Leadership and Tattoos

At present, a group of young leaders and I, are working through J. Oswald Sander's book Spiritual Leadership. It is a helpful guide in pointing us back to the kind of servant leadership of which the Scripture teaches. Sanders, like many others who have taken up this topic, rightly points us to the example of Jesus' servant leadership which is so clearly laid out in the gospel. The core principle of leadership truly is service, and we must ever labor to learn and relearn that lesson.

Yet, it seems to me that a great weakness in contemporary Christian thinking regarding leadership is that it often ends with thinking about the way Christ servant-led while here on earth. What about the ongoing, all-powerful leadership that Jesus Christ, our Mediator exercises as the God-Man today? Perhaps that question and its implications need to be more fully worked out in future works on Christian leadership.

__________

Secondly, while on vacation recently, I was in a crowd of people at an amusement park and began noticing the proliferation of tattoos in our culture. One of the editors of the Wall Street Journal has noticed the same thing and has written about it today. More than one in three Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 sports a tattoo these days. Tattoos have absolutely no appeal to me, but apparently people who want them feel that they will stand out and express their individuality or some part of their identity through their tattoo. They want to prove that they "stand out" in some way. After elaborating on some of the many weaknesses of tattoos, the author hits exactly the right note in saying, "There is something to be said for dressing to fit in and thinking to stand out."