What is leadership?

“Student leaders are awesome! Student leaders are sweet! Student leaders are awesome! Stand up and stomp your feet!” shouted Danny Paschall and Matthew Hooper, Biola University’s Dean and Assistant Dean of Students respectively, before proceeding to perform a suave stomp-clap combo and finish their cheer to the amusement of their audience of student leaders. The cheer officially concluded the celebration of the end of student leader formal training and the beginning of the madness of move-in weekend.

I’ve found, especially over the course of the last month that student leaders are awesome and student leaders are sweet – particularly those emulating and striving after the self-sacrificial attitude of Jesus. They’re strange: their leadership does not consist primarily in displaying strength, or espousing persuasive opinions, but in living a life of self-sacrifice. They do things as simple as washing one another’s dishes, and as difficult as changing personal plans to care for someone in need. However, I’ve also found that their awesome-ness and sweet-ness are a direct result of the thoughts, efforts, and self-sacrifice of their own leaders, those who pour their lives into these students.

The ResLife team at Biola University is truly impressive. I’ve become more intentional about an act as simple as remembering names, because they were intentional about remembering mine. They taught me, hands on, that this small gesture can be incredibly edifying. Maintaining eye contact, listening well and responsively, exercising compassion, putting others before you – it all sounds rather simple, but in its simplicity there’s difficulty. There’s difficulty because there’s sacrifice.

And this is the crux of the issue: what is good leadership? Good leadership does not, and never has been about self-glorification, self-promotion, “Me, Inc.” It’s about realizing that to live consists in loving, and loving consists in dying to oneself and living to God.

Move in weekend provided me with another incredible incarnate example of good leadership. Each staff for each dorm woke-up early to make sure we would be good and ready to greet the incoming class, to assure them that we were excited for their arrival and excited for the year ahead. Waking up early, though, was in our job requirement. Move-in weekend was a paid gig for us. It was not a ‘paid gig’, however, for Dr. Barry Corey, our university president, and his ‘Un-PAC’ team (President Advisory Committee). Nonetheless, Biola University faculty and staff do not merely preach servant leadership, they live it: herein lies the power of their message. DBC (as the student body has affectionately begun to refer to our president) and his team were bright eyed and bushy tailed as could be expected that Friday morning. In an unworldly fluid change of roles, the President and his team took their orders eagerly from the Resident Directors in order to greet the incoming class, to assure them that we – the RAs, the RDs, the faculty, the staff, as well as the President and his team – were excited for their arrival and excited for the year ahead.

The part that convicts me to my core, however, is not just that the President of Biola University set aside the day to help freshman move into their dorms, it’s the manner in which he did so – the humble, unassuming, ready manner in which he did so. There was no introduction, no name-tag, no post-performance applause. I reveled in imagining what would go through the minds of parents and students when they made it to the end of move-in weekend and found themselves listening to this man deliver a gospel-infused, Christ-centered message on his hope for their son’s and daughter’s time at Biola at the parent orientation dinner. I reveled. And I was inspired – I was inspired to think on how I might make my year an imitation of such humble service, such Christ-like humble service. Christ-like humble service: the balm for the pain and havoc wrecked by sin, the only power against the downward spiral, the degradation of ‘natural selection’, of greed, of the lust for power.

It is because Dr. Corey, the ResLife team, the faculty and staff, the student leaders, and Christians all over the world, abide in Christ that they can naturally live and serve - that they can lead like Christ. It is through reading, praying, taking time for solitude, silence, practicing fasting, pouring their lives out in service and continually celebrating the work of the cross, that we can truly provide our communities, and consequently our world, with exemplary leadership.