Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

One of the opportunities Selwyn College presents its residents with - as witnessed by our glittering alumni (!) - is the chance to grow into positions of leadership, both individually and within the community.

When students return from the mid-Semester break we’ll soon be into the electioneering and extravagant promises of would-be SCSA Executive members for 2009. We’ve just gone through the process for OUSA, and a couple of former residents were prominent in those races also.

But what kind of leaders are we trying to encourage?

There’s a passage in the gospels during the Last Supper when the soon-to-be leadership of the Church, the Disciples, break into a squabble about which of them is to be seen as “the greatest”.

Jesus replies by saying “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them … but not so with you;
rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest,
and the leader like one who serves.”

“Servant leadership” has become a bit of a “brand” in the (US) business world in recent decades, after a publication by Robert Greenleaf. But that doesn’t mean it’s not to be taken seriously.

Certainly the idea that we takes seriously and together both leadership and service deserves more airtime than we usually give it.

We are reminded in Jesus’ words that those considered great in the empires and ages of this earth often lack the true greatness they project.

You may have heard Coldplay’s recent song Viva la vida with the protagonist reflecting on the loneliness and emptiness of who he has become since he “ruled the world”.

C. S. Lewis offers a glimpse of true greatness and true discipleship in The Great Divorce, a little story about a busload of the dead who visit the outskirts of both hell and heaven.

Near Paradise the narrator comes across a great procession of song and luminescence,
and a woman of unbearable beauty. The observer assumes it must be the Virgin Mary.

“Not at all,” his guide says. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith … She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”
It emerges that this woman, altogether ordinary in the world’s eyes, was the kind of soul whose love for people, and even animals, made them better at what they were meant to be.
The guide says, “… her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers.
But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives…
In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them … It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? … But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”

Rather a lot to ask from a student body, but food for thought for an institution that would make a difference in its community, in this time, and perhaps into eternity!