Abstract

This chapter critically engages with the leadership theme of ‘servant leadership’ first developed by Greanleaf. It begins by briefly outlining the non-religious origins of this theme. The focus then shifts to contrasting this theme with the way Christian scriptures characterise the leadership of Jesus. Attention is given to how ‘servant leadership’ could be interpreted in the light this scriptural insight and in this way opened up to those who lead Catholic schools.

Key Words Servant leadership – School leadership and servant leadership– Greanleaf and servant leadership – the gospels and leadership

Introduction

In this chapter I pick up on the theme of ‘servant leadership’ which has its origins in the leadership writings of Greanleaf. The central argument to be made is that when it comes to Catholic school leadership, to be a servant leader is to have a set of dispositions inspired by the gospels. Moreover, it will be concluded that when it comes to Catholic schools the only acceptable model of leadership is that of the servant leader (as filtered through the prism of scripture).

Servant leadership as a concept underwent something of a renaissance with the publication, in 1977, of Robert K. Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership: a journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Despite its similarities to religious language, the model makes no reference to a religious framework but is inspired by Greenleaf’s reading of Herman Hesse’s short novel, Journey to the East. The essence of the model is that a leader should be a servant first, motivated by a desire to fulfil and develop others. Building on Greanleaf’s work, Larry Spear (who was formerly in charge of the Greenleaf Centre, Arizona) has identified ten characteristics of the servant leader from Greenleaf’s writing: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building a community (2002). An alternative definition of leadership is proposed by Northouse, he depicts it as a “process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (2009, p. 6). If this is applied to servant leadership as outlined above,

then the key word “influences” would be associated less with coercive authority or power exercised over another, and more to do with encouragement and persuasion based on listening and example. However, Northouse argues that leadership is not a trait or characteristic that resides in the leader, but is a transactional event that occurs between the leader and the follower. I will argue against this way of combining Northhouse and Greanleaf when it comes to leadership in Catholic schools. In this setting, to characterise leadership as a mere transaction, rather than a set of gospel inspired dispositions is serious misconception.

There is far more to the theme of servant leadership, but too frequently overlooked. In many respects this is because of the issue first identified by Punnachet (2009). She argues that Greenleaf’s model of servant leadership has been accepted uncritically by the Church and its educational leadership. She maintains that Greenleaf’s anthropology is not Christian and the fact that the model has been co-opted by the corporate world to help make economic profit should also be a reason for caution. While many of Spear’s characteristics or dispositions, such as empathy, healing, awareness, stewardship, initially sound as if they would be at home in a Christian understanding of leadership, they do not in fact have any theological or scriptural grounding and no clear link to serving.

Punnachet (2009) as well as Knight and Baumann (2011) look to the gospels of Mark and John for the paradigmatic texts. However a strong argument can be made for drawing on insights from Luke’s gospel, because it to has just as much to offer an account of servant leadership and in some ways is a more coherent model of a leadership which is at one with the key gospel theme of liberation from everything that oppresses human beings.

The scriptural foundation

In the Gospels, Jesus called disciples. This was unusual. As Lohfink points out, “There is not a single story in the rabbinic tradition in which a rabbi called a student to follow him…a rabbinic student seeks his or her own teacher” (2012, p. 74)). Rabbinic students served their teachers.

This was known as “serving the wise” and included waiting on table, sweeping out the courtyard and washing the rabbi’s feet, as well as the primary purpose which was the study of Torah. What Jesus did was unheard of at the time. On the shores of Lake Galilee, he approached fishermen and invited them to become followers. Peter, James and John, “left everything and followed him” (Lk 5: 11). When the emphasis is placed on him, the radical nature of what happened is underscored.

If the disciples followed Jesus, does that make him a leader? Is leadership even a Christian category? In Hebrews 6:20 Christ is described as our “forerunner” (from the Greek prodromos, the one who runs ahead to reach the destination before others), the one we are to follow through self-emptying into the presence of the Father. Does this make him our leader? Not in the understanding of leadership which was prevalent at the time. Jesus was all too familiar with that model of leadership. The Roman centurion who came to Jesus to plead for the life of his servant, said ‘For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go”, and he goes, and to another, “Come” and he comes’ (Mt. 8:9). This model was based on authority, or the power which one person had over another by virtue of office. This was the prevailing model of the time, which Jesus saw in the ‘kings of the Gentiles’ (Lk 22:25), those who “lord it over” (22: 25) others. This is the command-and-control model of leadership, which is still a necessary feature of military discipline and was, until recent times, the dominant model of leadership in the industrial and corporate world: clear objectives and lines of accountability, leaders and followers, subjugation of the individual to the collective, unquestioned authority demanding obedience.

If Jesus can be considered as a leader, it is certainly not in this mould. If Jesus is considered as a teacher, it is certainly not in the classical rabbinic mould either. Another feature of the rabbinic model which Lohfink points out is that it was not unusual for disciples to change rabbis, in order to learn a different interpretation of Torah. This was certainly not the case with Jesus. As he makes clear, ‘you have one instructor, the Messiah’ (Mt. 23:10). Some versions translate the Greek kathegetai as “leader” (New American Standard Bible), some as “teacher” (New King James Version), but the consensus understanding seems to be that if Jesus is referring to himself here as a leader, it is one who leads others on the path of learning, so teacher or master-teacher is the main idea. For Christians, Jesus is the way, truth and life (John 14:6), not just one option among many. Jesus is the teacher, and one of his final lessons for the disciples was how to be leaders when he had gone.

In all three synoptic gospels, and in John’s gospel, there is teaching on leadership. In the gospels of Luke and John the teaching is located in the context of the last supper. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus has just taken a loaf of bread and offered it to the apostles saying, “this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22: 19). The Greek word used for body is soma, which does not mean the mere human body, but as Robert J. Karris has pointed out, “one’s entire life, the whole human being” (1989, p. 716). Karris comments that if this meal is viewed in a sequence of meals with sinners, then the word “this” should not be limited to a mere repetition of Jesus’ words since “as Jesus has given up his entire life for others and symbolized this by sharing meals with them, so too must disciples give their lives in service to others” (1989). This is what leaders in the Christian church should be like, but their understanding has not yet developed to understand that.

The point is made vivid by contrast, grimly comically so, when almost immediately after this the apostles begin to argue about “which of them was to be regarded as the greatest” (22:24). They have not yet undergone the metanoia, the change of heart, they have been called to. The lessons of the previous discourse on greatest in Chapter 9, when Jesus took a child by his side to illustrate the disposition required of his followers, have clearly not been learned. They are still living in the ‘old Adam’ of rivalry and domination, worldly power and status. Jesus offers an alternative vision of leadership, based on service.

At the beginning of his public ministry in Luke’s account, Jesus was tempted to consider his mission in terms of worldly leadership. In the wilderness, the devil showed him, ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ (Lk. 4: 5). The devil offers Jesus, ‘their glory and all this authority’ (4:5). The devil can make this offer because it is his to give, this is his realm, it has been given over to him and he can give it to anyone he pleases. The early Church had another version of this temptation which we find in John’s gospel, when, after the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus realized that the crowd “were about to come and take him by force to make him king” (Jn 6: 15) and he withdraws to the mountain by himself. In Luke’s account, Jesus resists the devil’s temptations of worldly power and, ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’ (4:14), returns to Nazareth, where he was brought up, to announce the breaking in of the kingdom of God. The power which fills him, however, is not the natural power to coerce and dominate, but the power of the Holy Spirit to liberate human beings from all oppressive circumstances, from everything that binds them down, or diminishes them. From this power flows his authority.

In the synagogue in his hometown, Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah to announce the messiah’s good news to the poor. However, when Jesus reads from Chapter 61, we have a carefully redacted version. In his commentary on the Nazareth Manifesto, Michael Patella observes that, “Isaiah cites vindication to the afflicted, the brokenhearted, captives and prisoners, all of whom would be outcasts in the society of that day. For the gospel, however, Luke changes the recipients of the good news to the poor, the blind and the oppressed (14: 18-19). It is an alteration that enlarges the circle of those mentioned in Isaiah” (2022, p. 1310). By importing the reference to the “oppressed” from Isaiah 58 into a reading from Isaiah 61, the focus on the liberation from all unjust and oppressive circumstances as part of the messianic mission is highlighted. Jesus did not come just to liberate us from our sins, but from their social consequences in distorted and unjust relationships. The three main dimensions of the messiah’s project are presented as proclamation, justice advocacy and, at the heart of the rhetorical pattern, compassion.

It is in the context of this mission that the teaching of Jesus on leadership in Luke’s gospel should be viewed. The ones who lord it over others are the ones who perpetrate injustice and who contrive poverty. They build and maintain what John Paull II called, “structures of sin” (1987, 36). At the last supper, Jesus says, “But not so with you” (Lk 22: 26). This is the moment of revolution, the breaking in of a different kind of leadership in a different kind of kingdom, exemplified by the ritualized self-giving of Jesus moments earlier. The kingdom of God requires a model of leadership never seen before in human history, an approach which will lead to persecution and mockery, inasmuch as it is a threat to models of leadership based on domination. In a complete reversal of all accepted notions, Jesus says that the greatest must become like the youngest, and “the leader like one who serves” (22: 26). This may well be a point directed at those in positions of leadership in Luke’s community, which by 80 AD had institutional leadership roles in place. There will be a need for different offices in the church, as St Paul said to the Ephesians, some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, but the purpose of these gifts was “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph 4: 12). Not to lord it over anybody.

Robert J. Karris concludes his commentary on Luke’s account of servant leadership at the last supper by stating that leaders in the church are to adopt Jesus’ life-style of leadership: ‘Leaders are to be called to repentance and to the obligation to recognize that their talents as leaders are gifts of a beneficent Creator to relieve the lot of the oppressed and to set at liberty the captives enchained by social patterns, custom, and economic necessity’ (1989, p. 716).

Jesus did not just teach a new understanding of leadership, he modelled it at the last supper in rituals of radical self-giving for the life of the world. In John’s account, the disciples of Jesus did not wash his feet, as the rabbinic students did, but he washed theirs. Jesus takes off his outer robe (a symbol of revealing the heart of his identity), wrapped a towel round his waist, poured water into a basin and washed his disciples’ feet. Peter is scandalised by this cultural dissonance. But Jesus insists, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me’ (Jn 13: 8). John Shea brings out an aspect of this scene which is often overlooked: ‘Jesus not only washed the feet, he dried them. They are ready again. The journey now can be continued. And the One who performs this servant activity is none other than God’ (1998, p. 147). Servant leadership is not servile. Its purpose is to serve others so that they are equipped for mission, for the building up of the kingdom of love, justice and peace.

If Jesus is to be considered as a leader, it is in a new mould of leadership, servant leadership, which is oriented to service and liberation in the kingdom of God, self-donative, humble, but courageous and determined. It is a leadership inspired by a panoramic vision of God’s project in human history. Jesus did not seem to spend a lot of time working on the institutional detail of the Church which would gather round his risen presence. The twelve apostles are symbolic of a new Israel, not a kind of leadership council or leadership team. When they died, they were not replaced. However, there is in the Tradition a consistent memory of the special role awarded to Peter, although his understanding of leadership had to be re-shaped. In the final post-resurrection scene in John’s Gospel, Peter illustrates his unreconstructed leadership practice when he says impetuously, “I’m going fishing” (21:3). This is leading from the front according to his own lights. The other disciples go with him, but sure enough, “they caught nothing” (21:3). When Jesus does commission Peter to be a leader, it is to be a shepherd, to “tend my sheep” (21:16), and that role is only conferred following Peter’s declaration of love (philein) which still falls short of the love (agapan) which Jesus asked for twice. But that self-giving love will grow in him as he is led on his journey to the ultimate self-giving, his martyrdom.

Jesus is our Lord, our Teacher, our Saviour. In contrast leadership seems a much more worldly pursuit, which is necessary for organization, good order and common purpose any time human beings come together in any kind of community with shared goals, or the arbitration between different goals. The point is that in the Church this leadership should look distinctive, unrecognisable from the kind of leadership which has characterised most of human history. The next part of this will consider what this leadership might look like in a Catholic setting which has one foot in the world, the Catholic school.

Servant Leadership in a Catholic School

There has been almost a continual tension in the Church over the centuries between a worldly version of power and a Gospel vision of service. The Church at times in the past adopted a monarchical style of governance which was very far removed from its poor founder and at odds with the scriptural texts considered above. In a hierocratic Church the emphasis was on hierarchy and a governance bestowed by ‘orders’. The updating of Vatican II brought the Church back to an understanding of itself which was truer to the Gospel vision of service and self-giving. As it emphasises in Lumen Gentium, “Just as Christ carried out the work of redemption in poverty and persecution, so the church is called to follow along the same way in order that it may communicate to humanity the fruits of salvation” (1964 par. 8). In the mind of the Council fathers, a humble Church is more likely to be an effective witness to the gospel than a top-down hierocratic institution with an embedded culture of reputational self-preservation.

For the instruments of the Church which co-inhabit secular regulatory frameworks, an even more complicated challenge arises. In the private, public and not for profit sectors, the Church has established and runs schools, hospitals, and service charities for a variety of needs.

These organisations sit within secular legislative frameworks of accountability and performance measures, but they are Catholic, confirmed in this identity by the local ordinary and maintained as such by a majority of trustees and confessional or ‘practising’ executive leadership. These organisations are not confessional communities in the manner of a religious order. The staff are more likely to be not Catholic and not required to be so, outside of some ‘reserved’ leadership roles. What Clare Watkins observes about the Catholic school could apply to many types of Catholic organisation, that they are ‘located at the “edge” of the institutional church, in that it effectively interfaces between that aspect of the church and the more fragmented, even chaotic- looking activity of the Holy Spirit in the world’ (2014). Watkins goes on to say that the skill, or virtue (and I would stress the cardinal virtue) which most needs to be developed by Catholic headteachers in this ‘edgy’ environment is practical wisdom, prudence, or phronesis. They need to be attuned to the ‘signs of the times’, as seen through a Gospel lens, with the courage to be prophetic witnesses to justice.

Leading on the edge, or interface between Church and society means that Catholic school leaders will be held to account for performance measures which do not originate within the Church, for example academic outcomes and inspection grades (although the Church will have its own version of these measures). The requirements of a school leader will have a similar set of double expectations. The state will have expectations of a certain level of professional competence and experience required for school leaders (see, for example, the Headteacher Standards (2020) in England and Wales which while not statutory, exert a powerful influence on those appointing headteachers). The Church will be looking for these professional standards but in addition, at least in England and Wales, will be looking for those who fill certain senior posts to be "practicing Catholics”. The definition of this has often been reduced to baptism and regular attendance at Mass, but Bishop Marcus Stock, writing in Christ at the Centre, comments that Catholic schools are distinctive when they “model leadership inspired by the image and life of Christ” (2012, p. 13). In other words, Catholic schools are distinctive when they are led by Gospel-inspired servant leaders.

The sequence of documents which issued from the Congregation for Catholic Education, beginning in 1977 with The Catholic School, said little about the leaders of Catholic schools, or their formation and preparation for the role. The assumption was that the leadership was provided by clergy and religious, and their formation was a given. In recent years, the documents have acknowledged the shift to more lay leadership. The 2007 document, Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A Shared Mission between Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful, states that since Catholic education is about the formation of the human person according to a Christian vision of reality, ‘Catholic educators need a “formation of the heart”: they need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others, so that their educational commitment becomes a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love (cf. Gal 5:6)’ (2007, 25). Servant leaders are loving leaders, and this is not the kind of language that has much currency in the corporate world.

The 2014 document, Educating Today and Tomorrow, A renewing passion, is even more explicit about leadership when it states, ‘If we want to avert a gradual impoverishment, Catholic schools must be run by individuals and teams who are inspired by the Gospel, who have been formed in Christian pedagogy, in tune with Catholic schools’ educational project’ (2014, 1b).

Both of these observations beg the question of the extent to which the Catholic Church has invested in the formation of its lay leaders in education. A question which is pressing, but beyond the scope of this chapter.

Conclusion

A servant leader in a Catholic school, I would argue, should have a certain disposition, namely the disposition of a disciple of Jesus. By this I do not mean a natural disposition, as in a ‘charismatic’ personality, but a disposition as in a virtue, a theological virtue, a habit of loving which is made possible by grace, through faith, sustained and developed by practice in interaction with other people. A disposition of discernment and a settled commitment to social justice, sustained by courage and self-regulation (temperance). They will as Knight and Baumann put it, ‘allow themselves to be transformed by the love poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5). They must internalise St Paul’s hymn to charity or agape (1 Cor 13) which teaches that all the work of Caritas organisations is always called to be more than activity alone’ (2011. p. 61). Servant leaders can make this hymn, as Benedict XVI puts it, “the Magna Carta of all ecclesial service” (2005 par. 31).

Servant leaders, then, will be on a journey, in faith, of transformation, of sanctification, responding to the universal call to holiness. This of course is true for all disciples of Christ. The difference is that servant leaders are fulfilling their vocation as Christians in the world in a leadership role inspired by the Gospel. This is the source of their ability to navigate the tensions of the dual system, to manage human performance, but in a compassionate, adaptive and considerate way, to resist the temptations to coercive power and manipulations; to develop and practice supervision that promotes personal and professional development and preserves the dignity of the person. They will be “spiritually enabled to critically discern, apply and transform secular leadership competencies and strategies in the spirit of Christ, of service and of self-giving love” (2011, p. 61).

They will, as the 2014 document said, be finely tuned to the purpose of Catholic schools, which the Council’s Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis, states as preparing students “to promote efficaciously the good of the earthly city and also…for service in the spread of the Kingdom of God” (1965 par. 8). The vision of integral human development, or what Gaudium et Spes calls, “a truly human life” (1965 par 26) is at the heart of the Church’s vision for Catholic education and is at the heart of a servant leader’s vision and mission for his or her setting. The servant leadership in a Catholic school will help to generate an ethos in which human flourishing, the liberation from all that degrades the human person, will be the driving force. In the first instance, the formation of the student, their holistic growth in knowledge and wisdom guided by an understanding of the world as it is and inspired to be agents of change for the world as it should be. It is no less than the renewal of civilization, the creation of a social order which is “founded on truth, built in justice and activated in love” (1965 par. 26). With that formulation, the council fathers take us back to the synagogue in Nazareth when the servant messiah announced a mission based on proclamation (truth), Justice advocacy (justice) and compassion (love).

In light of the analysis in this chapter the definition of Gospel-inspired servant leadership can be framed in these terms (adapting the Northouse formulation). Servant leadership is a disposition, the virtues in the service of a leadership role, by which a person influences a group of people by example, with vision and accompaniment, to achieve the common goal of building up God’s kingdom of love, peace and justice in their setting.