A leader’s two allies: wisdom and courage
James Bradford
By James Bradford
I used to ask my prayer partners to pray for two things in my life – purity and anointing. I still have those two at the top of my list, but I have since added two more – wisdom and courage. Wisdom and courage are indispensible allies to anyone who leads a Sunday School class, an outreach group, a Bible study, a Fine Arts team, a church congregation or a business for that matter.
It struck me several years ago that most people don’t want leaders who have courage, but no wisdom. Neither do they want leaders who have wisdom, but no courage. Without wisdom, courage becomes recklessness. Without courage, wisdom leads to paralysis. Wisdom and courage, they are both needed to lead well wherever the Lord calls us.
So where do we start? Proverbs 2:4 tells us that pursuing wisdom is like searching for hidden treasure. We pray to receive it, seek the wise counsel of others to hear it, study to acquire it and dig deeply into the experiences of life to find it. The treasure hunt for wisdom, of course, ultimately starts with the heart and mind of God. “For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” (Proverbs 2:6, NIV) This wisdom guides our moral choices personally and resources our leadership publicly.
Wisdom helps us as leaders to know the right questions to ask. If we are asking the wrong questions, then the answers we are getting will side-track us at best. When I went to pastor Central Assembly in Springfield, Missouri, I knew that one of my leadership responsibilities that first year would be to articulate the two or three most important questions the church needed to address in order to move to the next level. That process involved listening to others and listening to God. The Holy Spirit really does speak wisdom into our leadership. And if we get our own egos and agendas out of the way, it really is possible to hear His voice.
Wisdom also helps us to get the right people doing the right things. I believe that, next to praying, this is our hardest work as leaders. Wisdom guides us to delegate wisely and do things in partnership with the right people around us. After all, it is people who the Lord uses to move ministry forward, not just visionary slogans or good intentions. Wisdom also redirects our tendency to go it alone rather than working under authority and in partnership with others.
Finally, wisdom helps us to maintain perspective when things bog down. Forbes once said that the best antidote to short-term discouragement is a long-term vision. Wisdom keeps us focused on that big picture. It bridles our tendencies to become either too self-focused or too despairing. Wisdom thinks intentionally rather than reactively. It steadies our way – even giving us those “ah-ha” moments when everyone else has given up.
Where, then, does courage fit in? If wisdom is the compass that points us in the right direction, courage is the engine that actually gets us moving that direction. Put another way, if wisdom is seeing life from God’s point of view, courage is tapping God’s power to live and lead consistent with that divine perspective.
Three times in Joshua 1 God tells Joshua to be “strong and courageous.” One of those times he tells him to be “strong and very courageous.” It’s that word very that worries me. Courage will always push us as leaders past self-preservation and on to risky obedience. We need courage to lead in God-following ways, courage that is Spirit-given and imbedded in accountability to wise, godly counsel.
After all, it takes courage to face criticism when we volunteer and make mistakes. It takes courage to lovingly confront issues rather than avoid conflict in order to feel better. It takes courage to stand for what is right when we feel out-voiced and out-muscled by contemporary culture. It takes courage to stay humbly servant-minded when it is tempting to be pushy and manipulative in order to get things done. It takes courage to keep going when we feel insecure, people aren’t cooperating, results aren’t coming and we are basically “dis-couraged.” It takes courage from God.
At 19 years old I remember the idea of leadership terrifying me. Yet God’s Spirit gave me courage to lead that first Bible study, courage to leave an engineering career and plant a church, courage to walk in faith when finances were few, courage to finally say yes to leaving the church I pioneered for a much riskier ministry assignment – after having said no twice. Even now I find the Lord giving me courage to take new risks and exercise leadership when the shyness of my own personality would have me shrink back and fear people.
Action, in submission to wise counsel, is the fruit of true courage. And that courage is rooted in the power of God’s Spirit that defeats fear, imparts faith, and works in us the humility to not act on our own or out of human self-promotion. God’s Spirit, the mind of Christ, and cooperation with ministry partners and spiritual overseers can give us the wisdom to know and the courage to act.
So in addition to purity and anointing, I have begun asking people to pray into my life wisdom and courage. Not courage without wisdom or wisdom without courage, but both, for the sake of leading well wherever the Lord calls me.