For most of the last sixteen centuries, Christian leaders could assume something that no longer holds.
They could assume that the surrounding culture shared their basic convictions. That the church sat near the center of public life, its voice respected, its buildings prominent, its leaders granted a seat at the table. To lead in the church was to hold a kind of cultural authority that the world recognised and, for the most part, honoured.
That world is ending, and in much of the West it’s already gone. We live now in a society that’s secular in its assumptions, pluralist in its makeup, and post-Christian in its memory. The church has moved from the center to the margins. Its leaders speak into a culture that often regards them with indifference or suspicion. The old authority has drained away.
And here’s where many Christian leaders make a fateful choice. Feeling the loss of power, they reach to take it back. They pursue political alliances that promise to restore the church’s influence. They adopt the strategies of the marketplace and the campaign, chasing relevance, platform, and applause. They fight culture wars to reclaim the ground that’s slipping away. The grasping takes many forms, and underneath all of them runs the same instinct: to meet the loss of power by seizing more of it.
There’s another way, and it was marked out two thousand years ago by the One whose name these leaders claim. The way of Jesus runs in the opposite direction from the grasping, and it offers the church a form of leadership that the present moment makes newly visible and newly necessary.
The Kingdom Turned Upside Down
Begin with the teaching that opened the public ministry of Jesus.
On a hillside in Galilee, Jesus sat down and described a kingdom that overturned every assumption about greatness and power. Blessing belongs to the poor in spirit, to the meek, to the merciful, to the peacemakers, to those hungry for righteousness. The ones the world overlooks are the ones heaven lifts up. The Sermon on the Mount paints a community where enemies are loved, where the other cheek is turned, where the last become first and the humble inherit the earth.
This was a direct challenge to every theory of power the ancient world knew. Rome led by domination, by the sword, by the iron logic of conquest. Jesus described a different kind of greatness altogether, one measured by love, service, and self-giving.
Later, when two of the disciples came asking for the chief seats in the coming kingdom, Jesus answered with startling clarity. The rulers of the nations throw their weight around, lording it over the people beneath them. Among the followers of Jesus, greatness would wear a different face. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” The Human One, Jesus said, came to serve, and to give life itself as a ransom for many.
A leadership revolution was being seeded in those words. Authority, in the kingdom Jesus announced, flows downward. It expresses itself in service. It looks like a towel and a basin in the hands of the one who could have claimed a throne.
The Cross as the Shape of Authority
Everything in that teaching found its fullest expression on a Roman cross.
On the night before the crucifixion, Jesus knelt before the disciples, wrapped a towel around the waist, and washed their feet. The act stunned them. This was work for the lowest servant in the household, and the teacher was doing it. When it was finished, Jesus told them plainly that this was the pattern they were to follow. The leader kneels. The greatest serves. The one in authority takes up the towel.
And then came the cross itself. Here the way of Jesus reached its deepest point. The One who could have summoned legions of angels chose instead to be handed over, mocked, stripped, and nailed to a Roman scaffold. The crucifixion was the deepest refusal of coercive power and the fullest expression of self-giving love. Authority was redefined forever. From that day, the truest power in the universe would be understood as the power that pours itself out for others.
An early Christian hymn captured this in words that still astonish. Though existing in the form of God, Christ held that glory with open hands, let it all go, took the form of a servant, and became obedient even to death on a cross. And precisely because of that descent, Christ was raised and exalted above every name.
This is the pattern. Down before up. Service before glory. The towel before the crown. The way of Jesus moves through self-emptying into exaltation, and it sets the shape for everyone who would lead in the name of Christ.
Why This Is Good News for a Post-Christian Church
Here’s the surprising gift hidden inside the church’s loss of cultural power.
For centuries, the cruciform pattern was easy to forget. When the church held the reins of culture, Christian leadership could rest on position, prestige, and the assumption that the world would listen. The towel and the basin could be set aside. Leaders could lead from the center, clothed in borrowed authority.
That arrangement is gone, and its passing clears the way for something truer. A church on the margins, stripped of cultural dominance, is a church returned to the very position the first Christians occupied. They were a small movement with no political power, no wealth, no cultural clout. And they turned the world upside down. They did it through the quality of their love, their care for the poor and the sick, their welcome of the outcast, their readiness to suffer for what they believed. Their leaders led by serving, by suffering, and by the integrity of lives that matched their message. Outsiders looked at these communities and saw something they couldn’t explain, a love that asked for nothing and gave everything, and the watching world was drawn in.
Our present moment calls for exactly this leadership. In a pluralist society, the followers of Jesus lead through love, service, and persuasion, and they have no business reaching for the tools of coercion. The world has seen enough of religious power that grasps and dominates, and it has rightly grown wary of it. What disarms that suspicion is a leadership that refuses to grasp, that serves without seeking reward, that loves without demanding allegiance, that bears witness through sacrifice and service.
A secular age can ignore an institution that clings to its privileges. It struggles to ignore a community that washes feet, that cares for the forgotten, that returns love for hostility, that holds to its convictions while laying down its power. This is the witness that broke open the ancient world, and it’s the witness that can speak to ours.
Leading with the Towel
So what does cruciform leadership look like in the ordinary places where we lead?
It looks like authority exercised as service, in the home, the church, the workplace, the community. It looks like leaders who listen more than they speak, who share power instead of hoarding it, who take responsibility for failures and hand the credit to others. It looks like a willingness to be unseen, to do the lowly work, to set down the platform when the platform would cost the soul.
It looks like influence pursued through love and persuasion, through the slow building of trust, through patient service that earns its hearing over time. It looks like leaders who prize faithfulness above fame, who measure success by the depth of their love, who carry a towel into every room they enter. None of this is weakness dressed up as virtue. It takes more courage to serve than to dominate, more strength to kneel than to stand over others, and the leaders who walk this road discover a settled authority that no title could ever grant.
The Invitation
The way of Jesus has always run downward, into service, into self-giving, into the laying down of power for the sake of love. The world that once made it easy to forget this pattern has now made it impossible to ignore. The church can grieve its lost dominance and scramble to take it back. Or it can recognise, in the loss, an invitation to become what it was always meant to be: a community led by servants, shaped by a cross, following the One who knelt with a towel and changed the meaning of greatness forever.
Pick up the towel. Kneel down. Lead the way Jesus led. In a world that has grown weary of power that grasps, the church has been handed a rare chance to show what love that serves can do.
What would change in the places you lead if you measured greatness the way Jesus did?
Graham Joseph Hill is the Mission Catalyst – Church Planting and Missional Renewal for Uniting Mission and Education. This post is from his Substack here.
