Christian leaders can learn so much from the leadership style of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was a brilliant man with deep passion and conviction. I love to study his methods because he was so effective, and obviously God had an anointing on his life to transform the hearts of a nation and the world. The following are a few leadership perspectives that modern Christian leaders can learn from:
1. Dr. King led by example. He asked the people he was leading to take risks and do hard things, and then he would go out and take those risks and do those hard things. He didn't do things for people, he did things with people by empowering his followers to take ownership of the struggle against discrimination.
2. Dr. King used both words and works. He may very well have been the best verbal communicator of all time, but his leadership became even more powerful when he stood with his people by leading boycotts, going to jail, and standing arm and arm with people in the streets. Combining words with actions leads to the type of authenticity that can only be earned the hard way.
3. Dr. King embraced downward mobility. He had little regard for his own life. He could have stayed up north once he earned his doctorate degree from seminary, but instead he chose to move south with his family directly into what he and his wife knew from the start would be an intense and costly fight for the civil rights of African Americans living in the south. He knew that he might be killed for doing what was right, and he kept going anyway. He thrived in the midst of suffering, and he understood that leadership with integrity comes with a cost.
4. Dr. King had a profound sense of the context in which he was leading. He had a very broad worldview, he sought to understand all of the different perspectives on various issues in different parts of the nation, and his end goal in leading with nonviolent resistance was to bring about transformation for all of the people involved (not just the folks he was trying to lead out of oppression, but also the oppressors). He had a knack for stepping into the moment.
5. Dr. King innovated. He applied nonviolent strategies that he had read about and tailored those strategies to the unique context of the fight for civil rights in the United States. He consistently created new approaches to complex circumstances based on limited resources and a domination system that was stacked against him.
I'll stop there, although I could probably describe hundreds of different leadership strategies that today's Christian leaders could learn from the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. Imagine the transformation that could occur through churches today if leaders simply had the courage to lead by example, utilize words and works, embrace downward mobility, contextualize according to unique circumstances, and innovate new approaches to complex problems in the world.
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