True leaders have no followers!

Posted by Gertjan Goldschmeding in Business, Spiritual | 0 comments

Last week the pastor of the Amersfoort Church (Ben Schmidt) and I took a short mission trip to the Ukraine. Pastor Ben preached the second service in Kiev Good News Church (founded by Rick Renner, pastored by a wonderful Ukrainian pastor David) and I preached the first service. Prior to Kiev we flew to Odessa where the people were so excited and hungry that the pastor announced a spontaneous meeting for all leaders the following morning. Since I did not have time to prepare anything I just started to share about empowering leadership from my heart. I noticed what I shared made a lot of sense to the pastor but some of the Ukranian leaders openly rejected the message a first. During this time of confrontation God showed me how the Kingdom of God is directly opposite of the system of Communism. Unfortunately the so called democratic systems of government in the west are not in line with the Kingdom of God either. But since communism takes away the initiative from the people, it also takes away the responsibility from the people and people slowly die, while remaining alive. When you want to restore the initiative with the people they oppose it at first because the are afraid of the responsibility. When God allowed Adam to name all the animals he did not only give Adam tremendous freedom and room for creative expression, he also gave him an awesome responsibility.

Much of the Church world, including all the new charismatic movements, have had insecure leadership that led to a system where all the initiative and control remained with the leadership. Leaders needed to be respected, honored and submitted to. While all of of that is true and essential in a church, the heart of a true leader should be to give room and responsibility to those he leads. Jesus is not a king of subjects, but a king of kings. We should not be a leader over followers, but a leader over leaders. We should desire, empower and allow our leaders to go beyond where we have gone, to take things to a higher level. Just like God empowered Adam and Jesus empowered His disciples. Remember Jesus told us that we will do greater works than He did? Most leaders are afraid that people under them will do greater works than they. It’s time for the Church to get serious about servant leadership. It is time to really adopt the leadership system of the Kingdom of God! It will require much of leaders and those following leaders. But there is no alternative! His Kingdom will advance, whether you cooperate or not! Become a true leader today, become a leader of leaders!

View a short video of our trip to Ukraine here: