Servants and Fools Quotes

“Fourth, while we may have visions (see Acts 2), those require weighing and discernment. Christians do not have their own visions—or “cast” visions, a popular cliché—they are invited to be channels of someone else’s vision and purposes, namely God’s.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“First, true motivation, change, transformation, and action (whether by individuals or groups) is accomplished by the Holy Spirit whose movements cannot be tracked or predicted (John 3:8). Second, we are not called to have followers but to be followers of Jesus Christ. Third, “getting things done” is rarely a biblical priority; we are encouraged rather to cooperate in God’s purposes and rely on God for fruitful results.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“When Christians talk about leadership or ministry, we reflect on what God calls us to do, who God calls us to be, how God calls us to act and behave. Our identity and vocation are rooted in God first of all. Our identity and vocation have everything to do with how we relate and respond to this God. Both verses cited above move from metaphors about Christian believers to praise of God. And so it should be.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“While history focuses on victors and the powerful, people at the top and in charge, the Bible pays an astonishing amount of attention to regular, normal folks who are nevertheless the unexpected means of God’s dramatic work.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“We also must speak forthrightly where Christian faith has different priorities. We settle for neither uncritical embrace nor wholesale rejection; we can opt for redemption.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“much leadership literature promotes “functional atheism”: working from “the unconscious assumption that if I don’t make something good happen here it never will.”17 Relying on techniques and best practices, we may forego reliance on God; we act like atheists. We effectively deny God’s existence or efficacy.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“The church doesn’t need to be run like a business,’ a mentor once told me, ‘but it surely shouldn’t be run like a bad business.’”15 Nevertheless, caution is in order. Bottom line concerns about profits, shareholder interests, and value-added priorities do not necessarily add up in God’s economy.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Leadership literature promotes envy with false promises. Casinos and lotteries encourage gambling with two messages: first, you, too, can win buckets of money, and, second, this is only possible if you gamble. Most gamblers and lottery ticket consumers do not win but lose. The truth is: “You can be a loser too.”12 When leadership books dwell on five-star generals, corporation executives, metropolis mayors, and megachurch CEOs, the implicit promise is like gambling: you can only win if you enter the game, and you, too, might hit the big time. But the majority of people, no matter how talented, motivated, and connected, will never be generals, executives, mayors, or megachurch pastors.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Many corporations earn success by questionable ethical practices, too frequently externalizing real costs,”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Much leadership literature—even from “Christian” publishers—dwells on executives or “stars” in big businesses, professional sports, and the military. Frequent are the celebrations of leadership in Disney, Apple, Southwest Airlines, or Shell. While there are things to be learned, caution is also appropriate. These kinds of books reinforce the interests and perspectives of the status quo.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“We need . . . church leadership that risks a robust correlation of its scripture and theology with the very best that secular leadership studies can offer. What we get is church leadership that congratulates itself for dabbling in secular leadership studies twice borrowed, church leadership with a preference for simplistic formulas, catchy buzz words, and inane parables.” Such “Church Leadership Lite” is both “short on biblical and theological integrity and oblivious to serious leadership study.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“public noteworthies are not where the greatest changes and most important events happen; acknowledged public leaders, people at the front of organizations or on top of pyramids, are merely “like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.”7”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“As Luke recounts events leading up to Jesus’s birth, he deliberately names luminaries of his day—Emperor Augustus, King Herod, Governor Quirinius. Yet he startlingly shifts focus to unimportant, unlikely folks—Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph—who are in fact the unexpected channels of God’s work, the real sphere of God’s transforming activity.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“I do not recall anyone commended for being a “disciple” or “faithful follower of Jesus.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“North American evangelicals are preoccupied with leadership. Evangelicals describe the process of winning conversions as “leading someone to Christ.” Numerous parachurch ministries are named after founders, sometimes fostering personality cults. Evangelicalism frequently “focuses on individual personalities and rallies around charismatic leaders, who often need and seek out acclamation.”4”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Some “leaders” are enveloped in hagiographical mystique: their laudably commendable achievements are the only lens through which we view them, while we disregard other facts about them.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Having heroes can come at the expense of the truth.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Sometimes I fear that English Anglicanism has given up on holiness. . . . I note now that many, even most, advertisements for new Anglican incumbents seek a minister who is gifted in ‘leadership,’ or one who is ‘energetic’ and ‘efficient’. Rarely do they ask for one who is ‘prayerful’ . . . But this ecclesiastical trend towards secular models of personal efficacy is odd; for if ever an age yearned for authentic sanctity, it is surely ours. Think of the magnetism of John Paul II, of Mother Teresa, of ‘Father Joe’.3”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Leadership is a primary quality people expect of pastors, even if no one is precisely sure what leadership actually is.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“A “public position” means that “the first freedom you surrender is the freedom to speak impulsively, from the heart.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“It’s out of our hands.” “What do you mean it’s out of your hands? Your hands are the ones creating it, aren’t they?” [asked Williams]. “You don’t understand, the corporation is its own entity. Nobody sitting around the boardroom believes any one of them can change things. Even we who run Procter & Gamble speak of ‘it’ as though it is something outside ourselves.”5”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“we can learn more from failure: There is a strong sentiment among many organizational scholars that copying the success of others . . . cannot work. They argue that so many factors have to come together for a program to work that it is all but impossible for an outside observer (or even for an insider) to determine which of the factors contributed most to the success of the program. These scholars believe, by contrast, that less-than-successful endeavors are more educational because we . . . point to the moment when things started to go wrong. Their point is that eliminating known mistakes is often a far more effective way to improve than emulating perceived successes.3”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Given the conditions prevailing in our culture, it’s the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus; this is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more; this is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service and resurrection. The consumer mentality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, “deny-yourself” congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them, satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel into consumer terms—entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure, problem solving, whatever. This is the language Americans grow up on, the language we understand. We are the world’s champion consumers, so why shouldn’t we have state-of-the-art consumer churches?”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“our culture has become steadily depersonalized. And that has gradually over the last century developed into a consumer enterprise. We North Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting more, requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn’t even know we had. We are insatiable.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“This is the concern right at the core of the work of giving leadership to the church: to focus attention on the way we live the Christian life, the means that we employ to embody the reality and carry out the commands of Jesus who became flesh among us. In other words, nothing impersonal, nothing nonrelational, nothing “unfleshed.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“We cannot participate in God’s work but then insist on doing it our own way. We cannot participate in building God’s kingdom but then use the devil’s methods and tools. Christ is the way as well as the truth and the life. When we don’t do it his way, we mess up the truth and we miss out on the life.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“But for Christians, the first priority is followership.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“Much—actually most—of what the Bible says about leaders is negative.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership

“First, the Christian way is not about us; it is about God.”
― Arthur Boers, Servants and Fools: A Biblical Theology of Leadership