SmartChristian Blog host, Dr Andrew Jackson, has a couple of posts up about the difference between a Christocentric focus and an “Abbacentric” approach to our discipleship. He suggests that typically the Protestant/evangelical faith practice has focused on a Christocentric approach, however, if one were to be an authentic follower of Christ, there is also the aspect of imitating Him. Imitating the Christ includes following His example in placing the highest priority in His relationship to the Father. So, rather than being Christocentric in our faith and practice as disciples, we need to focus on developing a priority in our relationship with the Father. In fact, Dr Jackson said, the pivotal sermon of Christ, delivered as the renowned Sermon on the Mount, needs to be seen from the perspective of the perspective of the contents of the sermon, which was really a Sermon on the Father.

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Further thoughts to my previous post on servant leadership. Actually just a quetion. Robert Greenleaf’s article was titled, “Servant as Leader”. Is there a difference between “the Servant as Leader” and “the Leader as Servant“? If so, what? If not, why not?

Much has been written about servant leadership. Ever since coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970, this philosophy of leadership has gained much currency in business circles. Aspiring business managers are encouraged to develop servant leadership skills. Seasoned managers have had to re-learn new skills, dropping the old school autocratic styles and adopting newer methods in order to cultivate the esprit de corps. But what exactly is servant leadership?

Greenleaf’s seminal article, The “Servant as Leaderâ€? was inspired by a novel that tells the story of a group of explorers who discovered that the leader of their group was all the time the one who was functioning as a servant of the group. I mentioned this a while back in a post on submission and leadership that was spurred by some ideas from Dory of Wittenberg Gate.

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My daughter’s little homework assignment got me thinking that perhaps in reality there are no heroes. My daughter’s complaint that the various examples we considered all turned out to be either that the flaws of the heroes concerned could be viewed positively or that it showed that these characters are all (to use her words) “only human.” Perhaps that is the truth: all real heroes are only human. And, all real heroes are anti-heroes. Probably, only in literature (and most likely only in the fairy tale variety) do we get to encounter heroes in the traditional sense. When it comes to real life, heroes do not exist. Even in the Bible, or perhaps, especially in the Bible, we find this to be true. Perhaps this goes to show that the Bible is an account of real people, where the characters’ life stories are re-told in a transparent manner.

At church, they have been going through a series on heroes the past couple of weeks. The tag line for the sermon series is “Heroes are not made, but broken.” So far, they have spoken on Moses the depressant, Jacob the conniver and Jonah the bigot. (No those were not the names they gave to these individuals - those are my paraphrases, but you get the idea).

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