Leadership in the Time of Crisis

BY RICARDO GRAHAM

When Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin discussed her book Leadership: In Turbulent Times on a series of broadcasts on PBS, she said, “Leadership is the ability to mobilize and inspire people to a common cause for the greater good of the people.”

For the Christian, the common cause is the cause of Jesus, and leadership is always Christ-centered and people-focused. Without godly leadership, the church is bound to wither and lose its ability to be light and salt to the world.

Leadership in the church is always an essential, but it becomes absolutely indispensable in a time of crisis such as now, when COVID-19 is indiscriminately killing people daily.

In order to preserve life and stop the communal spread of the virus, many municipalities have ordered that there is to be no assembling of people beyond 10 persons. This has temporarily halted activity in most church buildings, including Seventh-day Adventist churches.

However, we must note that the church building is not the church itself. The church is the community of believers called to God and committed to living out, corporately and individually, His principles.

The temporary closing of our worship buildings does not close the church, the Body of Christ. Remember what Jesus said: “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18, NKJV). We may be at the gates, but hell will not prevail against the church. Just remember how the book of Revelation ends: Jesus wins!

God has a plan for His church. To that end, visioning—receiving God’s vision and articulating

it to others—is significant, especially when the pressures of survival tend to dominate our thinking.

Visioning is a continual process that • discovers where God is moving and joins Him there, • determines what needs to be done to get there, • deputizes disciples and mobilizes them into action, • holds the disciples accountable for their individual role in the process.

Vision is the ability to see imaginatively the preferred future of the institution, the church. This is presented repeatedly in the Bible—most clearly in the story of Jesus.

We remember that John, imprisoned on Patmos Island, was shown the future. He saw a view of the Christian Church throughout history, in good times and bad.

We Adventists often see the book of Revelation as a means of communicating the history and future of the church, focusing on the symbolic representations of nations or entities as beasts— and that is there. However, we sometimes are less specific in presenting Jesus in the leading role. He is the “star” of Revelation and the key to understanding leadership in all of its dimensions.

A spiritual leader must receive from God a vision for the future of his or her leadership. I believe this is done in the very private atmosphere of prayer and meditation.

Prayer is the first and constant essential for church leadership, in and out of crisis. No one demonstrated that better than Jesus, who sometimes spent entire nights in prayer or rose long hours before dawn to pray. He was praying until the Roman soldiers, led by the traitorous Judas Iscariot, accosted him in the Garden of Gethsemane. He prayed on the cross, crying to His father. He prayed for His executioners while He was dying. He prayed for the repentant thief on the cross beside Him. He prayed for His mother as He gave watch care over her to His disciple, and He prayed for the disciple to whom He gave responsibility of His mother’s care. If I haven’t said it clearly, Jesus’ life and ministry was bathed in continuous prayer.

And Jesus used Scripture to define, defend, and shape His ministry. He knew the Scriptures thoroughly and consistently quoted from what we call the Old Testament as He fulfilled His specialized ministry as the Lamb of God.

TRUE LEADERS ARE ABLE TO SHINE OUT IN AN EMERGENCY, HAVING BEEN DEVELOPED LONG BEFORE THE CRISIS HITS.

Sacred and secular history is replete with stories of leaders whose abilities were demonstrated under the glaring spotlight of adversity or the challenges of a crisis.

In the Bible we find notable examples of men and women who stepped up their leadership game during desperate times for the world and their people. One can turn to almost any portion of the Bible and find narratives of leadership in crisis.

Moses is an example of such a leader. He was chosen by God to serve as the human leader of the Children of Israel, and he relied on his personal connection with God through a great many crises.

Of the several desperate situations Moses

encountered, perhaps one of the most intense occurred while he was on Mount Sinai with God for 40 days. God first spoke the Ten Commandments and then wrote them Himself on the two stone tablets, giving them to His chosen leader, Moses.

Returning to the encampment of nearly 2 million people, Moses found them worshiping a golden calf. A crisis of leadership had ensued due to Aaron’s inability to stand firm for God when the throng demanded an idol to represent God. This crisis was real. Aaron lost his vision, forgetting that everything he did affected the mission fulfillment that God had assigned to Moses and, as Moses’ “vice president,” to Aaron.

Moses demonstrated his godly influential leadership by immediately addressing the issue of the idolatry. He took bold and decisive action to lead the people away from their sin.

How did Moses become this bold person when the Bible calls him the meekest man on the face of the earth? Meekness is not weakness. It is the ability to be humble enough to be led. Moses spent 40 years learning humility while tending sheep in Midian, and his calling came directly from God in the burning bush.

True leaders are able to shine out in an emergency, having been developed long before the crisis hits. It is in the private times with God that a godly leader is prepared to stand for God and move the vision to mission deployment and beyond.

Moses used his leadership to bring the people back into a corporate alignment with God, from which they could choose a personal relationship.

In a crisis, leaders must be able to assess the danger to those whom they lead, access their knowledge of God, and act. They must surrender to God, seek guidance through prayer and Bible

Leaders can be effective, even in a time of crisis—understanding the challenges of the moment, being inspired by God through prayerful visioning, moving people forward to its completion, being boldly inclusive and transparent, and gaining courage from God to resist the intimidation of Satan or his human co-conspirators, who are always present.

Ellen White writes, “The church is God’s appointed agency for the salvation of men. It was organized for service, and its mission is to carry the gospel to the world. From the beginning it has been God’s plan that through His church shall be reflected to the world His fullness and His sufficiency. The members of the church, those whom He has called out of darkness into His marvelous light, are to show forth His glory. The church is the repository of the riches of the grace of Christ; and through the church will eventually be made manifest, even to ‘the principalities and powers in heavenly places,’ the final and full display of the love of God” (The Acts of the Apostles, p. 9).

This terrible long night of suffering will pass. As the Bible assures us: “For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for life; Weeping may endure for a night, But joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5, NKJV).

Hold on. The morning is coming.

Ricardo Graham is president of the Pacific Union Conference.

RICARDO GRAHAM