I don’t know how you define leadership, but I like this line from Peter Senge:

“Leadership is the capacity of a community to bring forth new realities.”

That line may be jarring. Where is the leader in that formulation?

We are accustomed to identifying a leader by the clothes they wear, the way they speak, or the fact that they are holding the mic. But what if that is not the kind of leadership that will help us move forward?

In an article in Leader to Leader magazine in 2003, three leadership consultants pooled their years of observation and experience to ask some simple questions about best practices, change, and sustainability in successful organizations. The conclusion was a radically different understanding of leadership itself.

"The paradox . . . is that the leader must add value to the organization but must not take it away when he or she leaves. An essential part of a leader's job is to become dispensable through creating a culture of leadership that extends throughout the organization."

Too often in ministry settings we have adopted business models and created management specialists, but failed to create conditions under which leadership could flourish throughout the organization. We valued a single kind of leadership, at the top, and disenfranchised the potential of thousands of new leaders elsewhere. Like Ford and GM, we cloned millions of ministry vehicles assuming that conditions would remain constant. I look at most large churches and I see bored, passive people and a few exceptional—and exhausted—leaders.

The problem may be specifically theological. Somewhere along the line churches became aggregations of individuals rather than communities, and the living Body ceased to function. The models of leadership we use in the church seem well designed to burn out a few specialists while disempowering the many. Our failed practice shows we have missed the heart of Paul’s teaching on community: “the priesthood of all believers.”

What we seen modeled is something like a leadership cult, a system well designed to fall apart when key people leave. It is as if we have never heard of the Holy Spirit; as if we don’t believe that there is one living Head of the Body who actively rules and reigns.

If we don’t like the idea of a leadership cult, what is the option?

How about a leadership culture?

What if it is actually true that we all lead all the time, and we can all develop leadership skill and capacity?

What if Paul is talking about all of us when he writes, “Our adequacy is from God, who made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:5-6).

If we create a culture of leadership, then we create the capacity to release innovation, creativity and leadership all around us. It will change our expectations of one another, and it’s funny how often we get what we expect! Leadership will rise up in ways we never would have thought, and we will see it where we did not see it before.

What difference might this make for the new world we live in?

Len Hjalmarson is a teacher, writer, and software developer living among the orchards and vineyards of Kelowna, BC. He blogs at http://www.nextreformation.com