What Christian leadership is · BereaWay Academy

🎯 Objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

give a biblical definition of Christian leadership;
distinguish leadership that comes from a role from leadership that comes from influence and example;
recognize the areas where you are already leading, even without a title.

📖 Receive

Read John 13:1-17 slowly, the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Then read 1 Peter 5:1-4.

As you read, ask yourself: what did Jesus want to teach with that gesture? And why does Peter, who protested that evening, write many years later to the elders that they should shepherd the flock “not by constraint, but willingly”?

🔍 Examine

All called, some to lead

Every believer is called to serve. Peter writes that we are a “royal priesthood”, a people God has acquired to proclaim his praises (1 Peter 2:9). Paul adds that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ for the good works he has prepared (Ephesians 2:10).

Within this general calling, God entrusts some with a particular task: leading others. It may be the pastor or the elder, but also the person who coordinates the Sunday school, a youth group, worship or a home group. It is a privilege, and it is also a great responsibility.

A definition: to lead is to influence

Many Christian writers who reflect on leadership arrive at the same word: influence. A leader is someone who, through their words, their choices and above all their example, moves other people in a direction.

Christian leadership adds two decisive things:

the direction is not what the leader likes, but the will of God;
the strength does not come from personal charisma, but from the Holy Spirit at work in a consecrated life.

So we can put it like this: Christian leadership is the service of someone who, called by God, influences other people to walk in God’s will.

Authority received, not owned

In the Bible all authority comes from God (Romans 13:1). This is even more true in the church. Peter reminds the elders that the flock is not theirs: it is “the flock of God” that is “among you” (1 Peter 5:2). The leader is a steward, not an owner.

📌 A principle to remember Those who lead in the church do not hold people of their own, but people who belong to God. One day they will give account to the “chief Shepherd” for how they treated them (1 Peter 5:4; Hebrews 13:17).

This truth guards against two opposite errors: the arrogance of those who feel like masters, and the fear of those who think everything depends on them.

The model of Jesus

In the upper room the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest (Luke 22:24). Jesus did not give a speech about leadership: he took a towel and washed their feet, the job of the lowliest servant in the house. Then he said: if I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14).

This is the Christian reversal of greatness. We will look at it more closely in the next lesson, but one point is already clear: in the Kingdom of God, we lead by serving.

Leaders in the Bible

Scripture offers us many examples, all imperfect but instructive:

Moses, who leads a difficult people and intercedes for them;
Joshua, who learns by serving and then leads with courage;
Nehemiah, who combines prayer, vision and organization;
David, a king after God’s own heart, yet capable of serious falls;
Paul, who plants churches and trains co-workers.

None of them is a spotless hero. All of them show that God uses weak people who rely on him.

Position and influence

There is leadership that comes from a role: the church appoints you as a leader, and you have formal authority. And there is leadership that comes from influence: people follow you because they trust you, because they see consistency between what you say and how you live.

A title without trust produces forced obedience or resistance. Trust without a role can bear fruit, but sometimes also confusion. The mature leader combines the two: they receive a task from the church and carry it out by earning people’s trust every day.

Leading by example

Paul writes: “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). And the letter to the Hebrews invites us to remember the leaders who spoke the Word of God to us and to imitate their faith (Hebrews 13:7).

This means that a Christian leader teaches more with their life than with their words. An old saying puts it well: words teach, but examples draw people along.

Three words to understand well

You often hear that a good leader must be effective, efficient and excellent. These are useful words, if we understand them well:

effective: reaching the goal God has set, not just any result;
efficient: using well the time, energy and resources God has entrusted;
excellent: doing things with care, “as to the Lord” (Colossians 3:23), not to be seen.

None of these qualities replaces character. But a holy character is no excuse for careless work.

Christian leadership in a diagram

We can sum up what we have seen so far as a path. Everything starts with God, who calls and entrusts a task. Even before skills, God shapes the character of the one who leads. From a transformed character comes credible influence, which is expressed in service. The fruit is not the leader’s fame, but people who grow in faith. And in the end the glory returns to God, where it all began.

flowchart LR
  A["God calls and entrusts"] --> B["Character shaped"]
  B --> C["Credible influence"]
  C --> D["Service"]
  D --> E["People who grow"]
  E --> F["Glory to God"]

The diagram also shows where leadership gets stuck. If we skip character and jump straight to influence, we get people who are skilled but not very trustworthy. If we pursue service without the calling, we risk running on our own. If the fruit becomes our own image, the chain breaks at the very last link.

Comparing this with the way the world often thinks about command helps us see the difference:

	Leadership as power	Christian leadership
Where authority comes from	From position or strength	From God, who entrusts it (Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 5:2)
What it is for	To get results for oneself	To help others grow (Ephesians 4:11-12)
How success is measured	Numbers, visibility, control	Faithfulness to God and people’s maturity (1 Corinthians 4:2)
Attitude	Being served	Serving (Mark 10:43-45)

A real-life case

The case is invented, but common.

Luke is thirty-two and for a few months has been coordinating his church’s youth group. He has never studied theology and doesn’t feel like “a leader”. At first he thinks his job is to organize the evenings and find someone to bring food.

After a few weeks he notices something: the young people are watching him. They notice whether he arrives on time, how he talks about the church leaders, whether he really prays or only when it is his turn. One young man tells him he has started reading the Bible again because he saw Luke doing it at a camp.

Luke realizes that his influence goes far beyond the evening program. So he decides to change a few things:

he arrives before the others to pray for each young person by name;
he spends an hour a week meeting one of them personally;
he asks an elder of the church to walk alongside him and give him advice.

He has not become more important. He has become more aware that leading means influencing, and that the strongest influence is the influence of example.

🔗 Connect

Christian leadership is a thread that runs through the whole Bible:

God chooses shepherds for his people, and promises to give some after his own heart (Jeremiah 3:15);
when Israel’s shepherds exploit the flock instead of caring for it, God judges them and promises to shepherd his sheep himself (Ezekiel 34);
this promise is fulfilled in Jesus, the good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep (John 10:11);
this is why every leader in the church is a shepherd “under the Shepherd”: they lead by looking to Christ.

Applying the BereaWay Method, every time you read the story of a biblical leader, ask yourself: what does this story reveal about God, and how does it point me toward Christ, the true Shepherd?

🙏 Apply

Answer in writing or in a study group:

In which areas of your life are you already influencing other people (family, work, church, friendships)?
Do the people who follow you do so more because of your role or because of the trust they have in you? How can you tell?
Think back to a leader who helped you grow. What struck you about them: their words or their example?
Ask the Lord to show you one concrete area where you can lead by serving this week.

📚 Go Deeper

Read Ezekiel 34 and John 10:1-18: compare the bad shepherds with the good Shepherd.
Reread 1 Peter 5:1-4 and underline all the verbs: what must an elder do, and with what attitude?
In the next lesson we will look more closely at the heart of Christian leadership: the servant leader.