Core Concepts of Servant Leadership

Our Servant Leadership Formation program seeks to offer the core curriculum of the Servant Leadership School of the Church of the Savior of Washington, D.C.  Over a ten-month period, the program weaves together the principles of Communion (prayer, community, call, being with the poor) and the Nature of Power in the Kin-dom of God. Each participant is asked to work with these principles, examining how they apply in his or her daily life in the context of the economic disparity and injustices of our day.

The process includes weekly preparation (including reading, scripture, prayer, and personal reflection) in order to name the critical issues needed to be addressed during group meeting time. Written reflections are important. When not done, the whole group loses the depth of the individual’s reflection.

The goal is to foster the creation of a community of servant leaders who can support, nurture, and encourage each other in their faith journeys following Christ.  We hope to create a Spirit of the Hills Servant Leadership School in Sioux City as a hub faithfully seeking to bring forth the Kin-dom of God in Sioux City.

Servant Leadership Model

When Jesus began his active ministry, he was first blessed by God, as the Beloved, and then gathered twelve to be with him and to be sent out to proclaim the message. These concepts of being with Jesus and of being sent are central to the Servant Leadership Formation Program.

In order to grow in our capacity to put on the mind of Christ, we need first to know who we are and whose we are. The deepening of our being will grow out of our relationship with God – out of our intimate communion with Jesus. The first focus will be deepening our life of prayer. As money is the primary symbol of the way the world thinks, we will also seek to increase our freedom in relation to money and security, as we increase our belonging to Jesus.

In order to grow in the understandings we are given, and to hold fast to alternative ways of seeing life, we must surround ourselves with a community of faith: those people who want to see us reach our fullest potential, to become all that God would have us be. Jesus chose twelve as his intimate circle. We may not have that many who want to walk this way with us, but we clearly need others as our close companions. With this group we will actively seek to create a space where we can listen together to the voice of God.

In the same way that the group that Jesus called around himself was very diverse, our group in the Leadership Formation program is to work with diverse expressions of the human family – encompassing rich and poor, different racial and cultural groups as well as diverse sexual orientations – so that we might learn from one another.

In the fruit of our relationship with Christ and our relationships in community will be our desire to walk with Jesus on his way and to connect directly with the pain of the world. In this way we will be sent out, by Jesus and by our community – as an expression of our common call – to proclaim the message. One of the questions that participants will be asked to consider during the Leadership Formation program concerns where they feel most called to express their deeper belonging to God. Over time, it is very much hoped that new and emerging calls would be expressed in concrete ministry to the poor in our society, sustained at the local level by communities of faith.

The purpose of servant leadership training is:

To develop mature disciples for Jesus Christ ~ or in other words

To learn to love and live as Jesus Christ.

Training is a study-action-reflection model that involves prayer, community, poverty, power, gifts and call, Zacchean economics, and scripture:

Prayer

A deeper experience of ourselves as God’s beloved child through prayer and listening in silence; a deepening congruence in our lives through reflection and affirmation of our life as a gift.

Community

Living together into deeper relationships of mutual exchange and healthy interdependency.

Poverty

	Exploration of our own poverty as we seek to live in community, live with what is different, and love “the other.” A willingness to journey into our own places of powerlessness and to understand what best helps us in our journey towards empowerment.
	Moving out into exploring the poor and broken places of our society and systems that keep persons from living into freedom and human fruition. Asking what “being with” calls for in each unique situation.
	Acts of compassion to meet the basic needs of those who are economically poor.

Power

Exploration of the nature of power and authority, our own and others. The difference between gospel beatitudinal power and the world’s power. What is the nature of violence, and the relationship between despair and violence? What is the inner process of becoming a nonviolent person? How does my understanding of power, authority, and empowerment affect my ideas of “service” and “leadership?”

Gifts and Call

What is the dream of God? What is my part in that dream? What is my high calling and vocation as a human being? What is the deepest longing of my heart? What are my unique capacities as a person? How will I exercise these capacities in light of my own longing; and in doing so, participate with God in the on going pro-creation of the world?

Zacchaean Economics

	Being a steward of God’s Resources
	Sharing the Wealth
	Working with one’s own issues around money and consumption
	Creating new systems of economic justice: micro enterprise development.

Scripture

All concepts are rooted in scripture.

Enjoy These Quotes on Servant Leadership!

There is another realm. To touch it is to live. To become immersed in it is the only worthwhile pursuit. To give it to others, the deepest joy.
Gordon Cosby

For anything new to emerge there must first be a dream, and imaginative view of what might be.  For something great to happen there must be a great dream. Then venturesome persons with faith in that dream will persevere to bring it to reality.
Robert Greenleaf

Servant leadership Definitions

Servant leadership is the inward outward journey, going deeper in our relationship with Jesus while moving into ministry among the excluded and marginalized.

Servant leadership is the journey of discovering “in our deeps we are love.”
Gordon Cosby

“Within each person is a servant.” Servant Leadership is to be first a servant, to lead by serving.
Robert Greenleaf

Servant Leadership is a “conceptual paradox,” that “gains by giving and leads by loving.”
Bennett Sims

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