In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, one of the readings for the sermon this week will be Exodus 16.1-3; the other reading will be from Leadership for the Twenty-First Century by Joseph Rost. You can look up the passage from Exodus on your own [link]; here’s the passage from Rost’s book:

Followers are part of the leadership relationship in a new paradigm of leadership. What is different about the emerging view of followers is the substantive meaning attached to the word and the clarity given to that understanding. The following five points give the concept of followers substance and clarity.

First, only people who are active in the leadership process are followers. Passive people are not in a relationship. They have chosen not to be involved. They cannot have influence. Passive people are not followers.

Second, active people can fall anywhere on a continuum of activity from highly active to minimally active, and their influence in the leadership process is, in large part, based on their activity, their willingness to get involved, their use of the power resources they have at their command to influence other people….

Third, followers can become leaders and leaders can become followers in any one leadership relationship. People are not stuck in one or the other for the whole time the relationship exists…. This ability to change places without changing organizational positions gives followers considerable influence and mobility.

Fourth, in one group or organization people can be leaders. In other groups and organizations they can be followers. Followers are not always followers in all leadership relationships.

Fifth, and most important, followers do no do followership, they do leadership. Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership. There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership. Followership makes sense only in the industrial leadership paradigm, where leadership is good management. Since followers who are subordinates could not do management (since they were not managers), they had to do followership. No wonder followership connoted subordination, submissiveness, and passivity. In the new paradigm, followers and leaders do leadership. They are in the leadership relationship together. They are the ones who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes….. Followers and leaders develop a relationship wherein they influence one another as well as the organization and society, and that is leadership. [pp. 108-109; emphasis in original]

Rost’s analysis of leadership is one of the best I’ve seen. The book is pretty dry, but it’s worth wading through the academic prose to get to the ideas.

Ideas like: “Passive people are not followers.” I see this happening in liberal religion right now. There are the passive people who sit and complain about having to take on responsibility for their own well-being (as happens in Exodus 16.1-3). There are the passive people can also hide behind individualism as their excuse for not being active followers; “doing your own thing” all too often translates into doing things that don’t effect real change (as happens in Exodus 32.21-29, which I almost used as one of this week’s readings). Individualism is my preferred form of passivity.