A while back I had been on the kids about picking up after themselves, so when one of my daughters left her snack trash and cup lying on the table, I called her back in to clean up and remonstrated, “You are responsible for cleaning up after yourself; I am not your servant”. Upon which my heart smote me as I recalled the words of Christ, “he that is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matt 23:11). But then I pulled myself together and reminded myself that whatever that verse means, it does not mean that I allow my children to be irresponsible and entitled, and I felt better about the whole thing.
Since I write from a distinctly Christian perspective, and since Christianity has not been immune from egalitarian assaults, I want to offer a critique of the leadership philosophy that goes by name of “servant leadership”. This post is for those pursuing a biblical model of home and marriage, and will probably just upset everyone else.
Since that episode with my daughter, I have been thinking this through and coming to some conclusions, one of which is that when I called my daughter back to clean up after herself, I really was serving her and not myself, because it would have been a whole lot quicker to just throw her trash away myself. In fact, as a parent, it takes quite a bit more energy to make the kids do what they are supposed to do than just doing it yourself. So what Jesus said is 100% true and we give our Amen to it. The issue is not whether we should serve, but how we should serve. In a Christian home, a husband/father does not serve his family in the same way that his wife or his children serve one another. The husband’s role is to be the head of his family, and therefore his service includes those activities that are required of someone in authority: decision-making, correction, instruction, etc…
In the case of my daughter and her trash, it was not my place to serve her by cleaning up after her, but by shaping her behavior and character in the direction of virtue. I have often heard marital advice given about how a husband should help his wife with chores around the house, but I have yet to hear – at least from the pulpit – that a husband is to help his wife by teaching her how to do her house chores. When it comes to separating laundry, most husbands wouldn’t be much help anyway, but if the laundry is never done, or the thought of doing the laundry is a constant source of anxiety, then a husband should have a frank conversation with his wife, because she obviously needs some help planning and organizing the needs of her family when it comes to her responsibilities. As children multiply and get older, a man needs to be having more of these types of conversations because more of the responsibilities need to be assigned to the children. If your wife is frustrated because she is shouldering the responsibilities of her fifteen year old son in the same was she was when he was five, then intervention is necessary.
It should be obvious that the way a husband speaks to his wife is by nature very different than the way a father speaks to his children, but in both cases the man is the head of the household and therefore responsible for its peace. If the peace of the household is destroyed by laundry, then the man should intervene. In some cases, this may mean that the man does some laundry, but if the man is doing the laundry because his wife refuses to do the laundry or because he is afraid to confront her about the fact that the laundry is never done, then there is a failure of leadership. You don’t lead by doing other people’s jobs for them, but by helping others do their jobs.
Which is why one of the most basic ways a man serves his family is by establishing responsibilities within the household. A very basic and helpful exercise is to take all the various responsibilities of running a household and assign them to individuals. Who pays the bills? Who plans meals? Who takes out the trash? Who mows? And so on and so forth. A lot of conflict and hurt feelings (ie “He never helps with the dishes”) can be avoided if everyone is aware of their responsibilities. In a healthy household, this does not preclude helping one another fulfill his/her responsibilities because the member assigned to that responsibility is sick, or something came up in the schedule, or that member’s particular responsibilities went crazy that week. One example of this in our household is when the kids are sick. While we both take care of them, my wife hits peak “mothering mode” when her kids are sick and she devotes herself to them. As such, I have no problem taking on more of the household responsibilities-like providing meals or cleaning or doing laundry-than normal. Once the kids are better, things go back to status quo.
The thing about a man who “serves” his family by taking on their responsibilities is that he will not have time for his own. His responsibilities include working to provide for his family, overseeing the family’s spiritual and financial well-being, leading in family worship, etc… Just as it would be detrimental to a business for a manager to do another employee’s job for them, so it is detrimental to the family when a husband tries to do the job assigned to others.
While I have no issue with the term “servant leader”, there does seem to be an egalitarian bent to its application among evangelicals whereby in practice, it has come to mean that the wife makes the significant decisions and the husband’s chief concern is that he never arouses her ire. Perhaps the issues with the servant leadership model exist because the whole thing was a bit of appeasement: it is an effort to avoid the ditch of the authoritarian selfishness that is certainly a temptation for patriarchalists. Unfortunately, it sets itself up to for the kind of selfishness that is a temptation to the weak, lazy man who doesn’t want to invest the kind of effort it takes to lead his family, or the kind of husband who doesn’t have the backbone to tell his wife no, or the kind of father who is not willing to sacrifice his own comforts and so he stops his children from sacrificing their comforts and instead allows them to become entitled brats, and all of this is done in the name of servant leadership.
Pastorally, I have certainly seen evidence of “servant leadership” used as an excuse to default authority to the wife. There have been times when I have intentionally had a conversation with a man by himself about a topic, only to have him return a week later after “discussing it with his wife” and give me his response. And you might ask what the problem is with getting his wife’s input, and my answer would be that there is nothing wrong with it, but if after every “discussion” they end up doing what the wife wants, then why I am wasting my time on conversations with the husband when he is just going to do whatever his wife wants? He isn’t serving by leading; he is using his wife as a shield from the burden of decision making. She is the true leader in the home. When this type of lackluster masculinity is baptized in the name of servant-leadership, there is a problem. When a husband never makes a decision on his own, or never makes a decision that contradicts his wife’s desires, he is not leading his family.
True servant leadership – the kind that serves by leading – takes guts, backbone, and confidence. If your family is going to follow you, then you have to be someone worth following. They have to see your love, care, and devotion for them if they are going to accept your instruction and direction. Lazy husbands make bad leaders, just as much as lazy managers make bad bosses.
When Jesus commands the apostles to serve one another, he is not telling them to abandon their position of authority at home or in the church. He is telling them that they are not to copy the Gentiles, who use the service of others to attain their own selfish desires, but are instead to use their own position of authority to serve those around them in the same way that He did. Jesus was not afraid to make decisions that upset those around him, or rebuke the apostles, or spend Himself passionately for the benefit of those around Him, and so these types of things need to be at the heart of servant leadership.
Let’s take a practical example. Let’s imagine a man with a wife and three young children who have been sporadically attending church, but he decides that he is going to lead his family to attend every week and they’re also going to start attending Sunday School. This is a leadership decision that he is simply going to make. But in order to be a servant leader, he needs to make this decision in such a way that he pays the highest price for it, not his wife. So he isn’t going to drop this decision on her Saturday evening after the kids are in bed, but pretty early in the week. Without heat, he is going to address any objections or difficulties that his wife brings up and plan accordingly. On Sunday, he will be awake, showered, and dressed before the kids need to wake up. He will make sure that the kids clothes are picked out on Saturday night (the actual choosing might be delegated but he will make sure it gets done). He will have a plan for breakfast . And so on and so forth. He isn’t going to make a decision that adds ten kinds of burden to his wife but then he sits in the car waiting for her to get the kids into it. Most of all, he will be cheerful no matter what. As difficult as the morning may be, when it is over he will thank his wife and children for attending church with him and let them know that they will be doing it all again the following week. And all of this is going to be done because it is good for his family to worship the Lord on the Lord’s day, and as the head of his household he is serving his family by leading them towards the good God has for them.
Once this type of pattern has been established in the family, things tend to go pretty smoothly. Confidence builds in the man as the wife realizes that there is no point in arguing with him, but also that he isn’t going to leave her drowning under the consequences of his decisions. Unfortunately, there are a lot of men who have never seen this dynamic and so they waver back and forth between appeasement and authoritarianism. As a man, you will know you are in the right spot when you have confidence that 1) the decisions you are making are the kind of decisions that God wants you to make, and 2) you are loving your family by making it as easy as possible for them to follow you.
Are you the kind of servant leader that Jesus was talking about, or are you are the kind of servant leader that has “happy wife, happy life” on a bumper sticker?
Nathan Writes 