I have found that one of the greatest errors that many church leaders carry about leadership is that it operates as something of a separate discipline from that of discipleship — a distinct skill set, studied, developed, and applied on its own footing, detached from the foundation of following Jesus. And this in my opinion is an error of the first order, and it goes a long way toward explaining the pervasive non-discipleship running through the contemporary Western church.
But in the movement that Jesus both founded and still leads--and what other understanding of the church is there?--leadership must always be understood as an extension of discipleship; nothing more and nothing less, and the moment we treat it as anything else, we have already begun building on the wrong foundation.
This matters because it is Jesus we follow. Not a leadership philosophy borrowed from the marketplace, not a management theory adapted for religious use, not even the accumulated wisdom of successful ministries — Jesus himself, studied afresh, followed directly. Christology determines everything downstream of it, and this is worth sitting with in its full weight: your view of Christ is always shaping your view of leadership whether you are fully aware of it or not.
It Is Jesus We Follow
Look at Jesus afresh and the picture that emerges is genuinely radical. He led from the underside of power. He touched the untouchable, ate with the excluded, and made his home among people the religious establishment had already written off. He confronted the self-righteous with unflinching directness and met sinners with a grace that confounded everyone watching. This is not the leadership template most institutions actually run on, and yet becoming like him is nonetheless the whole assignment of the Christian life.
Leadership, understood this way, is built on the imitation of Christ, the embodiment of the gospel, and a form of spiritual authority that has nothing to do with position. Study the life of Christ and become like him — this is the curriculum, and there is no shortcut around it. A leader’s Christian credibility rises and falls with the depth of their discipleship to Jesus. Any leadership that falls short of this remains neutral at best. Left unchecked, it curdles into something toxic.
Because you are always a disciple first, your leadership takes on the shape of the leadership Jesus himself exhibited. This raises an honest question about what kind of holiness that actually looks like. Jesus was gracious to sinners and hard on the self-righteous — a combination that most definitely will unsettle nearly every institutional instinct we carry. Christian leadership, if we are honest with ourselves, often drifts toward the moralistic posture of the Pharisees rather than the posture of Jesus, trading grace for a subtle system of rule-keeping and reputation management. Just as often it drifts toward the posture of the “lords of the earth” Jesus explicitly named and rejected — the power brokers, the celebrities, the figures whose influence flows downward from a platform rather than upward from among the people they serve. Our lives are meant to witness to Jesus, the radical One, and every borrowed model — the CEO, the religious control freak, the platformed celebrity — quietly witnesses to something else entirely.
It Is the Lord Jesus We Follow
Followership carries a further dimension once Jesus is named not simply as teacher but as Lord. We become agents of that Lordship, agents of the Kingdom of God, and the deepest discipline required of an agent is to stay out of the way of the one being represented. This reframes the entire question of leadership authority. Obedience creates authority. C.S. Lewis captured this with real precision: obedience is the compliment we pay for participation. A leader’s authority flows from their submission to Christ’s Lordship, not from their position, their titles, their platform, or their skill at accumulating influence.
Because our leadership is an extension of discipleship, it has to bear the shape of Jesus’s own leadership, and this puts many of our ordinary assumptions about influence, power, celebrity, and organization under real scrutiny. Leadership rises from the bottom, flowing outward from among the people rather than descending upon them from a stage or a title. This is what it means to be a genuine agent rather than a proxy ruler — the authority is real, and it is entirely on loan, held only for as long as obedience to the true Lord remains the leader’s defining posture.
What This Actually Asks of Us
Learning to follow Jesus before leading his people is not a sequencing preference. It describes the entire architecture of Christian leadership from the ground up. Every leader who skips this step will still lead — people will still follow, structures will still form, influence will still accumulate — and yet little or none of it will carry the shape of Jesus unless the leader has first become his disciple in the deepest sense the word allows. The good news is that this foundation is available to every leader willing to return to it: study him afresh, submit to his Lordship, and let obedience do the slow work of forming an authority worth following.
Key Takeaways
Leadership is an extension of discipleship. Any attempt to develop leadership skill apart from deepening discipleship to Christ builds on the wrong foundation.
Christology determines everything about the shape of Christian leadership — your operative view of Jesus is already authoring how you lead, examined or not.
Genuine Christlike leadership is gracious to sinners and hard on the self-righteous, a combination that runs against the grain of most institutional instincts.
Obedience creates authority. Spiritual authority flows from submission to Christ’s Lordship, not from position, platform, or accumulated influence.
Leadership rises from the bottom up, as an extension of a community’s discipleship, rather than descending from a platform, a title, or religious celebrity.
Drawn from Untamed, The Forgotten Ways, and ReJesus, and numerous talks that Deb and Alan Hirsch have done together.
Alan, you are giving us vintage material. I have benefited from your insights for years, but your latest ones seem to me to be a synthesizing of wisdom in a fresh-expression.way. Thank you. With respect to this post, I think you have given us a sense of leadership that is crucial. Again, thank you.
This is Philippians 3… A denial of earthly structures of authority & righteousness, a humble & continual submission under Christ and striving to be like Him, a charge for others to follow that example and the example of others in their community who follow Paul’s example, an acknowledgment that some still serve earthly things.