Leadership is not sexy

I have to be honest with you.  I made a promise to you, my tribe, to be vulnerable and open, and so here we are. We are down and disheartened right now.

My husband and I have worked our way in to roles where we have more influence and impact on global issues and global missions than we have ever had in our careers.  We now serve in circles and countries and situations where we can effect real change and empower people to make significant differences in the world and the Kingdom.  We work directly with people who are changing the face of world poverty, human trafficking, water issues, human migration patterns, leadership development, and education around the globe.  We coach and counsel and lead people who regularly sit in the offices of mayors and ambassadors and prime ministers and presidents.  All of this is good.  In fact, all of this is great!  Real impact and real influence. Empowerment and development of grass roots programs, and people doing incredible things.   But one fact remains…

Leadership is not sexy.
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We aren’t doing “sexy missions” anymore.  We are now leading and developing and caring for those people who do. We help to empower them and lift them up.  We help to train them.  We are the faceless mentors behind those incredibly great front-line workers. 

We serve in a different way now. We are about Training, Mobilization, and Service. We aren’t digging the water well personally – but we counsel the guys who do.  We aren’t living in a high security, closed access country teaching education programs and empowering local teachers and students – but we are the coaches for the ones who do that work.  We aren’t sitting on dirt floors with mothers and babies in impoverished villages in the bush – but we mentor those who are.  And we aren’t personally curing disease or bandaging the injured in medical clinics in the jungle or on war-torn borders – but we are helping heal the trauma that those people carry with them day in and day out.  

There was a time when we did many of those things personally.  We spent years doing work with poverty, with empowering women, and with hunger.  We spent years helping with medical campaigns and serving in places that never see doctors or health care. We founded education programs in villages with little access to resources and high rates of illiteracy.  We served in community development projects and harvested crops and milked goats and raised chickens and fed the hungry. And we planted churches and discipled new believers where before there had been none. We have vast experience on the front lines of ministry, mission, and humanitarian efforts. That experience and those years of service are exactly what lead us to be what we are today… mentors, leaders, trainers, coaches, and counselors for the next generation of cross-cultural workers that are taking up the torch and stepping in to serve.

In the corporate world, this is exactly how it should work!  Younger workers spend years getting their feet wet, working their way through roles and job descriptions and career paths until one day they are really good at what they do, and they have the experience necessary to step up the ladder and train up the new recruits.  They become leaders and mentors. Their earning power increases and their resumes build.  They become team leaders or department heads or executives.  They have arrived.

But it’s just not quite like that for cross-cultural workers who become leaders and take on leadership roles.  At least it hasn’t been for us, nor for some of our peers.  There hasn’t been any earning increase – we continue to be fully dependent on churches and partners and donations for funding the work. Now that 80% of our work and roles are related to leading others and mentoring, training, developing, and coaching, we are no longer seen as “real missionaries” by the general public.  Our influence is greater, our responsibility is greater, our ability to impact effective change in real world issues is greater – yet we are losing funding every day because we aren’t “front line enough”.  We don’t post photos of us curing diseases or healing the sick. We don’t have video of us wandering through dusty streets with native people groups.  We don’t personally plant churches in war-torn areas. And we aren’t seen wearing traditional clothing or eating unknown foods. That used to be us, but not in this season.  This season is a season of leadership and of training up and empowering and caring for our peers - other cross-cultural workers.

Leadership isn’t sexy. It doesn’t fit the traditional narrative for cross-cultural work.  It doesn’t yield spectacular photos or near-death experiences or wild animal tales. But it’s necessary. It’s dirty in a different way. It’s front-line in a different way.  It reaches the unreached and least-reached in a different way. And it’s what we are called to in this season.  It’s the role we have risen to. It’s what we believe in.

I know we make a difference.  I know we are holding others up when they don’t think they can keep going for one more day. I know that training matters, that development matters, that mentoring matters. It matters in the corporate world. It matters in the academic world. And it matters in the mission world. I know it matters.
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Not all cross-cultural work is sexy. But that doesn’t make it less valuable. I know this calling still matters to God. 

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