Читать книгу The Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus - Owen Phelps Ph.D. - Страница 8

Foreword

When Phil Hodges and I first began to discuss the idea of developing tools to help people lead like Jesus, we knew we didn’t want to develop just another leadership program. Our vision was to launch a movement.

We wanted to share our conviction that Jesus is the greatest leadership role model of all time, and that everyone can learn to lead as Jesus did. To accomplish this, we would need to produce some materials to help us spread the word. And yet, we wanted to avoid the implication that there was a neat little package of information that guaranteed anyone could lead like Jesus.

We recognized that leading like Jesus involves, first and foremost, matters of the heart. To lead like Jesus, one needs a servant’s heart. I’m not saying that in order to be an effective leader one has to first become entirely selfless. I’m saying that to develop our aptitude to lead like Jesus, we have to recognize our fundamental self-centeredness and commit ourselves daily to becoming ever more God’s servant in the image of Jesus’ own character.

We recognized, too, that over the centuries Jesus’ followers had let themselves become divided over various issues. We committed ourselves to avoiding the pitfalls of divisiveness and remaining faithful to Jesus’ own wish “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21). We resolved that the Lead Like Jesus movement would always be “nondenominational and nondoctrinal.” That commitment is at the core of who we are and all we do.

At the same time, we recognized that the faith experience of many people is different. Not only should we respect the Christian experience of other Christians, we should reach out to them and build partnerships to spread the Lead Like Jesus message. To make these partnerships effective, we knew we would have to customize the Lead Like Jesus message to resonate with the lived Christian experience of different people.

The Catholic Vision for Leading Like Jesus is an effort to do just that. Its purpose is not to revise the principles we present in the Lead Like Jesus movement, but only to enhance them for a particular audience — the more than 1 billion Catholics in the world who proclaim Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

I am pleased that we have found a member of the Lead Like Jesus movement who is a Catholic family man to step up and take on this task. Owen Phelps, a certified Lead Like Jesus facilitator, has worked for his church for a quarter of a century and has excellent credentials in both the fields of religious studies and leadership training.

It is our hope that others will step forward in the days ahead to help us develop more partnerships of all kinds in other faith traditions. In that way, our vision of Lead Like Jesus as a movement will flower and grow. And even more important than that, we will all be better servants of God.

Ken Blanchard