Who wants to be the leader?

Ask that in any classroom on the planet and two-thirds of the hands will go up. Every child in the class wants to be the leader.

The leader determines the direction. The leader walks out front. The leader becomes the role model for everyone else. The leader issues orders to the rest of the troops. The leader is well-known and highly visible. The leader gets interviewed by the media, shown on television and quoted by the paper. The leader receives the accolades when it’s all over. The leader takes home the choice rewards.

It’s fun being the leader.

Because he’s the most visible, the leader also gets shot at first and most often. The leader gets criticized by outsiders and insiders alike. The leader is the first to be arrested and executed if the movement fails. The leader bears the blame. The leader was at fault. The leader has to keep up appearances even when he is hopelessly discouraged or lost at sea. It all falls on the shoulders of the leader.

You sure you want to be the leader?

At this very moment, a future president of the United States of America is in high school. He/she may know very well that this is their destiny or, more likely, not have a clue. Some future president is a toddler in diapers.

It’s possible and even likely that the pastor-after-next who will be coming to lead your church is in middle school right now, without the slightest idea what lies ahead.

You hope someone is training these young people well. You hope they don’t have things too easy, that they learn the lessons only hard work can teach. You want them to know the positive values of struggle, of overcoming obstacles, of reaching deep down inside and summoning inner strength.

You want them smart and strong and solid.

The question is: where do we get such leaders? And how do they get that way?

Here’s how God did it.

God was finished with the present king. Saul had begun well. At first, he had been humble and sweet-spirited and teachable. But in short order, the adulation of the masses had turned his head and he had become far too infatuated with his own image. When his world began to center only in himself, he was no longer of any use to the nation or to God.

So, the Lord commissioned His prophet to locate the next leader.

We who work in leadership development would do well to study what God did and how He did it.

First lesson: potential leaders are where you find them.

Throw away your preconceptions and open wide the doors of your imagination and expectations. The next king might be anywhere.

God sent Samuel to Bethlehem, to the sheep ranch of Jesse, a Ben Cartwright-type (maybe; why not?) with a houseful of boys. The story is recorded in I Samuel chapter 16.

Being a creature of habit, the old prophet remembered how a few years back he had done a similar thing in fingering Saul as the next king. Saul had been tall and good looking, right out of a Hollywood casting office.

No doubt God would do the same thing this time, Samuel thought. He was thinking wrong.

After going through all the sons of Jesse and finding none that satisfied the Spirit of God within him, Samuel was about to admit defeat when he turned to Jesse and said, “Anyone else? Is this the lot?”

The father said, “There’s one more. The youngest and the runt of the family. That’s David. He’s outside on a hillside somewhere, watching over his sheep and no doubt, strumming a lyre and making up hymns.”

Not exactly presidential material, Samuel must have thought. In that, Jesse would have agreed. That’s likely why he didn’t summons David in from the field in the first place. He was a poet and musician, of a gentle nature, not a man’s man.

At least, that’s how he seemed.

God gave Samuel–and the rest of us–a lesson for all time when He said, “Man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks at the heart” (I Sam. 16:7).

Don’t put too much stock in surface appearances. I can almost guarantee you that if you had shown up in the village of New Salem, Illinois, in 1829, and pointed out the young awkward Abe Lincoln as not only a future president, but the greatest this country would ever know, you would have been laughed out of town.

Second lesson in God’s leadership development plan: if he would grow strong, the future leader must learn to deal with pressure, hardship, and opposition. He must experience defeat and discouragement and learn to pick himself up and get back into the fight.

When you want to build a muscle, you apply stress to it.

As a shepherd, David fought off bears and lions. (He says that in I Sam. 17:34-36.)

While still a youth, he went against Goliath. (I Sam. chapter 17; it’s everyone’s favorite Bible story. Mine, too.)

About the time things began going well for him, the king made David an outlaw and put a price on his head. He became a wanted man for no wrong he had committed. (I Sam. 18:10 through chapter 31)

This time, the Lord was going to make sure–as much as one can make sure of anything–that the man in the White House–excuse me, the man in the king’s house was of more solid material than his predecessor.

Testing and trials will accomplish things no amount of luxury and success can ever achieve.

The poorest leaders on the planet are those selected by dad to follow in his footsteps but never made to work or learn the lessons of leadership the hard way. As has been said of others, this one was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple. Such a non-leader never understands the challenges he faces or the people he will try to lead or the methodologies he will need to employ.

Some lessons are available only by the sweat of one’s brow.

Rudy Vallee, the celebrated singer and popular movie star of the early-to-mid 20th Century, grew up the hard way. In his father’s grocery, he chipped 17 buckets of ice every day required to keep the ice cream cold. By the time his little brother was of the age to take over the job, their father had bought an icemaker. Rudy worked long hours in the store, but by the time his little brother was old enough to share some of the duties, the store was sufficiently prosperous for employees to be hired.

It used to bother Vallee that his younger brother was lazy and accomplished so little in life. But the reason is clear: he was never taught to work. Everything was handed to him. He grew up soft and pleasure-driven. If you are looking for a recipe for raising a failure in life, that’s it.

A friend who pastored a mega-church told me once when his children were young adults, “My one regret is that I never made them work. I wanted my kids to have advantages I never had, and it turned out to hurt them more than it helped.”

Third lesson in God’s leadership development program: Have the trainee learn by painful experience that the Lord is faithful and will be a sufficient strength for him.

“You never know the Lord is enough,” the saying goes, “until He’s all you have.”

That’s the plan. So, when the king turned against David and made him a wanted man, he became persona non grata throughout Israel and fled into the neighboring countries. The people who came to David’s assistance–to join his rag-tag army–were the dregs of society. I Samuel 22:2 calls them distressed, debtors, discontented. Not an impressive bunch. Not a championship team. No most-likely-to-succeed in the bunch. (In fact, according to I Corinthians 1:26, they closely resemble the membership of the early church.)

It’s hard to know which, but we can assume some of the psalms we treasure most were penned during this dark period in David’s soul.

Perhaps the 13th Psalm came about during this time. It begins, “How long, O God? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

God didn’t say. It was part of His plan in developing the soul and mind of this servant and future king to teach him to persevere against all odds, to sing when his heart was breaking, to do the right thing when he wanted to quit. To do that, it was important that David receive no answers to his prayers, at least, for a time.

Can you keep going when God seems absent? Can you be faithful when no one is encouraging you and God seems distant? If so, you are made of the right stuff.

The 13th Psalm ends: “But I have trusted in thy lovingkindness; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because He has dealt bountifully with me.”

Clearly, the lessons were taking. David was learning in God’s crucible the lesson which the Prophet Habakkuk would express so beautifully a couple of hundred years later in Hab. 3:17-19, to “praise God anyway.”

Fourth lesson in God’s plan: Give the trainee an occasional encourager. Saul’s son Jonathan came first, followed by a succession of godly but lesser known priests and prophets, then Abigail the wife of Nabal who was to become Mrs. David, and throughout, his military advisers.

Everyone needs encouragement, even the greatest among us. A word of affirmation, a prayer, a note. Someone has said, “I can live a week on a compliment.”

The Lord Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit as our “paraclete.” We take comfort in knowing this word is often translated as one who comes along beside us to encourage us, to lift up our spirits. So, the Lord is our encourager.

But He will send the occasional comforter “with skin on,” as the little child put it.

It would be nice to never need human support, to be so clear in our direction and certain on our program that we can stand alone at all times. (At least, I think it would; I’m not completely sure about that.) But God has not made us that way.

We need people around us who are on our team, who know when to rebuke and when to comfort, who are supportive of the goals and agreeable to the methods, but who are unafraid to “speak the truth to power.” If we make the mistake of a Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff and surround ourselves with non-questioning sycophants who know only how to say, “Great idea, sir–let’s do it,” but have never learned the value of a well-timed “I’m not so sure, sir. Let’s go slow here,” we will fail miserably and perhaps even spectacularly, in the manner of these two men.

Fifth, and final lesson, for this particular session: The process of leadership development never ever ends. The classroom is an ongoing laboratory for God’s leaders.

No one gets to the point where he has arrived and can shut down the learning mechanisms and thereafter devote himself to turning out endless books and programs on “how I did it.”

No one in the history of this planet, I’m betting, has written more books on the subject of leadership than a San Diego preacher named John Maxwell. I own many of his writings.

Recently, I raised a question about Maxwell with some pastor friends, people who also read him. “Why does he keep turning out more books on leadership? I mean, other than to keep the cash flow healthy.”

The consensus was that leadership is not an exact science and that we’re always making new discoveries, figuring something else out, finding better ways to communicate old truths.

That’s part of it, but here’s another aspect: everyone is different. What works for you may not work for me. The human being is not a product of a cookie cutter assembly line process, with each one replicating the one who went before.

There are all kinds of leaders, a hundred philosophies of leadership, and a jillion ways of figuring out how to get a team from here to there.

Last Sunday as I write, Larry Black, known throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, my denomination, as one of the pre-eminent worship leaders for the past half century, was leading a congregational hymn at the First Baptist Church of Richland, Mississippi, where he is the interim leader and I was guest preacher. As Larry announced the next hymn which the choir and vocal ensemble would lead the congregation in singing, he looked into the audience and said, “Where’s Luke? I want Luke to come up here and lead us in singing this wonderful hymn.”

Luke, it turned out, was 11 years old. There was clearly some kind of understanding or perhaps a little history between Larry and this child of a church staffer already in place, because Luke did not hesitate. He strode confidently to the platform, took the cordless microphone, and along with the other singers, sang out in his beautiful clear voice the hymn of the morning.

I stood there singing along, thinking of what Larry was doing, even after all this time: still finding future leaders of the Lord’s work and encouraging them.

Later, when I rose to preach, I called attention to what Larry had done with Luke and remembered how he had done something similar with my son Neil as a 9-year-old over three decades ago. When the children’s choir from First Baptist Church of Jackson, Mississippi, presented “The Boy Who Caught The Fish,” Neil was one of several children chosen for the lead roles. The choir presented the program numerous times, with the leadership revolving at each performance. Neil’s chance came before the student body at Woodland Hills Baptist Church’s elementary school. Somewhere around the house, we still have a cassette recording of that proud moment.

To this day, Neil sings in the church choir in Louisiana and often takes a leading role in Christmas and Easter musical presentations.

It all started in childhood when a minister of music saw potential in a child.

You will not be surprised when I inform you that some of today’s leading worship leaders in great congregations across America were once children in Larry Black’s choirs.

There are all kinds of leaders and all types of programs of development. Some training God does on His own without the permission or assistance or awareness of anyone around. We think of young Abraham Lincoln lying near the fireplace hearth at night reading, of the long hours he put in working and walking and studying alone. The resistance, the hardships, the struggles, and the occasional encouragement all had a part in making him into the kind of solid leader this nation would require in its darkest hour.

What’s God up to in you today? Putting you through a boot camp? Give thanks. He’s forging a leader.

He has big plans for you. Stay on the anvil, friend.