A couple of years ago, I was privileged to be on a team in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago that helped congregations to revive their vigor. We took them back to basics: What does it mean to be church? From time to time, we’d invite people to join us who have experience or expertise in various subjects pertinent to church vitality.
One of the best of them was a professor from the MBA program at Northwestern University, of all things. Her subject was leadership, and we had engaged her for a full day with our participants. For the first hour or so, she led a discussion on the principles and characteristics of good leadership, drawing from the experiences in the room. It was a lively conversation that resulted in a fairly detailed sketch of what good leadership does.
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Then she spent the rest of her time with us teaching us how to dance.
I confess that this surprised all of us at first, including those of us on the team that had invited her. She paired us up and, through a series of exercises, first taught us how to walk together—just that. When we had mastered walking side by side, she invited one of each pair to lead a follower who was to place one hand on the leader’s shoulder, eyes closed, around a large room. After we stumbled through that for a while, she had us switch roles, leaders becoming followers and followers, leaders. Once we got the hang of that, we were asked to face each other, each placing both hands on the partner’s shoulders, leaning into each other slightly, and walk—one leading, the other following, the followers closing their eyes. And again, leader and follower switched places. And that, she said, was our first lesson in the tango.
Parts of this exercise reminded me of the old trust walks we used to do with high schoolers at retreats or at camp. But in fact, her point was much more nuanced. A good leader knows how to follow—is, in fact, first of all a good follower. They know the foible of overanticipating the leader’s moves, know that a slight tension between follower and leader is a good thing but that too much tension tends to result in overbalancing and collisions from which it’s difficult to recover. She went on to demonstrate that when the trust and tension between the partners are just right, marvelous dancing is the result—and, perhaps surprisingly, it’s the follower who gets to do all the fancy stuff, going out now and then to do the footwork that draws observers into the rhythm. The follower dares to venture out because they know that the leader is reliable and will be there to gather them back in after the outer work has been done.
It turns out that our visiting professor was not only a gifted teacher, she was also a skillful tango dancer who saw a stunning set of connections between her profession and her avocation. A colleague of hers, not knowing about her tango lessons, when asked for the definition of authority, had answered with one word: “Followability.” True authority, earned through the experience of learning and practicing under a mentor, gives others the confidence to follow.
In our Hebrew Bible text, God tells Joshua, “I will begin to make you great.” Leaders aren’t made in a day. Leadership—and, not coincidentally, the life of faith—is a process. Joshua has already received on-the-job training as an avid follower of Moses. We first meet him as a trusted disciple shortly after the successful escape from Egypt (Exod. 17). He continues his allegiance as faithful follower through the sometimes tedious, always risky, and often confusing trek through the wilderness. And because he has been an observant follower, picking up cues along the way, Moses occasionally sends him out on missions to prepare the way for the rest of the community. Once introduced in the text, Joshua is mentioned 26 more times in the Pentateuch, always as a dependable second. In our text, and after the death of his mentor (Deut. 34:5), Joshua, faithful follower, is called to lead.
You don’t become a leader—or a believer—overnight. You don’t anoint yourself leader or tout yourself supreme believer by claiming titles or bullying your way into self-carved niches. Moses learned that, as did Joshua. As did, albeit with many false starts and unfortunate detours, the first followers of Jesus.
In a February 2011 White House ceremony, Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to, among other national notables, Maya Angelou. During an interview, she remarked “I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I think, ‘Already? You already got it? I’m still working at it.’”
