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Podcast: Growing as a Follower in a Culture Obsessed with Leadership (Richard Langer, Joanne Jung)

October 31, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Better to Lead or to Follow?

In today's episode, Richard Langer and Joanne Jung point out the prevalence of books, podcasts, and workshops on leadership and suggest that the contrasting idea of followership is where our focus should be.

The Call to Follow

The Call to Follow

Richard Langer, Joanne J. Jung

Authors Richard Langer and Joanne J. Jung teach that “followership” is essential to both organizational and spiritual flourishing, reexamining the nature of leadership and followership in light of the life-transforming power of following Jesus Christ. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:56 - Obsessed with Leadership

Matt Tully
Joanne and Rick, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

Richard Langer
Thanks for having us, Matt. We’re really excited to be with you.

Joanne Jung
Yes. Thank you, Matt.

Matt Tully
The title of this new book that you both have written together is The Call to Follow, and the subtitle, I felt like, was very provocative and very interesting. It goes, Hearing Jesus in a Culture Obsessed with Leadership. So to start us off, Joanne, I wonder if you could explain why it is that you both say that our culture is obsessed with leadership.

Joanne Jung
Almost everywhere you look there are leadership podcasts, leadership webinars, leadership books—leadership even at young ages. We make a comment about a girl scout cookie that’s stamped with “I Am a Leader.” And we want our children—do we not?—to grow up to be leaders. And so it’s infiltrated our conversations, our vision for our children and for our teenagers, college applications. It’s everywhere. What aspect of leadership can you fill for our institution, for our organization? So it’s everywhere.

Richard Langer
I think one of the other things about the obsession with this word is it’s kind of like a disordered desire for leadership, which is really different than saying there’s something wrong with being a leader or leaders are always bad. Somehow it’s gotten twisted for us. And I think we make the analogy in the book that it's kind of like having an obsession for money. That doesn’t mean you’re saying money’s bad or it doesn’t mean let’s all give up on money. It’s saying, Oh, somehow this thing that should be good has become problematic because we’re somehow viewing it wrong, or the way we value the one thing too highly. As a result, we neglect other things or devalue or disregard them. And that’s, I think, one of the things that really gets us anxious about the obsession with leadership in that sense. It pushes away everything else that we might need to be thinking about

Matt Tully
And I want to get into this idea of followership, which is sort of the flip side to leadership, and I want to explore that in a minute. But maybe before we get there, within Christian circles in particular, what would you say this idolization of leadership looks like? What are the manifestations of that that we might notice as we look around the Christian landscape?

Joanne Jung
We actually observe this on a number of different levels. Certainly, at an individual church or denomination. We have all been familiar with leadership conferences and leadership summits focusing on leadership. And even in our training; we train people in order to become leaders. So we do this at, again, all ages and all levels. And particularly in the church, I think the church has adopted much of what culture has said and how we magnify leadership, and we’ve allowed it to influence the church.

Matt Tully
And you mentioned culture there for a minute. Are you saying that it’s the broader prevailing, maybe secular culture, and it’s their perception of leadership that is actually influencing the church and not vice versa?

Joanne Jung
I suspect so.

Richard Langer
I was just going to say, I really do think it is a thing that there’s a prevailing drift of our culture, and I don’t think the church has had any awareness that that is a problematic drift. So for example, there’s a prevailing drift in our culture for sexual promiscuity or kind of anything goes sexuality or things like that. The church has been aware of the drift and felt like it should resist or speak a prophetic word, or at least somehow avoid being conformed to the world on that point. With leadership things, I grew up in a campus ministry where the discipleship program was called “a leadership training institute.” Everything was phrased that way, and discipleship just meant leadership. And I’m like, well, that’s kind of curious because the word and the call that Jesus gives is to be actually a follower. And the disciple is exactly the follower of someone. It seems strange to me that we can’t even imagine having a followership training seminar. If you don’t like the word followership, I get it. We don’t use that word a lot, but just the discipleship training. We have to baptize it as a leadership thing, and then we want to include everyone, so then we have to say, everybody’s a leader.

05:17 - Followership and Its Foundational Place in the Christian Life

Matt Tully
Rick, I want you to elaborate on that. In the book you write, “For Christians, followership is more foundational to our spiritual lives than leadership.” I confess that I had to stop and think about that for a minute and kind of ask myself, Is that true? It does kind of push against some of the ways that we just think and talk in our circles. So, two questions. First, that word “followership.” Did you make up that word? Is that a coined word that you came up with for this book? And second, what do you mean by that?

Richard Langer
“Followership” is not a word that we coined. If you were to look in the academic circles, you would find followership as a topic. If you pick up certain big leadership anthologies, they may actually have a chapter that’s entitled that. Robert Kelly is a guy who wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review back in I guess around 2000 or maybe the late 1990s, something like that. He used that term, and others had as well. It isn’t a word that we use a lot in the English language. It isn’t necessarily telling us anything, except somehow it doesn’t roll off the tongue the way leadership does. So, we didn’t coin it. We do use it, and when we use it, we’re simply trying to have a parallel word to leadership. It’s helpful that way, and then it’s also just a way in general to refer to all the dynamics that go into being a faithful follower. And I think that’s part of the challenge. If you don’t have a name for the thing, it’s hard for you to get an imagination for it. How would this look? We would like to be a . . . —and then you have to talk around the circle to get the term “follower” articulated in the way that you could say, Oh, you could do this well or poorly. And we tend to have very low expectations. We tend not to talk about it. We liken it to a shadow rather than an actual object in our thinking. It’s an absence of light. It’s something that’s foreclosed. And so I think that’s partly reflected in the awkwardness of that followership term, because we just don’t talk about it as a thing, so to speak.

Joanne Jung
And there are aspects of this followership term that are key, not only in view of leadership but also with the church. When we unpacked followership, there are three key components, and the first is, of course, deference. Deference between follower and leader. But secondly, the engagement that one has as a follower with zeal. And then thirdly, mission ownership—that we own this mission. It is part of us and we’re invested in it. And so when we use those components and we apply this to our relationship with Christ, same thing: deference, engagement, zeal, and mission ownership.

Matt Tully
So as you two have thought about this topic, followership, in the context of the Christian community, which is kind of what this book is primarily focused on, and you’ve been developing these ideas, is that happening in a parallel way in kind of the broader secular world? You mentioned an article written for Harvard Business Review where this term is used. Is there a recovery of the importance of followers in the broader world, or is this something that you feel like is more truly just strictly arising out of your own Christian conviction?

Richard Langer
I think on our end, it arose from our Christian convictions. In the early 2000s, there was a bit of momentum in the academic world for this, and I think we quote in the book this guy who said, Yeah, ten years from now, which would be 2018, followership and leadership—those categories will have kind of flip flopped. Leadership will be as passe as leisure suits and bell bottoms—or something like that. Yeah, didn’t happen, buddy. So there’s been some talk about this, but honestly, there hasn’t really been any significant secular move on that. It hasn’t been completely abandoned, it just kind of trickles along at a very, very low level.

Joanne Jung
And I think most of the perspective on that relationship between followership and leadership tends to be as a good leader, how can we create followers that follow better? So it’s not how to become a better follower, but how can we get followers to follow the leaders better?

Matt Tully
You emphasize that in the book that so often when followership is discussed, it’s kind of discussed through the lens of supporting and empowering leaders to do their leadership better. It’s not really like followership is ever an end in itself.

Richard Langer
That’s exactly right. And I think that’s one of the big things that we really wanted to try and cast a vision for followership being something worthwhile. I was just doing an adult Sunday school class about this topic these last couple of weeks. Joanne and I end up talking about this a lot at a moment like this, and I was trying to get a picture of someone that we actually conceive as being a meaningful, positive, attractive figure, but we do actually conceive of them as a follower without any nuancing or funky explanation. And the thing that hit me was actually the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. The hobbits are not the leaders of the fellowship of the ring or any of that story, but they are the heroes of the story. And that’s a really interesting difference. We look at them and say, Oh yeah, they’re models of loyalty. They're a lot of models of friendship. They have incredible amounts of perseverance and grit and courage. There are a million virtues, but we don’t think, Man, I wish I could grow up to be a leader like Pippin was! That just doesn’t come through our minds. And in that sense, they’re a good picture of something that you go, Oh wow! There were ways to actually be a good follower, and they really exhibit that in the book. The book is really about them cultivating the virtues and skills of followers. They are 100% sold out for the mission. They literally are happy to give their lives for the mission, and it’s a miracle that they live through it. But they’re absolutely all out. They’re taking the initiative, they’re sold out as you could possibly imagine, but they aren’t actually the leaders of the operation.

Matt Tully
One thing I’ve heard, I think maybe even specifically in reference to The Lord of the Rings and the hobbits, is sometimes we can take those virtues that they exhibit, like humility or service, and we can transform that into some kind of leadership. We want to talk about it like it’s some leadership role. I think in particular of the popularity of language around servant leadership today in the church. You both kind of gently push back against that a little bit, or at least how central that idea has become in the church. And you instead say that maybe it would be worthwhile just to try to be a servant, not always a servant leader. So why is that worth highlighting, and what are the ways in which we can sometimes reframe other qualities as leaders? What does that say about how we view leadership?

Joanne Jung
I like the way you said we gently did this because there’s such a market for servant leadership. In fact, I just heard it the other day and I kind of thought, Oh, maybe he’d like a copy of our book. But I think it testifies to how easily and how commonplace we want to add leadership to everything. And that has been found in the. Are there leaders? Absolutely. Is leadership necessary? Absolutely. What we try to, in the book, argue is that, really, what Paul is describing and what Jesus is describing is a servant. How are we a servant? How are we a slave? And how is that understood in the first century? Paul is grateful to be called a servant, a slave. And so we kind of nuanced this in terms of in light of leadership—in light of servant leadership—what is really the point? I would argue, yes, we have leaders, but we would want them to continue to be excellent followers. We never stop in our leadership roles, whether it’s a season or a role, we should never stop being a follower. So how do we cultivate being really good followers?

Richard Langer
And another thing that hit me. I had written a chapter for a book on leadership, an organizational leadership book where they wanted a chapter on a biblical theology of leadership or something like that, so I’d done all this. I talked about biblical notions of leadership and talked about servant leadership, steward leadership, and shepherd leadership as these metaphors that come out in Scripture and all this. And those are there, and I would actually argue that there’s really nothing wrong if you’re going to be talking about leadership to talk about servant leadership. I’m okay with it. The weirdest thing was I had written that, I’d been a pastor for twenty years, I’d taught about this and talked about it a million times, but I still would read Jesus, talking to the disciples when they say, Let me sit to your right hand and left hand, and we have this whole discussion about how you’re not supposed to be like the Gentiles who lord it over other people and all this kind of thing. But you’re supposed to be, and I have always read that in my mind somehow, that you’re supposed to be a servant leader. And you read the passage and it’s not saying that. It says you’re literally supposed to be a servant. It was like a reflex. I couldn’t not read it with the word leadership in my mind as I read it. Joanne and I were talking about the book one time and she had gotten this note from a friend of a friend or whatever, and it made this comment that, I think, perhaps overstated when they just said there’s no such thing as servant leadership in the Bible. But they were referring to that passage not talking about servant leadership, and it took me up short and I had to think about it. Wow! I am just absolutely as much a victim of the prevailing culture as anybody else. I just can’t help but read that into the passage. Jesus is saying, This is what I want you to be—and the answer isn’t, I want you to be a servant leader. It’s literally saying, I want you to be a servant, the kind of person who’d be wiping somebody else’s feet—that kind of imagery.

15:44 - Harmful Assumptions about Leadership

Matt Tully
I think this whole issue speaks to the power of those sort of subconscious, or unstated, cultural assumptions and understandings of things, like leadership, and that it is viewed as this kind of unalloyed good that can be abused, of course, can go wrong, but is nevertheless always the highest form of what we’re called to do. And that actually gets into something else. You list in the book a number of harmful statements, or harmful assumptions, about leadership, and I wanted to highlight a couple of those and have you explain them a little bit more. Joanne, maybe let’s start with you. The first one that you highlight is the idea that everyone is a leader. What’s wrong with that? I’m thinking especially of the parents listening right now who are thinking, Of course my little Jimmy is a leader. Why would you tell me he might not be a leader? What’s wrong with that statement?

Joanne Jung
You know, little Jimmy just might be a leader. And I’m not going to take away from a parent’s ideal and goal for their son or daughter. But I would argue, and I think that’s the premise of our book, how are we doing on followership? Do we cultivate in our children a desire and a visioned to be good followers of Christ? In that, then I think they would be most prepared to be the best leader. But again, it attests to how we want, at so many levels, our children, our spouses, and our friends to be leaders. But the conversation about being a follower just doesn’t happen. And sadly, we see leaders who are not good followers, and that impact on the organization, on the church, on families where leaders are not good followers.

Matt Tully
And would you go so far as to say that you can’t be a good leader if you’re not first a good follower?

Joanne Jung
You’ll be a better leader if you’re a better follower.

Richard Langer
And I do worry that one of the first ways our leadership goes wrong, particularly in American culture today (I’m not enough of an expert on every other time and place), but I really do think that issue of failing to be a good follower is actually a huge thing. It’s partly because we disconnect from the notion that we’re actually followers in relationship to Jesus. And so we end up building our church, building our brand—think of the language we use. You’re supposed to build your brand in all of this kind of thinking where you are the person at the top of the pyramid, so to speak. And we make the analogy in the book that it’s like that isn’t really the biblical thinking about this, to the extent most people are both leaders and followers. In my organization, I’m a professor here and I’m also the director of the Office of Faith and Learning. So I have leadership responsibility over some people; I also have a followership responsibility, and I would just argue that’s kind of typical for most people as you go through life. You have places you lead, you have places that you follow. But for some reason, we feel like calling a person a follower in any setting is kind of an insult. So that’s part of why we talk about everyone being a leader, because we want to be for everybody. And that’s the part that always gives me the heebie-jeebies, when people are using this “everyone’s a leader” and “because you have influence, you’re a leader.” It’s like, are you saying that a follower should have no influence, or followers don’t matter? That’s kind of what’s tacitly built into that thinking, and that’s part of why we resist so much the idea of everyone’s a leader. I’m like, why do you have to say it that way? And why do you have to validate this person’s work and effort and service to Jesus by calling it leadership, as opposed to just serving God?

Matt Tully
And that kind of gets at another one of the harmful statements that you guys highlight: “If you’re not leading, you’re missing out or you’re being irresponsible in your life.” And it can sometimes seem like that, that it’s the leaders who are really in the game. They’re the ones who are in the room where it happens, so to speak, and they’re the ones who are actually affecting big results that make a difference. So how do you push back against that?

Joanne Jung
I have to ask, Matt—and this will be a question back to us—and that is, To what part of our human nature is that appealing? And it typically will appeal to our pride. It will typically appeal to our need for control. And essentially, that control, then, is our idol. And so we have to kind of step back a little bit and ask, Oh, if you’re not a leader—and this is what we hear—it’s the dormant aspect of you. There’s a leader in you and if you don’t exhibit it, then you’re not using your gifts, or let me help you bring out the leadership gifts that you already have. It’s just a rat race, I think, in terms of how do we get to where we think we want to go when, really, that goal is not the goal that Jesus would want for us. And that is to be a follower.

Richard Langer
I heard someone in an academic setting (they were a staff person at a university—a younger person), and they were being trained in the future leadership training thing. The person who was talking to them was talking about how she had been at the university for twenty-seven years, or something like that, and had climbed a ladder. Somebody in the group asked the question, Well, what if you like the job you have and don’t really want to do the promotion thing? And she was like, You absolutely need to climb the ladder. You need to do this. That’s part of being just faithful. I’m getting this second-hand report back from my friend who is hearing this, and I’m like, that is like a formula for getting people to do jobs they don’t want to do and probably aren’t that good at. And so the idea of let’s make everyone move up some ladder, why in the world? In the book I tell the story of my dad who was a research scientist, and he loved doing it hands on, on the workbench, out in the field, all of that stuff. He absolutely loved it. Dad would’ve been a living nightmare if he had to go to balls and board meetings and things like that. It would’ve just driven him berserk. He was a happy man doing what he did in never climbing the ladder. I think he published like 123 scientific journal articles in the course of his career. It’s not like it was an unproductive career, but his interest in climbing the mountain was like zero. I like right where I am out doing the work. And I’m like, more power to him!

Matt Tully
That speaks to that pressure that people feel to even do things to rise up in an organization or assume leadership, not because they really enjoy it or want to do it or are even gifted at it, but because they feel like that’s just part of what it means to be successful and mature. That gets at one more of the harmful statements that you list: leadership is an essential mark of Christian maturity. This one really hits home because I think of how often when we look around the landscape of our churches and of maybe the broader Christian world, the people who are held up as models of Christian maturity are almost always in pretty prominent leadership roles of some sort, whether that’s all the way down to a local church level where it’s the pastor, or all the way up to some big level where it’s the head of some big ministry. It seems like Christian maturity and prominent leadership are almost always connected when we think about the church. How do we get out of that mindset where it’s always leaders who are viewed as the models for maturity?

Richard Langer
I appreciate you framing that question that way. In other words, to say, How do you shift that mindset? I think there’s a naturalness to celebrating leadership. One of the things that comes to my mind is, What are we actually doing to celebrate followership, so to speak? At the church that I was at for twenty years before I became a professor here at Biola, I was the senior associate pastor. We had a senior pastor who I worked directly with. He had bumped into someone who had done a servant celebration at their church. And we got to talking about that and thought, We need to do a servant celebration, not a leader celebration. So we said, Everybody who served in any ministry of the church, we want to do a special thank you thing. And then we actually gave a servant leadership award. We gave an award to the woman who was a behind the scenes person who kind of ran the kitchen. And you start doing all these events at a church, and you have 300 people for some breakfast and all this, and you stop and think, What does it take to get the dishes clean, the silverware where it belongs, everything back to where it all operates? The classic sort of invisible, unthanked job. And so we made an effort to do that. Now, that’s just a little thing, but that kind of symbolic value of saying, Who is it that we celebrate? And we actually can choose that. We can choose to say, Hey, there are some folks you don’t know, that you need to, because they’ve really made a difference in the life of our church, or the life of our organization. So one thing we can do is that kind of acknowledgement in public celebration. We decide who’s in our magazines. We decide who we bring up front on a Sunday morning for an interview or whose video we put on our website. And I think it’d be really good for us to think let’s find some folks who don’t count as leadership, but make the act of intention to identify how they’ve really made a valuable contribution that’s really worthy of celebrating.

Joanne Jung
And I would want Christians to understand that this mark of maturity isn’t necessarily something external, like a role or a title or viewed elsewhere. But this aspect of being a follower—and a mature, faithful follower—sometimes will not show up on anybody’s radar, but it is a relationship that we have with God, when he is the one who says, Well done. There are things that we will never get accolades for. When we hear from God, You need to forgive that person. After ten to twenty years, you need to forgive that person—and out of obedience we do forgive, God says, Well done. Well done. That was hard, but you depended on my Spirit to do that. Well done. So we see this grandiose idea of leadership, and we market it as a mark of maturity, but I would argue that that person who depended on the Spirit after ten to twenty years, followed God, and forgave is a mark of maturity. That is champion and difficult.

26:36 - Followership Is Not Passive

Matt Tully
Related to that is kind of the flip side of maybe misunderstandings about what it means to follow and be a follower. And one of them that you highlight is that following is passive, that it’s not an active type of thing, that it doesn’t require gifts or abilities or hard work like leadership does. Speak to that a little bit, Rick.

Richard Langer
I mentioned the Sunday school class I was just teaching. I did the exercise of saying, Okay, just give me word association. What do you associate with the word “following?” The answers were serf, lemming, sheep, they were just lazy, and all these sorts of things. They just got their momentum up, and they knew I was talking about following and had written a book on it and that’s what I was talking about those two weeks in the class. And I said, It’s kind of no harm, no foul in the sense that you’re reflecting the culture. And that’s our big claim. We’re just saying this is how we are wired and it is what we naturally associate. But you start thinking about that and going, Wow! And Jesus wants us to follow him. Are we supposed to be his serfs, his sheep? And, of course, if you look at parables about masters and servants and things like that, you don’t find these guys being—well, you might find them being lazy, but they don’t end up well on the end of the story. They clearly weren’t hitting the target at being a follower. So notions of passivity, and even the lemming thing is really interesting, that we’ll follow somebody off a cliff. And it’s really interesting to note that in the Bible, followers really are compared to sheep. There’s a part of me that just wants to let people just sit with that thought for a while and say, You don’t like sheep. Fair enough. I’m just wondering if perhaps you should develop a little bit more of a taste for them because they seem to be a thing that we are likened to in Scripture. We are the sheep of his pasture. And so could you opt in on that or not? The other thing that’s interesting in John 10 is that those sheep aren’t just following anybody. That’s a big part of that story. They’re saying, Wait a minute! I’m not going to follow that guy. He’s a thief and a brigand. He snuck in here. I know the voice of my shepherd. And this is one of my worries about followers in the church today. You see some of the things that have come out recently about churches following leaders that are destructive and abusive and all of this, and I’m saying, Guys, you’re not being a good sheep. You were not discerning in terms of hearing the voice of your shepherd. So you’ve gone off and done something, but that doesn’t make you a follower; that makes you a failed follower, an unfaithful follower, an undiscerning follower. It’s like being a lazy follower. Same thing. So this idea of clarity of mission—we know what we’re here to do, we know the voice of the master, we do it with enthusiasm—those are the things that we’re looking at. The whole idea that it’s lazy, passive, indifferent, lemming off the cliff, I’m like, Yeah, that’s not what we’re talking about*.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful nuance, Rick, that does feel very timely today when it can feel like our culture is overrun with a lot of bad leaders, examples of bad leadership. We see the examples of people who blindly seem to follow these people no matter what they do or say, but that’s not what you’re talking about here. This isn’t total subservience to somebody—a fallen human. This is incisive and wise and a biblical form of followership that ultimately submits to Jesus first and foremost.

Richard Langer
And there’s kind of a watchfulness about it. In other words, you say, I know I’m here following Jesus, and I’ve committed myself to this church or this leader or this minister (or whatever it is) because it certainly seems to be a great vehicle for my following Jesus. But I’m doing this to follow Jesus, and if this thing’s going off the track, I need to be watchful. It’s not going to work for me to pass this off as ’My leader made me do it’. I don’t think that’s going to be a thing you hear from Jesus, Well done, my good and faithful servant. You followed your leader off a cliff into destructive behaviors. I don’t think that’s going to be a win. I think this watchfulness—that sense of active ownership of the mission, even if the tactical details are being designed by the ministry that you’re working in—the sense of, Wait a minute, this has departed from the mission. We should be as followers on the ground. We’re the ones who often see most clearly if higher level policies are being implemented in a way that’s really conducive to advancing the kingdom, or really destructive. So we’ve got to be the ones who’re watchful and aware.

31:21 - A Good Leader Is a Good Follower

Matt Tully
Joanne. I wonder if you could speak to leaders right now who are listening, those who are in leadership positions in a ministry, in an organization, in a secular job. What impact should this understanding of followership have on how they approach their work of leading?

Joanne Jung
Oh, absolutely. First of all, I would charge them to lead well. They need to lead well. We need good leaders. We need good leaders who are great followers. They’re the ones who can develop trust because of their actions and their behaviors and as they allow their intentions and their motivations to be known. They’re transparent. Qualities of a follower are going to show up in the qualities of a great leader. But we, as Rick mentioned earlier, we can go in and out of leadership roles and positions. However, we never stop being a follower. So I would argue for our leaders to please consider how you can be an even better follower.

Matt Tully
Rick, a few minutes ago you both shared the simple idea of leaders in an organization having a day where they celebrate all these servants in the church who are doing different things—serving in the kitchen, serving in the nursery. What other ways could leaders in an organization encourage and ennoble followers in the work that they’re doing? What practical ideas might you suggest?

Richard Langer
Another thing that comes to my mind as I think about this comes back to this mission ownership issue. And so I think one of the things that ennobles following, so to speak, is for leadership to say, Hey, you’re on the ground floor. You understand and are committed to this mission. Talk to me about how you see the mission currently being implemented where you work. What’s working? What isn’t working? Are there things that worry you? And so the followers, in that sense, have a voice to leadership, not in a token sense but in the sense that the leadership really is going, Oh, the best place to find out about how we’re doing is by talking to the guys who are out there every day. Maybe it’s a World Vision thing where you’re caring for people in communities. They’re the ones, in some sense, that have a better grip on whether or not the decisions we’re making at the top level are really making a difference out in the communities that we’re serving. Talking to your followership as if you expect them to have knowledge, and then actually giving the followership the expectation. Say, Hey, I don’t know everything, so I’m expecting you to take the initiative. I’m expecting you to know more about some of these things and make some of those plans. A lot of times, there’s that saying that people do what you inspect, not what you expect.

Joanne Jung
I would add, also for the leaders, this alertness and attentiveness, which is a key part of being a good follower. This alertness and attentiveness doesn’t need to be a show or a public display of service. But how about that gratitude piece? Coming alongside, serving someone (an employee) and validating their work, validating the challenges, even validating their failures, saying this is still a necessary part in the process, and thanking them. For an individual employee or for a working group, that speaks volumes. And that can’t help but trickle into the other relationships that we have. And so in all of our organizations, what essentially is it? It’s just a huge, massive collection of relationships. So how can a leader demonstrate that key, faithful followership? And that is how do we regard each individual? As made in the image of God. We’re grateful for that person, grateful for their contribution—no matter what that contribution is—validating that person in a very respectful way.

35:23 - Jesus, the Most Faithful Follower

Matt Tully
Rick, in your book you emphasize that Jesus, who is our Savior but also our King, was nevertheless a follower in many ways during his life on the earth. So I wonder if you could point to us where we see that in Scripture. Why do you say that? And then, what impact does that have on our understanding of what it means to be a follower?

Richard Langer
This is an observation that Joanne made one day when we were talking about the book, and it really got us both thinking about this. So one of the things that I did is I did a deep dive into the book of John, and I just began recording what you might call Jesus’s statements of self-understanding. How does he see himself operating? Is he viewing himself as a leader or a follower? And just to make clear, we’re not talking about the eternal second person of the Trinity being a follower. We’re talking about the incarnate Christ. What was he modeling for us? In John 5:19 he says he does nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. So the Father is his exemplar in Jesus’s imitating him. He seems to be the follower. In John 5:36 he points out that his works bear witness to the Father and that he has been sent by the Father. So he’s not the sender; he’s the sent one. In John 6:38 he says he’s not acting on his own will, but rather he subordinates his will to the one who sent him. So he’s obeying the commands of the master. He does the same thing about teaching. He talks about the teaching that I’m giving you came from the Father. The commands I gave you came from the Father. And you just realize, and I have a list of like a dozen of these statements of Jesus’s self-perception, and they’re all marked by this characteristic of viewing himself as a follower and saying, I want you to follow me in being a follower. And for some weird reason, we flip this all upside down and we think Jesus was a leader and we’re supposed to be following him and being a leader. The way we imitate him is by being the leader. And that’s almost dead exactly the opposite of what he says repeatedly in the Gospels. And then you pick up really similar pictures from Paul, where he does say, Yeah, follow me as I follow Christ. So he’s saying, *I follow Jesus. So why don’t you follow Timothy, who’s following me, who’s following Jesus. You follow Timothy, or you followed the church in Thessalonica who abandoned their idols and served the true and living God. And you realize that the New Testament picture is this great chain of follow the leader, where the leader goes all the way up to Christ and then even beyond Christ up to God the Father. But everybody’s viewing himself as a leader, and you may be following Timothy or Timothy’s person, but that’s just because the line has gotten so long that you can’t see the person in the front, so you just follow the guy who’s in front of you. And in that sense, everybody is a leader because someone’s behind you, but you’re all focused on the idea of I’m a following, following, following follower. There’s this cascade that goes up. And that, to me, is kind of a revolutionary inversion of our thinking that I think is much needed.

Joanne Jung
I think what an honor and privilege it is to follow Jesus, knowing that he was a follower of God the Father. And how could we consider ourselves any less of a follower, knowing who Christ is as he follows God the Father.

Matt Tully
Joanne and Rick, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us about what I think is a very important and timely topic in light of the things that we see going around in the world today, and even in the church today. We really appreciate you taking this time.

Richard Langer
Thanks so much for having us.

Joanne Jung Thank you.

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