This is an edited transcript of a talk given to prayer group leaders in the early ’70s. In it Paul DeCelles described what God means by freedom and then talked about how leadership is service that sets others free. He also talked about what leaders should be doing and about the problems within themselves they need to confront. He concluded by commenting on the importance of supporting a leader.
There’s a passage in the writings of Jeremiah which I’d like to read a little bit of. This is in chapter 50.
Lost sheep, such were my people; their shepherds led them astray, left them wandering in the mountains; from mountain to hill they went, forgetful of their fold. Whoever came across them devoured them, their enemies said, “No blame to us; it is because they have sinned against Yahweh their true fold and the hope of their fathers.”
And again in the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 34 [:2] there’s a passage which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, which goes like this:
. . . prophesy and say to them, “Shepherds, the Lord Yahweh says this: Trouble for the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Shepherds ought to feed their flock, yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock. You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the wounded ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost. On the contrary, you have ruled them cruelly and violently. For lack of a shepherd they have scattered, to become the prey of any wild animal; they have scattered far. My flock is straying this way and that, on mountains and on high hills; my flock has been scattered all over the country; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.
And it goes on like that for a long, long time. What I want to talk about in this talk is leadership and being a shepherd. When we’re talking about leadership we may think that now we’re getting into something kind of specific and detailed and it doesn’t pertain to all of us or something like that. In fact, when we talk about leadership we’re talking about an area where there has been a certain kind of failure. We’re talking about a situation where perhaps we ourselves as leaders have been failing and we’re beginning to see maybe some of the consequences of those failures. On the other hand, if we’re not leaders, then we still have to hear about leadership because we have to know what it is and what it ought to be, so that we can in fact support it properly. So that we can respect it as a genuine gift from God and cooperate with that grace.
One of the first things that struck me when I first got involved with the charismatic renewal, sort of at the beginning, was how it was that we’d walk into a prayer meeting and it was really impressive how free everybody seemed to be. I think it was shocking to people who would come for the first time to see the kind of liberality, for example, the crazy gestures or the praying in tongues or the laying on of hands or the songs or even the late hours or some other unusual thing that was going on—everybody felt that he had a right to say what he thought was from the Lord. And so it seemed that everybody was saying something. And the overall impact of it was such that you’d look at something like this or look at our typical prayer meetings today and say, “Man, there’s a lot of life there; there’s a lot of action, tremendous amount of vitality. Something is always going on and it’s very unpredictable. No two meetings are alike. At any time, there’s just so much life.” Well, the Lord came to give us life. Jesus said, “I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” He came to set us free. The work of redemption is the work of setting us free; it is Jesus setting us free from our bondage to sin, our slavery to the enemy.
Now let me tell you what I’ve done: I’ve talked a little bit about leadership and I’ve read something to you about what the Lord thinks about leadership. If people are not being led and they’re going astray then he’s laying a very heavy burden on the leaders. He says, “I’m through with you leaders. I’ll get some more and in fact I’ll be the leader myself.” On the other hand, there is in fact a real sense of freedom in our prayer meetings. And we run into a conflict right away, because on the one hand we feel like we need leaders and on the other hand we want to be free, and we put in antagonism to each other freedom and leadership. And there’s something wrong with that, and I want to talk about that a little.
In fact, Jesus came to set us free, free from sin and free from death, so that we can live forever with him. It says in Scripture that once we were slaves to sin and now we are free in Christ Jesus. Once we were dead but now we live. St. Paul says in his Letter to the Ephesians, chapter two [:1],
And you were dead, through the crimes and the sins in which you used to live when you were following the way of this world, obeying the ruler who governs the air, the spirit who is at work in the rebellious. We all were among them too in the past, living sensual lives, ruled entirely by our own physical desires. . . .
He’s saying that we were dominated, ruled and governed by our own physical desires and our own ideas. Our ideas control us, so that by nature we were as much under God’s anger as the rest of the world, but God loved us with so much love that he is generous with his mercy. Here comes the punch line. When we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life in Christ. It is through Christ that we have been saved, and he raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven.
We are truly free, free sons of God. But what we usually mean by freedom is a little bit different from what Scripture means by freedom. In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter six [:12], he says,
That is why you must not let sin reign in your mortal bodies or command your obedience to bodily passions, why you must not let any part of your body turn into an unholy weapon fighting on the side of sin; you should, instead, offer yourselves to God, and consider yourselves dead men brought back to life; you should make every part of your body into a weapon fighting on the side of God; and then sin will no longer dominate your life, since you are living by grace and not by law.
It goes on to say,
Does the fact that we are living by grace and not by law mean that we are free to sin? Of course not. You know that if you agree to serve and obey a master you become his slaves. You cannot be slaves of sin that leads to death and at the same time slaves of obedience that leads to righteousness.
The point is this: We have to make a choice. We are either going to be slaves to sin and the enemy and death or we are going to be slaves to God. He says, we are either going to be slaves to sin which leads to death or slaves of obedience that leads to righteousness. We think what we mean by “free” is that we’re free to follow God or we’re free not to follow God or free to follow Buddha or Mohammed or whatever else or free to follow our own passions whatever they might be. When we think of freedom, it seems we have a right to choose among equal types of things. And that’s not true, that’s not what God means by freedom.
In the Scripture, what freedom means is vitality, life, vigor, wholeness, enthusiasm, splendid joy, patience and kindness, a fantastic life. God has come to give us all those things as opposed to the old things that we get when in fact we are living according to our passions, living toward death, which is slavery to Satan and to sin. Let me finish reading in Romans 6:
You were once slaves of sin, but thank God you submitted without reservation to the creed you were taught. You may have been freed from the slavery of sin, but only to become “slaves” of righteousness. If I may use human terms to help your natural weakness: as once you put your bodies at the service of vice and immorality, so now you must put them at the service of righteousness for your sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you felt no obligation to righteousness, and what did you get from this? Nothing but experiences that now make you blush, since that sort of behavior ends in death. Now, however, you have been set free from sin, you have been made slaves of God, and you get a reward leading to your sanctification and ending in eternal life. For the wage paid by sin is death; the present given by God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
On the one hand we have Satan and slavery to sin, and on the other we have Christ and life everlasting.
You are free to choose God. Freedom to follow Satan is not freedom at all, only slavery. Freedom in the Scripture means life, abundant life, full of enthusiastic joy for the Lord and all the fruits of the Spirit that follow from walking in the way of the Spirit. You can refuse to do what God wants, but there’s no middle ground. You’re either for Christ or against him, and you’re either for the enemy or against him. There’s no kind of no man’s land in the middle.
Our whole life in Christ does flow from within us. It flows from God. The life which we live in Christ is something that the Father is continually giving to us, it’s coming from without, from outside of us. In fact, in order for us to be really free, to experience all the fruits of the Spirit, it’s necessary for us to commit ourselves to doing what God says, and that’s obedience, and that sounds like it’s the opposite of freedom, but it isn’t. This experience called salvation-freedom that I’ve been describing is meant to be permanent, but it requires vigilance on our part to maintain this kind of experience. Now, we are free but we’re not entirely free right now, and we can all say with St. Paul how it is that the things which I do, I don’t want to do, and the things I don’t want to do, I do. And so we know that there’s something wrong. We just say, “What’s wrong with me?” and St. Paul says, “I know what it is; it’s sin.” What we experience in fact is that sense of being dominated. We experience that slavery to our passions and to sin, and we do feel downcast. We’re downcast by the things of the world, by our work, by some of our friends and some of our acquaintances, by our own flesh and our own inadequacy to do what we set out to do and by the enemy.
Christ came to free us, to give us life and to manifest all the works of the Spirit in our lives, like vitality, joy, enthusiasm and life everlasting. Jesus has died to liberate us and he’s paid the price of our ransom with his death on the cross. He’s led the way and he continues to lead the way to freedom. Jesus said that the truth shall make you free, and if we adhere to the word of God, revealing and enlightening us by his Spirit, we shall be free. But what are we free for? We’re free for service, we’re freed by God to live for his purposes. He intends for us to serve one another. So God has set us free, and it’s freedom to serve, it’s freedom, so to speak, to freely choose to become a slave to one another in Christ and for his sake.
Now we are in fact freed as a people, not just as individuals, but the whole people was just taken out of bondage by Christ. And when one of us is not free then to some degree all of us are not free. When one of our brothers or sisters in the prayer group is under bondage, is oppressed, then in fact we also, to the degree to which we are really brothers and sisters in Christ, we also share his oppression, his bondage, and we are less free. In our prayer groups, our work has to be to set people free. We’ve got to work to make it possible for people to come into the whole life of Christ, into real vitality, the real love of God. When somebody is not free in our group, that’s a call to the leaders to work to set that person free, and that may take a great deal of time. We should work to make it possible for all men to live in the full life of Christ. So leadership is service, service in the Christian community means service to set people free.
Most of the leadership that we’ve seen or experienced or have exercised ourselves has in fact not been liberating. I speak from experience about that. The problem is that we don’t know very much about how to really liberate people. We don’t know, for example, how to speak the truth in such a way so as not to burden a person with the truth but rather to speak the right truth the person needs to hear which will set that person free. You know, not every truth that comes to mind is the truth that needs to be spoken. There’s a time and place to say what needs to be said. We have to know what it is, we have to be willing to say the truth that needs to be heard that will really unchain a person’s life for Christ. Leadership, then, is service that sets others free. It’s part of God’s order for the total liberation of all people.
Usually we think that if somebody’s a leader he’s a boss. We know what a boss does; he tells me what time I have to get to work, what my tasks are for the day. If I don’t do that I’ll get less pay or I’ll get fired or worse. A boss is somebody who sits up on top and doesn’t really know what’s going on with me at all and he couldn’t care less. He simply issues orders; he uses me and that’s sort of what I mean. I don’t mean that every boss we have is a boss like that but we do get the feeling that we’re part of a machine and the boss is the guy who pulls the levers and we’re simply supposed to fit in whether we feel like it or not. And we all know that we’d better fit in or out we go. But that’s not the kind of leadership our Lord is talking about. He talks explicitly about this kind of thing. He says, you know people in authority over you in the world lord it over you. They dominate you, but look at what I’ve done for you. I’ve tied a towel around my waist and I’ve washed your feet. In other words, he puts on the garb of a slave and he did the task reserved for slaves. “So for you I have become a slave and now I’m telling you to do the same thing. You’ve got to be slaves to one another.” Now, that’s not a boss; that’s a leader.
A leader, in fact, is one who fits into God’s plan and is one of the real liberators of his people. Leadership does have some elements of slavery attached to it. Sometimes leaders ask us to do something and there is an element of, well, I ought to do it, you know. But you have to remember that slavery that is from God is slavery to God. And that’s what Christ calls us to, and that’s what he calls freedom.
It’s difficult for Christians to ask anybody to do anything. Usually what we try to do is to paint it in such a way that the person would love to do it. If he had thought of it on his own, he would even have been happier. “The only drawback about the whole thing is that you’re mentioning it to me. If I’d thought of it myself, I would have done it a long time ago.” In other words, in that whole system I’ve tried to describe, we see a kind of rebellion at anything anyone else tells me. And that’s not right. There is in fact a need then for leaders to do some saying and to do a lot of doing, to do what they’re told themselves. But one question that leaders ought to ask themselves is: Is what I’m doing—saying or doing—really helping my brothers and sisters to appropriate the freedom of the sons of God? Am I listening to what they’re saying to me? Do I know what the people’s needs are? Do I care about them? Am I spending enough time planning to see how I can help somebody? Do I look to see what God is doing among us all? Am I a servant?
Now there are lots of ways in which we have been dominated and that we dominate others ourselves. One way is that as we live sometimes we wind up imposing our ideas on people instead of in fact really listening to what the Spirit is saying through them. Sometimes we manifest a kind of false generosity: as I mentioned to the community one time, anybody in the community is perfectly welcome to use my power sander. I don’t need it anyway. I can give from my superabundance. But in fact making a big splash over my superabundance—you know, here’s my sander, everybody in the community use my sander!—that kind of generosity is in fact something that I do as opposed to a need that is met. It’s a false generosity. It’s something which in fact puts a lid on genuine generosity. In fact, in our prayer groups, do we find people who are willing to give up everything to follow the Lord? If no one is doing that in our community we ought to in fact wonder, well, what am I doing wrong? What kind of model of generosity am I showing to people? False generosity is enslaving. It makes people dependent. How much effort, how much money, how much time are you genuinely willing to lay down for the sake of your brothers and sisters in Christ? Going around pretending that everything is fine, with a kind of false face, in fact obscures the face of Christ. And it keeps us from an authentic and deep realization of the kind of generosity that the Lord is calling from us, the generosity that he showed us on the cross.
Another kind of thing we’ve all experienced is this: there is a temptation from the enemy who is always trying to divide us. He tries to get factions against factions—to get his idea against another until he causes a clash.
Then there’s a real action on the part of the world that goes like this. I know of one large corporation which has as a corporate policy that every executive has to be transferred every three to six years. The reason for this is: say you’re living in Chicago and you’re running this operation, wheeling and dealing with a lot of people and you know them pretty well and after about two or three years you’ve made a lot of deals. The thing is that after three years some of those deals are going to be called up—you know, like, “I did a favor for you now it’s your turn to do a favor for me” or “we’re friends aren’t we, why don’t you hire my son?” You know, a whole bunch of deals like that. So this corporation says, none of that. It says you can make all the deals you want to that are favorable to the corporation and at the end of three years they’re going to move you so that all those IOUs are torn up by us when we move you. The idea there is that they don’t want you to get close to one another, to become interdependent. In fact, the corporation seeks to divide people and in fact divide families and a lot of other things as well. By families I don’t mean like taking a husband out of the home. I mean to divide the husband, wife and children from, say, their grandparents and from their other brothers and sisters, nephews and uncles and people like that. There’s a real tendency on the part of corporations to move people in such a way as to continually divide them. That’s part of the way the world works. It tries to keep us apart. And we ought to be very careful about that.
The third thing that I want to mention is the way in which we are manipulated by words. A lot of times we use words, as leaders, which have tremendous power and impact. But frequently we don’t mean them. That is, we have to really reserve power words for power things. We should be careful not to take a really wonderful thing and apply that word to something which is in fact not the real authentic thing. For example, we should not call something a great miracle when it isn’t. We ought to, in fact, be careful about the way we manipulate people with our vocabulary and our words and our emotions and so on. Manipulation is one of the standard techniques for dominating people. You see this a great deal in things like labor unions, politics and prayer groups as well.
So how are we as leaders supposed to function? Well we should work for unity instead of dividing and ruling. Our basic thing should be to try to keep the people together. If you see somebody drifting off, going his own way, gently go after the person and encourage him to come back, to take part, that everybody really does want to know what he thinks about something. People really are concerned about him, and that there are a lot of ideas and right now we can’t resolve which is the right idea. “Why don’t you come on back and we can work this out.” So somebody who is a leader works to keep people together, does what Jesus died for. He tries to keep us all going together.
Also he works at another level of unity within the community. A leader ought to be a reconciler. When there is an argument between two people the leader should become a peacemaker. He needs to, in fact, develop the techniques that are necessary to bring about genuine reconciliation. One thing, for example, that all of us can do is try more and more to be genuine reconcilers. Some of us should teach in our communities how to achieve forgiveness—how to ask for it and to receive it and give it. That is a very important issue for leaders. We have to know how to reconcile people. We also have to know when is the right time not to be reconciled. There are some issues that are deep enough for us to go on a separate way. But we’d better be very, very careful and sure that we’re really in God’s will when we make such splits.
Instead of being manipulators we need to be authentic servants in our lives now for the sake of our brothers and sisters. We should not be too ambitious. Instead of being misleading in our use of language we should be authentic, speak the truth simply, honestly. We should be trying to create a new order as leaders which is the antithesis of the world—a new way to live.
Now, all of us need to concentrate on preaching and teaching. If you feel that you don’t have the gift of preaching and teaching and your community needs it, then ask God to give it to your community and then try it. But we do have to have preaching and teaching in our prayer groups. And along the way we have to develop a kind of ministry of grace of praying with people which is at all times overcoming the work of the enemy in our lives. We have to have people, for example, who can run a prayer room and make it work, where problems can be met and discussed and healed, where something authentic is taking place and lives are changing, where prostitutes are dropping their prostitution, where people who are angry and violent become gentle men, where people who are liars begin to speak the truth, those who exaggerate begin to be humble and those who are rich begin to be a little poor.
With regard to the devil we need in fact to speak the truth. We need to confront him and tell him to go to hell. In general, we need to encourage a climate of freedom, that people must realize that the Lord has set them free, that he died that we may be free and have life and vitality. As St. Paul says in his Letter to the Galatians, “When Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”
There are two big problems that I would like to highlight. One of the biggest problems is that leaders down deep in their hearts really do believe the gospel, especially where the gospel says, if you want to be my disciples pick up your cross and follow me. And so I think that maybe even at a subconscious level we may down deep in our heart know that to be a leader means to suffer. And after all, who really wants to do that? Well, I’d say we don’t have to want to do that, as long as you do it. Our Lord gives a little parable about this problem. He talks about two sons. One son says, “Oh, sure I will, Dad” and off he goes and he forgets to do what he was asked. He doesn’t pay attention and nothing happens. The man asks the other son and the other son says, “You’re always asking me to do things! I won’t do it. No!” And then a little later on he quietly goes and does it. Well, we may very much be like the people who are in the second category, we may complain quite a bit and may not want to pick up the cross and follow the Lord, but let’s do it anyway.
It’s very hard to accept responsibility for leadership of prayer groups. We know down deep in our hearts that there are great things happening in these prayer meetings, that God is moving very strongly, that changes are taking place and we just down deep don’t want to be held responsible for any failure—in the power of God. We’d like to seem humble and say, “Well, I’m not really a leader. George is a leader, or at least he ought to be. He looks like one,” when in fact it’s our responsibility.
Some of us may, in fact, want to be leaders—or at least we want to be thought of as leaders—out of some kind of sense of pride or prestige. We want it that way as long as things are going well, but when the heat is turned up we’d rather not be thought of as the leader of “this crazy group.” “Look at the way they pray with their hands up and everything like that.” I know that in each community where there has been a turning point in the direction of a life together of more than just some kind of a weekly service, as soon as it got off of the weekly service and started ministering to deeper needs of the people and frequently to strangers, . . . a turning point when the prayer group started to become a community was when some people accepted the fact that, whether they liked it or not, God was giving to the community as a whole gifts of leadership in their person. That as soon as people accept the responsibility for what’s going on, a new kind of thing begins to happen in the community as a whole. A new kind of order, a wholeness, a completion begins.
The second half of this, though, is: what about all of us who have to follow leadership? The key thing there is that nobody wants to lead anybody who doesn’t want to follow. Part of it is a mistaken notion which I’m trying to deal with. But leaders are so reluctant to accept the responsibility that they’ll be very ready to duck out at the first signs of pressure. I’ll give you an example. Finally I’m willing to accept responsibility for, say, this thing. I mean, I don’t want to and I’m scared to death of this kind of thing, but here I am, and then you go and you have your first meeting. And somebody says, “I won’t do what you ask me!” And then right away you say, “Nobody could lead you people!” And so you quit and to some degree that’s right. But what needs to be done is for the leader to say, “Okay, I can’t lead people who won’t follow. I can’t work to set everybody free if nobody will in fact support me in this kind of work.” And so this aspect of support is absolutely crucial. Now, we have suffered so much from bad leadership—domination, you know, “You do this for my glorification”—that this is an area where, as a community, as prayer groups as a whole, we simply have to ask God to heal us. He’s got to change our hearts as regards the whole question of headship or leadership, and he’s got to change our hearts as regards submission. But there’s one sure way, I guarantee it, on the Lord’s word, that it will work. Don’t be afraid of it. All you have to do is pick up your cross and follow Jesus, because that’s the way to life everlasting.
Copyright © 1975 People of Praise Inc.