Because we participate in a movement that seeks to proclaim "the eternal gospel" to "every nation and tribe and language and people" (Rev. 14:6),1 our church needs to develop leaders who can provide the global leadership for such a task. Increasingly, we must think of ourselves as global leaders; that is, leaders able to lead locally in the context of a global movement. So where do we turn for lessons in global leadership?
Let's try the Nebuchadnezzar narratives in Daniel chapters 1 and 2.
Daniel 1
With its initial words, the book of Daniel portrays Nebuchadnezzar as both "king of Babylon" and military leader. "In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it" (verse 1). However, no sooner are Nebuchadnezzar's title and military prowess announced than Daniel turns to a central theme of the book: "The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into his power" (verse 2). Nebuchadnezzar's leadership is bounded by divine sovereignty. Already we learn a lesson in global leadership: the need to acknowledge the God of the globe.
As the story unfolds, we learn that Nebuchadnezzar is also a strategic planner, deeply involved in the details of his realm. The strategic plan of Babylon involved training indigenous leaders. Nebuchadnezzar sketches out the lineage, qualifications, curriculum, diet, and eventual placement of the leaders-in-training (verses 3-5, 10, 18-20). He then delegates these matters to Ashpenaz, his "palace master," giving him both the authority and duty to perform what he directs—and he holds Ashpenaz accountable for fulfilling these tasks. At the end of the training, the king personally conducts oral and comprehensive examinations (verses 18-20). Ashpenaz, though, feels accountable all along. To the Hebrews' request for abstinence he responds, "'I am afraid of my lord the king ... If he should see you in poorer condition than the other young men of your own age, you would endanger my head with the king'" (verse 10).
Without endorsing such violent consequences, we may learn from Nebuchadnezzar's positive leadership qualities. Vision casting. Delegation. Accountability. These are marks of capable leadership in any era? What if Nebuchadnezzar had done his work more indulgently? What if he had not cast the vision of training gifted candidates? What if he had failed to appoint a truly capable "palace master"?
What if Nebuchadnezzar had left the results entirely up to the palace master with no timetable and no accountability? Would the quality of the four Hebrew candidates have been nurtured and known? Perhaps not. God's agenda is advanced by the excellence of Nebuchadnezzar's leadership.
This story is challenging for those involved in selecting and training church leaders. We often talk of attracting "the best and the brightest." Nebuchadnezzar "attracts" these candidates by force.
While we would not adopt wholesale Nebuchadnezzar's benchmarks for his hostages, the qualifications he insisted they have are interesting. He insisted on the high est standards. They had to: (1) Have the right lineage (verse 3); (2) Be physically perfect and handsome; (3) Have reached a high level of intellectual attainment; and (4) Be "compe tent to serve in the king's palace" (verse 4). Nebuchadnezzar's list does evoke important questions.
Should the candidates recruited for the High King's palace, be less qualified than the conscripts of Babylon? It was Nebuchadnezzar who set the criteria for his candidates and we must look to our King for a different set of qualifications. We want to recruit and train the candidates that He has chosen. Who are they? What are their qualifications? How do we access His choices?
Learning leadership from Daniel
If we can learn leadership lessons from the tarnished example of Nebuchadnezzar, we can surely turn to the unsullied one of Daniel and his friends. What can they teach us about leadership? At first, they hardly seem to be leaders. Everything happens to them—captivity, conscription, renaming, education. Their lives are planned tightly. There seems little chance to lead when you are so busy following. The opportunity comes, though, in a moment of crisis. Daniel and his friends cannot accept the "daily portion of the royal rations of food and wine" (verse 5). Caught in a pattern as passive captives, they could easily have succumbed, accepting the king's diet as a mark of God's judgment upon them and their nation. Instead, these four exercise leadership that would prove global in its influence.
Daniel serves as lead negotiator. He goes first to palace master Ashpenaz and requests permission to be exempt from the royal fare. As we have seen, Ashpenaz turns aside the request, cit ing his own fear of the king. Daniel, leading from below, is persistent. He goes down a notch on the organizational ladder and makes his request of the palace guard whom Ashpenaz had appointed. This time he offers a more detailed proposal, vegetables to eat and water to drink for ten days. And Daniel's persistence pays off. The guard agrees. The test is on and ten days later the Hebrew four are in great health. The guard, knowing now that there is no risk to his neck, continues "to withdraw their royal rations and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables" (verse 16).
These four young men personify an essential element of leadership: integrity. As someone put it: "Integrity is everything. It requires scourging moral courage, magnetized by a fervor to an ideal. The complete person is a union of unswerving integrity, pulsating energy, and uncompromising determination. And the greatest of these is integrity. . . . Integrity demands unchanging principles, rigorous standards, unshakable discipline, towering dedication. Always. A devotion to what is right and honest and just."2
God adds His blessing to the persistent loyalty of the four friends. Because they were willing to lead from below, they are blessed with knowledge and skill and with the chance to lead from above. They are stationed in the king's court with the opportunity to exercise global leadership on the basis of a reputation as the wisest advisors in the realm (verses 19, 20).
Daniel 2
At the outset of chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar appears at his worst as a leader. He is personally troubled and looks to his underlings for help.When they are unable to recall his dream, he responds viciously: "'This is a public decree: if you do not tell me both the dream and its interpretation, you shall be torn limb from limb, and your houses shall be laid in ruins'" (verse 5). After two more exchanges, Nebuchadnezzar's temper really flares. He flies "into a violent rage" and commands "that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed" (verse 12).
One could argue that Nebuchadnezzar is being authentic. In transparent fashion, he displays his rage. However, there are moments in a leader's experience where other values trump that of authenticity. This is such a case. We could offer the excuse that Nebuchadnezzar is simply reflecting the customary leadership techniques of his time, when kings were expected to be demagogues. All such explanations and excuses aside, Nebuchadnezzar leaves us nothing to emulate.
Daniel, however, does offer us something. He reassures Nebuchadnezzar of God's interest in him. The "'God in heaven'" has, through Daniel, "'disclosed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen at the end of days'" (verse 28). God has revealed this to Daniel, not out of any merit on his part, "'but in order that the interpretation may be known to the king and that you may understand the thoughts of your mind'" (verse 30).
The antidote for the poison of selfish egotism and rage seems to be a fresh understanding of the love and concern of God. When tempted to lash out at those we lead, what we really need is to worship afresh the God who loves us. In the knowledge of His individual concern for us, we are equipped to face troubling thoughts and difficult challenges without wreaking havoc on those who follow.
As in chapter 1, Daniel and his three friends offer a striking and positive example of global leadership. The king has ordered the execution of "all the wise men of Babylon" (verse 12). Arioch, the king's chief executioner, searches for Daniel and his companions, so that he may execute them also. Of the quartet, he finds Daniel first. Daniel asks Arioch a calming question, "'Why is the decree of the king so urgent?'" (verse 15). On hearing Arioch's narrative of events, Daniel heads straight for the palace and requests "that the king give him time and he would tell the king the interpretation" (verse 16).
Here we learn something very important about Daniel's leadership style—it is collaborative. With the reprieve granted, Daniel heads home to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah and tells them to "seek mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery" (verses 17, 18). We should always remember that Daniel's band is a prayer band. As is so poignantly dis played in Daniel chapter 6, Daniel's leadership is rooted in prayer. And here we see that it is rooted in shared prayer. This little community of faith—this house church—is crucial to Daniel as leader.
When the mystery is revealed to Daniel in a night vision, he gives cred it, again in prayer, to his companions: "'To you, O God of my ancestors, I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and power, and have now revealed to me what we asked of you, for you have revealed to us what the king ordered'" (verse 23). When Daniel is handsomely rewarded for offering the dream and its interpretation, he has one request—that the other three share in the honor (verse 49). Daniel receives the vision, but he gives credit where credit is due—to his prayerful companions.
Collaboration and acknowledgment
In The Code Book Simon Singh traces the science of cryptography from ancient to modern times.3 Singh relates a story which evokes this vignette from Daniel. In the 1970s, an unlikely team of three people had been drawn together around a seemingly arcane problem: "Before two people can exchange a secret (an encrypted message) they must already share a secret (the key)."4 The team focused on the problem of "key distribution," how to communicate the "key" in an efficient manner that does not risk secrecy. Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle, working together at Stanford University, made progress.
The real breakthrough, though, came to Hellman in a "vision of the night." Working through the night on his inspired calculations, he waited until the next morning to call Diffie and Merkle. He would later say, "The muse whispered to me, but we all laid the foundations together.'"5 The discovery was dubbed "the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange scheme" and yielded "the greatest cryptographic achievement since the invention of the monoalphabetic cipher, over two thousand years ago," allowing secure communication and transactions over the Internet.6
The Diffie-Hellman-Merkle team worked on problems of encryption— how to secretly encode a message. Daniel and his colleagues were con fronted with a problem of revelation, the need to know the king's dream, and one of decryption, how to interpret it once known. Problems of encryption and decryption are like all difficult issues—they are best solved by a team of collaborators. And credit must be given where credit is due. The breakthrough may come to one, but the credit should be shared by all who have invested themselves in the solution. So here in Daniel 2 we are able to identify two characteristics of excel lent leadership: Collaboration and acknowledgment.
To reach the highest standard of excellence in global leadership, we must take an additional step. Ultimate credit must go to the One who grants every true breakthrough and inspires every true revelation. When Daniel is ushered in to the expectant monarch, Nebuchadnezzar asks, '"Are you able to tell me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation?'" Daniel replies, "'No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or diviners can show to the king the mystery that the king is asking, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has disclosed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen at the end of days'" (verses 26-28). God is the Giver of every true gift. Human leaders should riot take credit for that which is divine.
Conclusions
In these ancient narratives, we learn important principles of leader ship. We learn to emulate the king's excellence while avoiding his demagoguery. And we learn to follow the fine example of four Hebrew men in persistent, prayerful, collaborative leadership exercised with integrity. These leaders lived at the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the kingdom of the golden head. We seek to lead in the time of the toes—the divided kingdoms which succeeded the Roman Empire. These ancient leadership lessons are durable and able to inform the lives of believing leaders "from head to toe."
The most important lesson of all for global leaders may be this: There is a God in heaven who nurtures the leadership gifts of those who turn to Him.
1 All Bible quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
2 Jerold Panas, Integrity is Everything (Chicago. Jerold Panas, Linzy & Partners).
3 Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
4 Ibid., 256.
5 Ibid., 267
6 Ibid., 252.
