“Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.” James Kouzes & Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge, 2017.
As I was growing up, I had many role models for leadership (the act of influencing/serving others). I found them in my family, my time in Girl Scouts, the Grange (a national organization for farmers and rural communities), as well as in my “church life.”
I watched my father lead and serve at a local country fair every summer, perform as a union shop representative, and act as local and state officer in the Grange. I also saw him lead within our church family, serving in various office capacities, praying his way through call committees, greeting as an usher, acting as a counter in worship, and helping lead the merger of two parish churches into one congregation.
Living in a rural community in the south, ‘church life’ was the largest part of my life outside of family. Strong pastoral leadership was there but more important were the individual members who guided me along a path of service and leadership. This included the volunteers who taught my Sunday school classes and devoted their time every summer for Vacation Bible School or two weeks of herding youth at church camp. The young adults and parents who served as Luther League advisors (e.g. junior and senior high school students) and shepherded visits to other congregations and to regional youth gatherings. There were church council members who allowed teenagers to plan and execute a worship service each year and so many other volunteers who were the foundation of my church family. They offered up their time and talents that helped me to grow into an adult with a desire to serve as they had.
Over the years, I have tried to live their examples of service and leadership out in my personal, professional, and church life. From my undergraduate and graduate days of serving and leading in the communities where I lived, to serving and leading my profession at the state, regional and national level, I have tried to respond to the needs before me. However, it is within my service and leadership roles in my church families that I have always felt the strongest pull. There has been a milieu of roles, including youth leadership when I was a graduate student in Buffalo, choir membership from the time I was a teen to when my voice finally stopped being a soprano, Sunday school teaching, VBS leading and teaching, serving on various church committees, and serving on church councils as member or officer.
I think that each of these roles has been sustained by the simple idea that leadership is based on the act of serving others. Leadership doesn’t take an advanced degree. It doesn’t require a full-time commitment of an individual’s time. It doesn’t always even require an outgoing personality. What leadership requires is a heart for service, a talent to share, and a call from God that you are needed for a special purpose at a particular time and place. Can you greet members of your church family at the door? Can you assist in helping our children and youth to grow as Christians? All of these questions need to start in your heart.
Lord of Life is at the cusp of starting a new year. Work has already begun in youth and adult ministries, the 2022 mission spending plan, and the continuation of our Share the Light capital campaign. In addition, there are positions to fill for church council at our November congregational meeting.
Leadership and service at Lord of Life take on many forms. How do you feel called to serve within your church family? Remember that where you serve and how you serve are forms of leadership and that they are affairs of the heart.
Serving with joy and gratitude,
Denise Krallman, council president