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No missionary organization ever has enough leaders. It’s lots easier to be a leech.

Leeches draw the life out of others; leaders give their lives away to others. Leaders impart energy, strength, hope, encouragement and inspiration. Leeches drain all of the above.

Leeches cause pain; leaders bear it. Leeches are concerned that others know how unhappy they are. They drain life on the inhale and spout and fume on the exhale. Leaders impart blessing and joy. They help decrease others’ misery and share their burdens. Leadership, in short, is personal death. It’s an orientation to others at one’s own expense.

Anyone who has made serious effort to serve others knows something about the energy drain involved. The human body, after all, is a vessel of energy and power, commodities which do not come in unlimited amounts. In the process of giving these to others, the giver is depleted.

A couple of years ago I talked with a man who works hard serving other missionaries. He had spent all morning with two unhappy missionary couples who would not be mollified. After several hours of listening and trying to understand, help and serve, he was exhausted. “I’m going to bed!” he said. It was early in the afternoon, but I understood just how he felt.

When a sick woman touched Jesus’ garments and received healing, the Bible says that Jesus “realized that power had gone out from him.” That power drain pictures the less literal—or perhaps only less intense—loss of personal energy required to serve others as God calls us. It means giving yourself away.

Of course, Jesus did not rebuke this woman, and I don’t mean to suggest that it’s never appropriate to be served. True community means allowing you to minister to me when I need it, and vice versa. But the missionary enterprise is hampered today by too few who are willing to pour out their lives, not only for the gospel’s sake, but for their fellow servants as well.

Last year I participated in an interview with two field directors and a new missionary couple to discuss their placement. We needed them on Field B, but they wanted to be on Field A. I watched in awe as the Field B director had the grace to step back from his agenda and graciously help direct them away from his field, where he needed them. He knew their decision would hurt his field, and maybe even damage his own reputation. His missionaries have seen a steady flow of new recruits to Field A and very few to theirs, and he was expected to help reverse that trend. But he looked beyond his own hurt to someone else’s gain.

Such selfless treatment toward fellow missionaries, unfortunately, is unusual. “I have lots of patience with the lost,” one young aspiring missionary told me awhile back. “But Christians who don’t measure up—I don’t have much time for them.”

That’s a familiar sentiment. Most missionaries extend much more grace to their host-culture friends than to their fellow missionaries. We expect much more out of our fellow missionaries, and when they don’t meet our standards, we write them off.

I assured him his attitude was not unusual, and reflected aloud on the familiar statistic that the single biggest cause of preventable attrition springs from relationship problems with fellow missionaries.

If we all did more giving and less taking, if we were more leaderly and less leech-like, we would bury that troubling statistic. But it requires giving ourselves away.

You don’t need a title to do that. True servant leadership is not a label but a practice. Lots of leaders have no title; lots of people with titles don’t lead.

Consider a few tests of servant leadership ability: Can I applaud the success of a fellow missionary? Can I be silent (and content) when someone else gets credit for my idea? Can I cheerfully accept the death of my dream because the team voted it down? Can I overlook a personal loss that happened because somebody else failed?

Can I achieve these virtues if the other missionary—the one who succeeded, or stole my idea or failed me—is my supervisor or director? That is the real test.

Jesus, the ultimate leader, was the champion of giving one’s self away. He gave and gave until one day he hung on a cross and said, “It is finished,” and gave up his spirit. He had come to do that, he told his disciples, and to serve rather than be served. He calls us to the same: to give our lives—not in the unique redemptive sense, but in the serving sense, because that’s leadership as he ordained it.

Jesus warned us against leadership as the flesh wants to exercise it, as we see it practiced in the world. In the flesh, we want to lord it over others, but a lord is just a glorified leech with a title. Jesus identified the lords of the world as those who nurture their own lives at the expense of others. That, Jesus said, is not leadership.

Mind you, it’s often mistaken for leadership, or even greatness. We esteem the figure who can bark orders (just watch for that pattern in the next movie you see). He knows what he wants and how to get it: from the energies and lives of those around him. The difference between that leadership model and Saddam Hussein is one of degree only, not of kind.

“It is not this way among you. Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:44-45).

The gospel cannot advance without this kind of self-giving leadership. Will sufficient numbers of leaders emerge to make that happen?

Gary Brumbelow serves as general director of InterAct Ministries in Boring, Oregon.