Have you ever seen someone who is passionate about something? What drove their passion or did their passion drive them? Have you ever seen someone who was not passionate about what they were doing? In a team setting this unpassionate drive eventually infilitrates the team and tears it down, especially if you are the unpassionate leader. If passion drives a leader, how then does a leader stay focused without letting passion take over him or her? What is passion? These are all questions that leaders should be able to address because it pushes us towards the vision that God has cast.
I attempted to find a universal definition of passion and have not. The best I can come up with is that passion consumes our thoughts and feelings and drives us towards some something. For the leader, passion consumes our thoughts and emotions and drives us towards God’s vision. If we are not passionate about the vision of God then there is probably something blocking us from how beautiful the idea of restoration in God is. People have been trained to run away from personal desire/passion by the institution of the church. It is not as black and white as we make it out to be. I think often we push away passion about something because we have been trained that if we have personal desires it is of our self.
The question at hand is “What if these desires and passions are not of ourself and it is from God?” We must be self-disciplined enough as leaders to discern these things. This discernment points back towards integrity. and having the self-discipline in being authentic. We must also be disciplined enough that passion does not take us over. It is one thing to allow passion to put drive into our leadership but it is something completely different to allow it to take over us because we run the risk of allowing our self to direct us instead of allowing God to direct us.
Passion is a key ingredient of a leader because it drives us towards some kind of mission God has placed inside of us that points back towards His vision. We must trust our passion’s as leader’s in God’s hand and allow Him to work it in away that pushes us foward. It is risk taking which I think is also imperative to leaders who lead instead of people who manage. I think the key to harnessing this passion can be found in 2 Timothy 1.7 (see the Ablazed post)- God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound-mind (self-control, self-discipline). We have to trust it is of God and not of ourselves and daily hand it over to God. God will give us the power to correctly handle a passion that pushes us towards a mission He has given us, love to make this passion not about us but about Him, and the self-discipline to stand unshakeable in this.
What I really take away from this is that passion when handed over to God and our courage to take risks can form leaders with God-sized missions that point to Him and honor Him. If we follow the mentality of He must Increase and I must decrease and couple it with passion, amazing things can happen and God will give us our mission. God is in the process of developing a personal mission in my life. “I will direct my love so passionately towards God that it has no other choice but to overflow into those around me and change lives.”. I have desires and passions on how to direct my “love passionately towards God” and I must trust they are not self-ambitions but ambitions God has given me and I must take the risk of pursing them.