When the crowds sang of David’s exploits, King Saul should have been at the front of the parade, waving the brightest banner and singing the loudest. Instead, he became swamped with fear and jealousy.
So the question for first followers is this: Are you leaving a wake?
“A believer, after all, is someone in love.” Søren Kierkegaard8
To follow Jesus does not mean that you have all the answers. To follow Jesus does not mean that you are altogether personally. To follow Jesus does not mean that suddenly the shades go up, the light floods in, and the shadows disappear. It just means you keep on moving after the One who has chosen you, the One you’ve said yes to. And as you travel in his footsteps, things gradually—sometimes very gradually—get brighter. For “the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.”9
To follow Jesus means that you are someone in love, someone who is hopelessly, head over heels in love with God. Followers are more than believers. The devil and the demons believe in Jesus. They know he’s the Son of the Most High God. But while they believe in Jesus, they don’t love him. Before they are finally defeated, in fact, they want to take out as many of those who love him as they possibly can.
While heroes are the center of their stories, lovers are but supporting characters in a story that is about the beloved. The story of a follower’s life is not about him or her. It is about the greatest Lover the world has ever known: Jesus the Christ. Followers don’t write their own stories. Followers are co-writing God’s story. And what happens when the main narrative becomes about ourselves and not God’s story? We become our own heroes, obsessed with our own leadership, rather than loving followers, immovably devoted to God.
By © 2012 Leonard Sweet | Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc. | January 2012
