Cultivating Christ-like compassion

I’ve thumbed through various leadership books for most of my adult life. Much of the literature strikes me as excessively jargony and less helpful than more practical methods for learning effective leadership. Nevertheless, certain leadership characteristics surface repeatedly—traits that capture the attention of followers.

What attracted people to Jesus, interestingly enough, were not traits that we customarily associate with effective leadership in our day, traits like self-awareness, innovation, emotional maturity, self-confidence, creativity, strategic thinking, and more. His personality may well have encompassed any of these. But when people followed Jesus, they were drawn by his compassion as much as anything else. He possessed what Frederick Buechner describes as the “fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside someone else’s skin.”

At the very outset of his ministry, Jesus touched and cleansed a leper, moved as he was then (and at many other times) “with compassion.” He cared for crowds from the deepest parts of his being—splagchnizomai in Greek, the bowels or entrails, or what we might speak of as “from his gut.” His was a deep feeling for what others were experiencing, which he then acted upon kindly.