John Stott on Christian Leadership

From Stott’s book Involvement, vol. 2, the concluding essay entitled, “A Call for Christian Leadership” (247-264). This summary includes some paraphrasing.

Five main ingredients of Christian leadership: clear vision, hard work, dogged perseverance, humble service, and iron discipline:

1. Vision: act of seeing, an imaginative perceptions of things, combining insight and foresight…It is compounded of a deep dissatisfaction with what is and a clear grasp of what could be.

2. Industry: men of vision need men of action. Not enough for Moses to envision the land, he had to gather the people.

3. Perseverance: True work of God thrives on opposition. Its silver is refined and its steel hardened.

4. Service: authority by which one leads in not power but love, not force but example, not by coercion but by reasoned persuasion.

5. Discipline: knowing weakness, the greatness of the task & the strength of the opposition, & the inexhaustible riches of God’s grace.