Love-Driven Leadership

Editor’s note: In Heroic Leadership, Chris Lowney explores four foundational pillars of leadership exemplified by the Jesuits: self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism. We’ve invited dotMagis bloggers to reflect on each pillar. Explore these ideas further with the exercises in The Heroic Leadership Workbook.

For most of human history, leadership was assumed through violence or inherited through a bloodline. Leadership was understood in terms of a hierarchy, a pyramid, with one man at the top. It was about control, authority, and force. And even beyond the Church, leaders were assumed to be ordained by God. But Jesus, God himself, in his teachings and actions, completely changed what it meant to be a leader.

Jesus rejected the temptations of control that leadership offers. He rejected the politicking that was fed by self-interest. He rejected the violence upon which many other leaders relied. His way of leadership was to love others first, invite them into relationship, recognize their gifts, and walk with them through the ups and downs of life. He affirmed people’s belovedness, even when they were petty, insecure, or marginalized by others, and even when they betrayed him and acted out of their own ego and unhealthy desires or fears. In John 21:15–17, as Jesus is passing on his leadership to Peter, he asks three times, “Peter, do you love me?” and then his instruction was clear, “Feed my sheep.” In other words, first affirm your love for Jesus, and then acting out of that love, care for everyone else.

This is Jesus’ two-step leadership strategy: Love ‘em and lead ‘em.

Fifteen centuries later, St. Ignatius was called to formal leadership through discernment with his companions. He didn’t seek it. His companions came to love Christ through the Spiritual Exercises and sought Ignatius’s leadership out of that love. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius offers each person the invitation to choose between the Two Standards of leadership. He asks which will we follow: the human standard of riches, honor, and pride, with its accompanying desires for control, security, and attention, or the divine standard of poverty, insult, and humility, under which we desire to cede control to God’s grace. But Ignatius asks us to make this discernment only after naming all God has done for us personally. Thus, we first affirm our love for God, and then we choose our response. How will we lead? Ignatius often wrote of his love for Jesus, Mary, his companions, his beloved society, and the Church. These were the loves that motivated his leadership.

Fast forward 500 years, to Pope Francis and his insistence on humility in leadership. Francis was committed to flipping the hierarchical leadership pyramid for the Church just as it was flipped by Jesus. In his homily at the end of the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis again affirmed the root of leadership is in love experienced and expressed in adoration of God and service to others. “It is important to look at the ‘principle and foundation’ from which everything begins ever anew: by loving.” (“A More Synodal and Missionary Church of Adoration and Service.” L’Osservatore Romano, 3 Nov. 2023) In the Synod’s Final Document, the leadership gifts of the Holy Spirit are recognized in all the baptized, male and female. These gifts come not through election, bloodline, or position, but through invitation to all the People of God to love and serve and to be “co-responsible” (For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission, 35) for the mission of Christ. Today, we are all called to affirm our love for God and then lead from wherever we are through service.

Can you imagine Jesus asking you, as he asked Peter and Ignatius, “Do you love me?” Jesus asks us to care for his sheep too. How are you called to love ‘em and lead ‘em?