If You Want People to Follow You, They Have to Know You Care

More than one book has been penned (well, key-stroked) about Leadership Principles According to Jesus.  I've never been entirely comfortable with the everything-you-need-to-know-you-can-find-in-Scripture school of Christianity.  Most of what you need to know, certainly.  All the really important stuff you need to know, absolutely.  But everything?  Biblical truth transcends time and place, but I'm not sure even Jesus would claim that the Gospel narratives of his earthly ministry provide a leadership textbook for the 21st century.

But...even if Jesus doesn't tell us everything, that doesn't mean we shouldn't practice everything Jesus tells us.  I'm thinking of one Leadership Principle in particular: If you want people to follow you, they have to know you care about them.

Jesus calls his disciples, they drop literally everything to follow him.  Sure this is Jesus we're talking about.  Being the Messiah does give your call street cred that your average run-of-the-mill ministry opportunity doesn't have.  And Jesus undoubtedly had a charisma (fully human yet fully divine) that pretty much immediately banished any second thoughts his disciples had about answering the call.  But, for all that, Jesus was relentless in communicating through words and actions not only that he cared for those who followed him, not only did he love them, but he was willing to die for them--even when they had no idea what he was talking about when he spoke of what awaited him on that hill outside Jerusalem.

"A new commandment I give you...love one another as I have loved you."  That would've made no sense apart from Jesus' manifold efforts at compassion and caring for his followers...caring that went way beyond saying, "I care about you" or "I love you," though Jesus undoubtedly said that often enough.  Jesus cared enough about his followers to invest time in them, to teach them (over and over in the face of their thick-headedness), to warn them, to heal them, to tell them the truth that following him would mean rejection and suffering and daily shouldering their own cross.  And for all who said, "this is too hard," and turned back, we know of the relative handful who stayed and followed and, ultimately, understood...a handful that grew into a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions.  And that relative handful: they followed because Jesus was the Messiah, was charismatic, because he was the Way to life.  But they followed, too--in fact, until they did figure him out, probably followed mostly because--Jesus cared about them in profound and extraordinary ways, and they knew it.

I don't know anybody (OK, hardly anybody) who answers the call to ministry for the paycheck.  Most churches don't have the resources to pay people enough to do the work.  It's too hard, too costly.  People do the work because they are called and they can't not do it.  And they follow a leader because they buy into the vision and believe in the mission but, most of all, I think, because they know the leader cares about them.  In my experience, at least, people will not follow someone they think doesn't care about them no matter how compelling the vision or urgent the mission.  They don't expect the leader to die for them, but they do expect the leader, through words and actions to say to them in healthy, appropriate ways, I care about you.