Servants of the Servant: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

Servants of the Servant: A Biblical Theology of Leadership. By Don N. Howell, Jr. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003, 314 pp., $24.00.

This book sets out to delineate a full-orbed biblical theology of Christian leadership and is aimed at both an academic as well as a lay audience. While recognizing the Bible is not a textbook on leadership, the author nevertheless believes it indeed contains a "theology of leadership" that can be discerned from the precepts, principles, and examples of Holy Scripture (p. 1). As the title of the work indicates, the concept of servanthood is presented here as central to the biblical understanding of a leader.

In his introduction, the author defines leadership as "taking the initiative to influence people to grow in holiness and to passionately promote the extension of God's kingdom in the world" (p. 3). Whether a person leads in a beneficial or detrimental way depends upon whether or not the character, motive, and agenda of the leader are in accord with biblical truth. According to the author, this holds true of leadership in any setting, quite apart from questions of leadership style, the type of organization (church vs. parachurch ministry), or a person's specific role in a given organization. Hence the theology of leadership presented in the volume is applicable to a wide variety of people and organizational settings.

The study is organized as follows: Part 1 explores the language of servanthood in the Bible, first in the OT and then in the NT. Part 2 contains eleven chapters, each of which provides a "leadership profile" of several OT figures (Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, Samson, Samuel, David, Solomon, Daniel, and Nehemiah). After an analysis of the biblical material that pertains to these characters, each chapter provides a summary of the chief leadership qualities of the person in question. Part 3 examines the leadership profile of Jesus, focusing in particular on three "kingdom motifs" that governed how he prepared and equipped his disciples for leadership in the post-resurrection church, which the author summarizes under the rubrics of "harvest through sacrifice," "righteousness through freedom," and "greatness through servanthood." Part 4 follows with five NT leadership profiles (Peter, John, Barnabas, Timothy, and Titus). Part 5 devotes two chapters to the apostle Paul, whose foundational leadership in the early church is plain both in his epistles and in Acts. Part 6, which concludes the work, sets forth the broad profile of the biblical servant leader. Rather than providing merely a compilation of the various profiles contained in the preceding chapters, Howell attempts to relate the biblical material to the three key issues he set forth in the book's introduction, namely, a leader's character, motive, and agenda.

While the author's commitment to the authority of Scripture is clearly stated at the outset and is evident throughout the work, his actual use of Scripture was something of a disappointment. By this I am not referring to the fact that I disagreed with his interpretations of particular passages on occasion, which is only to be expected. Rather, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with the almost exclusive weight the author places on the various "leadership profiles" of biblical characters for establishing his theology of leadership. Though he mentions the need to look at the "precepts, principles, and examples" of leadership in the Bible (p. 1), in reality he gives practically all of the attention to the examples and has relatively little interaction with the Bible's more directly didactic material relevant to the subject (e.g. he gives little consideration to leadership themes in non-narrative portions of the OT). He explicitly states he is attempting to use the historical narrative of Scripture to establish normative principles of leadership (p. 2). While this is no doubt possible in some instances, it is not so in many others, and when applied across the board it quickly falls into a moralistic reading of Scripture that invites eisegesis rather than exegesis. The attempt to paint a "leadership profile" of Joseph (pp. 22-26) is a case in point: the author views Joseph as the "leadership figure" of the narrative, with his elder brothers portrayed as "discredited leaders" (p. 23), and he develops his profile accordingly. I think the author's hermeneutic leads him astray here because, to the contrary, I believe that it can be argued from a narrative analysis of Genesis 37-50 that Judah, not Joseph, is the real "leader" in the narrative (see, e.g., Gen 49:8), and the larger redemptive-historical movement of the biblical narrative certainly bears this out. This points not only to the need for a much more thorough literary and exegetical analysis in order to make assertions about the character, motives, and agenda of various biblical personages, but more importantly to the need for more careful hermeneutical reflection on the use of Scripture and theological method. The author would have been better advised to focus his attention on analyzing key texts that speak directly to the subject of leadership (as he does in chapter 23 in his helpful discussion of Paul's qualifications for church officers in the Pastoral Epistles) before proceeding to this sort of narrative approach.