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Home/Biblical and Theological/The Most Attractive Quality in a Leader

The Most Attractive Quality in a Leader

The inside is bigger than the outside.

Written by Andrew Wilson | Wednesday, July 3, 2019

You can hear it in their prayers. You can see it in their homes. You can tell by hearing the jokes they make (or decide not to make), the controversies they avoid, the judgments they pass (or don’t), the way they interact with their families, the things they spend their money on, the way they treat those from whom they have nothing to gain.

 

What is the most attractive quality in a leader? No doubt there are all sorts of ways of answering that, and although some responses are obviously wrong, I don’t think there’s any particular one that is obviously right (other than “Christlikeness” or “love”, which just push the question back a stage: “OK, so what does that look like?”). For years I’ve oscillated between “prayerfulness” and “humility” (which, when you think about it, are two sides of the same coin), with “zeal” and “wisdom” also up there. But more recently I’ve thought about it in a slightly different way, based on the beautiful image in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. The most attractive quality in a leader, I find, is when you discover that the inside is bigger than the outside.

I was thinking about this last month, when I had the privilege of meeting and praying for two days with the key leaders in Newfrontiers in the UK. None of them are household names. They all live in very ordinary places. They don’t have bodyguards, Twitter fan clubs, lucrative publishing deals or six figure salaries. They don’t pack stadiums or have profiles in the national media (not that those things are necessarily bad). Most people outside of a very specific slice of British evangelicalism have never heard of them. But having travelled, stayed or shared family dinner with all of them, one thing that they all have in common—as far as I can tell, anyway—is that their inside is bigger than their outside.

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