What qualities define leadership? The dictionary tells me that leadership involves guidance, stewardship, and command. I would add humility, vision, and alertness, along with the ability to serve a great cause and those working for it. And we mustn't forget hard work. Leaders need to stay in tune and ahead; they must be informed. This requires diligence, accountability, and the ability to see things through to completion and beyond.
A leader will not do the work of another, but will often show the way by doing. Mary Baker Eddy was, and still is, the leader of the Christian Science movement, but she has said that her followers should follow her only so far as she follows Christ. She refused to be put on a pinnacle, but knew her place as Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.
Great leaders care for their flocks and Eddy surely demonstrates this in her voluminous writings, including in our book this month, The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany (we are reading chapters 10 to 20). Her exquisite letters "To a First Reader" (My 247) and "The Christian Science Board of Lectureship" (My 248-9) are inspirational and point to her adherence to the inspired word of the Bible. I love when she quotes Ecclesiastes 11:1 about "cast[ing your] bread upon the waters" and finding it returning to us "after many or a few days" (p. 247: 24).
Such encouragement certainly sustains hope.
Julie Swannell
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