Servant Leadership in a Digital Age

Servant Leadership is a trending topic in all forms of organizational life, from churches to universities to non-profits, small businesses to multi-national corporations. Yet as the popularity of servant leadership has increased, its definition has become increasingly ambiguous. What exactly is servant leadership? How is it practiced? And what might it mean in a world of continuous social change and digital acceleration?

Google searches for servant leadership have doubled in the last 14 years.

Robert Greenleaf first coined the term Servant Leadership in a seminal 1970 essay, "The Servant as Leader."

In the essay, Greenleaf writes:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."

Greenleaf's roots were in the corporate world. He worked at AT&T for nearly four decades. Yet despite his work in the telecommunications industry, one wonders how Greenleaf's ideas might have evolved were he working in our contemporary tech-shaped culture. He passed away in 1990 at age 86, leaving a legacy that continues to shape leaders of all vocational and spiritual backgrounds. In this post, we'll explore how the idea (really, the ideal) of servant leadership transfers to a digital age, and what it means to be a servant leader in a time of constant technological acceleration.

We need a new approach to leadership

Acceleration and a drive towards efficiency are the only unifying aspects of all organizational life life today. Digital technologies have expedited the flow of information providing us with an abundance of data while conditioning us to move quickly. As communications dart across our screens we cannot help but feeling a sense of busyness, even a sense of overwhelm and malaise. The same corporate world that gave rise to the concept of servant leadership expects constant availability and its responsiveness, far more than it expected from its laborers in Greenleaf's day. Lean staffing structures and ceaseless digital connectivity are a potent pairing, explaining why organizations see increasingly more of their people affected by exhaustion, burnout, and anxiety.

Indeed, this is a time that requires a new approach to leadership. So many of those who aspire to leadership today do so because they believe the can improve efficiency, increase speed, and crank up outputs. Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" has become a widely adopted template for doing less with more. If aspiring leaders are successful in this drive towards acceleration, the market will reward them accordingly. Yet in prioritizing these outcomes they exacerbate the anxiety and freneticism that characterize organizational life.

Servant leadership offers an alternative to the hamster wheel of digital age efficiency. While still driving towards a meaningful vision of a world that could-be, a servant leader consciously charts an unconventional path.

Motivation: The Heart of the Servant Leader

Motivation is the most distinctive attribute of the servant leader. Their motivation appears rather backwards when compared to their peers.

The conventional digital age leader thirsts for productivity gains and increased effectiveness. And let's be clear - there's nothing wrong with efficient, high performing organizations. But in servant leadership, any performance indicator is understood to be an output. When servant leaders achieve such ends, they do so by starting from a commitment to service above all else. The servant leader chooses to serve - to serve first. Being a servant leader in a digital age is about prioritizing a mindset of service to one's team members, stakeholders, members, or community. To paraphrase servant leadership guru Ken Blanchard, any profits reaped by the organization are the applause they receive in exchange for quality service.

The heart of servant leadership is this orientation towards making people and communities more complete, more whole.

To identify a servant leader, ask them about the purpose underlying their work. Ask them about their why. If their answer is presented in the metrics of the marketplace or in the terms of the efficiency expert, than they may be a conventional manager. But if they are driven to make a demonstrably positive impact on their surrounding communities, then they might just be on the path towards servant leadership.

Best test: The Outcome of Servant Leadership

As with the conventions of motivation, the conventional metrics of the marketplace are outputs to the servant leader.

While they are likely to be as or more effective than their conventional peers in generating revenue, profit, and growth, they measure their effectiveness over time with a different yardstick. The growth logic of the marketplace is less immediate than the growth of people. The servant leader repeatedly inquires as to the effect their work has on colleagues, customers, suppliers, and members. If their leadership is to be meaningful, their entire network must benefit.

Greenleaf established a test for would-be servant leaders when he wrote:

"The best test [of a servant-leader], and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?"

Servant leaders can be shrewd negotiators and crafty marketers, powerful executives and commanding authorities. They can be successful capitalists and wealthy investors. Each will employ a unique approach to their exercise of leadership. But what will unite them is a continuous process of reflection into the well-being of their community. The best test of servant leadership is in the betterment of others, for the benefits of servant leadership must be shared.

Finding Sacred Spaces in an AI-Shaped Culture

The sociologist Emile Durkheim argues that religion is defined by the concept of sacred spaces. A sacred space is one that is inherently distinct from the ordinary aspects of life. This differentiation clarifies why churches have sanctuaries, why worship involves liturgy, and why traditions are centered around canons of holy texts.

While I'm hardly an expert on Durkheim's work, it appears that this demarcation primarily pertains to rituals. However, in my personal experience, it seems that questions and conversations can also hold significant power in designating a space as sacred, even without the presence of rite or ritual. Three sacred spaces have shaped my faith, my theology, and my outlook on life.

One is the sanctuary at my home congregation, a community that gathers each week to ask what it means to Welcome, Forgive, and Serve. Another is the campfire ring at Rock Island State Park, where I gather with good friends each summer to ask the big questions of life over beer, steak, and s'mores. The other is the pastor's office at Lutheran Campus Ministry, where I had so many meaningful conversations about the Lutheran tradition and vocation with my late mentor.

In my experience, these spaces were sacred not just because of rituals --- but because of the depth of conversations that occurred there. Each space facilitated the asking of the biggest questions of this life - in a way that wouldn't have been possible amidst the frenetic pace of our culture.

The digital age has already erased two of the boundaries that religious communities once held between the sacred and the profane.

Online worship has erased the boundaries used to mark worship spaces by making worship available in our living rooms. And apps that support spiritual practices like prayer and meditation have made these traditional aspects of religion more widely available. But by integrating these practices into daily life, these technologies have also erased the distinctions that once made these traditions sacred.

Now, AI systems like Chat GPT provide us with the means to ask the questions that were once the domain of sacred spaces. ChatGPT can help you make sense of the death of a loved one. It can advise on you on how your vocation is meaningful. It can give you language to explain the mysteries of faith to a small child.

AI generates answers to these great questions in mere seconds. And while it doesn't cite sources, I found ChatGPT's suggestions on vocational meaning to be compelling. I found its commentary on death to be thought provoking, if not hopeful. I found its guidance for teaching faith to small children to be clear, useful, and within the bounds of my own faith tradition.

What happens to faith when a chat bot so easily answers the big questions we once asked in sacred spaces? What happens to the spaces we thought of as sacred when AI becomes a spiritual director? Can we still find sacred spaces in a post-ChatGPT culture? To answer these questions, the church might look at two commitments for ministry in a digital age:

The church must facilitate the practice of asking questions in community. ChatGPT can provide a quick answer to a big, spiritual question. The church cannot rival the speed with which AI answers these questions. Nor, in many cases, can the church come up with answers that sound as confident. Still, the way that AI responds these questions is somewhat isolating. To answer a big question with out the involvement of a trusted interlocutor is to present a viewpoint that is incomplete and fragmentary. Conversations on being are richer as dialogues, not monologues. So while big questions may begin as monologues in a world of AI, our sacred spaces must convert them into shared conversation. If we develop the trust and the psychological safety to convene these conversations, then the sacred spaces of the church will be all the more important in a digital age.

Then, faith leaders must teach their communities to critically reflect and scrutinize texts. AI-generated content seems authoritative. It is well organized and easy to read, even to the point where it could be considered "doctrinal." Yet the web is full of examples where AI fabricated answers or presented outright falsehoods. Inaccuracies are rampant. Its answers seem confident but they are hardly authoritative. This invites a return to the practice of textual scrutiny - or to use the technical term, hermeneutics.

We ought to equip our communities with the ability to wrestle with texts - not just the scriptures, but the confident-sounding outputs of computer technologies. More than all others, this might be the lifeskill that the church is best positioned to teach in a digital age. Regrettably, American Christianity seems less willing today to train its communities on hermeneutical scrutiny. Rather than teach interpretive skills, too many ministries and preachers seem content to offer the "Biblical view" or the "Christian answer." Too many of us see the church not as a place where texts are wrestled with, but as a vendor for inscrutable answers. If we develop the capacity to teach critical and reflective thought processes, if we are effective at teaching context, culture, and history to our communities, then the spaces that set apart our churches will be free to grapple with all sorts of texts - both those from the scriptures, and those from the chatbots.

If we fail to make these commitments and develop these habits, our sacred spaces may be eroded by ChatGPT. Who needs a pastor to give you vocational advice when OpenAI is available to you in all times and places?

But if we become skilled facilitators of life's biggest questions, we might just find that AI becomes something of a sidekick.

Rather than supplant the church as the location for these conversations, ChatGPT may spark curiosity and inspire confidence.

AI may initiate deeper conversations within Christian communities.

AI, then, becomes the doorway to the sacred spaces that define religion. It becomes a portal to conversations that are meaningful, life-giving, and set apart.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of two books on church in a digital age.

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Churches and Content: How to write better prompts for ChatGPT

This post is the fourth in a series on the intersection of Christianity and artificial intelligence. The previous post in the series, which explores why AI might push church communities offline, is available here.

Since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, much has been said about what AI can and cannot do. For example, ChatGPT can write a simple five paragraph essay. It then struggles write prose that is truly creative or authentic. ChatGPT can come up with a coherent lesson plan. It's less effective at coming up with hands-on activities that facilitate learning. Thus, AI right now is more of a tool for organizing your thoughts, rather than an autonomous creative agent.

But while its true that ChatGPT has technical limitations, its constraints aren't always due to algorithms, models, and predictions. Across all domains, if we want to get more out of AI tools, we need to ask better questions. The prompt, or our request to an AI system, is the most important and most overlooked aspect of AI. When we ask vague questions, AI gives us vague answers. When we prompt AI with context and even nuance, we get outputs that are more useful, more likely to evoke our own creative response.

On a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, the host interviewed a prompt engineer, someone tasked with finding the best ways to ask questions of AI. And while we are unlikely to staff prompt engineers in most ministry contexts, the church out to think about the ways we prompt AI systems. What questions should we ask? What context do we provide? And how should we respond to the answers we receive?

Several marketing blogs have come up with ideas to write better prompts, with suggestions ranging from instructing ChatGPT to adopt a particular persona to specifying to instructing ChatGPT to write with language suitable to various levels of educational attainment.

Across each of these recommendations, you'll find consistent encouragement to:

• Define the role of the chatbot - tell AI who you want it to be (ie, you are a Sunday School teacher at a suburban congregation)

• Define your role - tell the chatbot who you are (ie, I am a director of children, youth, and family ministry)

• Specify structure and style - tell the chatbot where you want it to focus (ie, write a 300 word lesson plan that can be shared with a team of volunteers)

AI for ministry requires a similar approach, with a few modifications unique to churches. Here are three ChatGPT prompts to help church leaders utilize AI efficiently:

Don't just ask ChatGPT to create a Bible Study lesson plan. Ask ChatGPT to create a Bible Study lesson plan that:

• Defines your audience. Be specific on whether your audience is youth or adults, traditional or progressive, in-person or via Zoom.

• Places the lesson within an overarching curriculum. Is this group meeting one time, or is this a weekly meeting? Is this study taking place on a retreat or at a workweek lunch?

• Reflects on one key question the group is currently engaging. Are they working through a strategic plan, or a staffing transition? Are they exploring a particular topic like care of creation or inclusion?

Example prompt: We are a Lutheran summer camp in Waupaca, WI. Create a Bible Study lesson plan based on Genesis 1. This Bible Study is for youth ages 10-16. The Bible Study will take place outdoors on a camping trip. The themes of the study should focus on care of creation and environmental stewardship.

Don't just ask ChatGPT to write your newsletter. Ask ChatGPT to write a newsletter article that:

• Addresses a specific audience. Is the article for new or established members? Is it for visitors? Defining the readership makes sure the tone aligns with the interests of the audience.

• Includes a catchy subject line. Once you've drafted your newsletter, ask ChatGPT to generate 10 subject lines for your email that will lead to the highest open rate. Select the option that seems most relevant.

• Reads free of misspellings or grammatical mistakes. Paste your email text into ChatGPT and prompt it to proofread and spell check. AI is a great tool for better grammar!

Example prompt: This week our church has worship Sunday at 9 with a pot-luck to follow. Our first Confirmation night of the year is Wednesday at 7. Parents should attend. And our Men's Group is meeting Friday morning at 7 AM. Next week we'll be looking at Romans 14 during worship. Use this to generate 10 subject lines for our announcements email.

Finally, don't just use ChatGPT to generate ideas for a sermon. Ask ChatGPT to come up with ideas for what types of stories or illustrations could align with the scripture passage and the themes of your message.

Example prompt: This week we are preaching on Romans 14:1-12 and the theme of hospitality and inclusion. Generate 10 ideas for illustrations or stories I could include with my sermon.

While these systems will never be great theologians or caring pastors, they can serve the role of virtual assistant. Whether we are intrigued, afraid, or enthused by artificial intelligence, we can learn how to use systems like ChatGPT to communicate and create more effectively. When we practice writing better prompts, we can find use cases for ChatGPT far more expansive than what we initially imagined.

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@ryanpanzer teaches classes on religion and technology for Luther Seminary's Faith + Lead.

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