The Spiritual Life of a Leader: A God-Centered Leadership Style

By Boyd Bailey

The Best Leaders Rely on God

No matter where you lead, the qualities that make a great leader are the same: you should be humble, selfless, honest, collaborative, and teachable. Most of all, you should recognize Jesus as the gold standard of leadership and make your relationship with God your top priority.

In The Spiritual Life of a Leader, bestselling author Boyd Bailey will help you develop the habits and goals of an effective leader. As you orient your heart toward serving God, you’ll grow in your ability to bear spiritual fruit in your workplace, serve your colleagues, and raise up other leaders.

Learn how you can…

• use honest self-assessment to improve your weaknesses and hone your spiritual strengths
• make spirituality a central part of your management style, even in a secular environment
• avoid the temptations common to leaders and ensure your unique spiritual needs are met

Get ready to grow as a leader and a follower of Christ. The Spiritual Life of a Leader will help you adopt God’s priorities as your own and enable you to shine for Him as you follow Jesus’ footsteps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780736982467

Boyd Bailey

Boyd Bailey, the author of Wisdom Hunters devotionals, is the founder of Wisdom Hunters, Inc., an Atlanta-based ministry created to encourage Christians (a.k.a wisdom hunters) to apply God's unchanging Truth in a changing world. By God's grace, Boyd has impacted wisdom hunters in over 86 countries across the globe through the Wisdom Hunters daily devotion, wisdomhunters.com devotional blog and devotional books. For over 30 years Boyd Bailey has passionately pursued wisdom through his career in fulltime ministry, executive coaching, and mentoring. Since becoming a Christian at the age of 19, Boyd begins each day as a wisdom hunter, diligently searching for Truth in scripture, and through God's grace, applying it to his life. These raw, 'real time' reflections from his personal time with the Lord, are now impacting over 70,000 people through the Wisdom Hunters Daily Devotion email. In addition to the daily devotion, Boyd has authored three devotional books: Infusion, a 90-day devotional, Seeking Daily the Heart of God, a 365-day devotional and Seeking God in the Psalms, a 90-day devotional along with several 30-day devotional e-Books on topics such as Wisdom for Fathers, Wisdom for Mothers, Wisdom for Graduates, and Wisdom for Marriage. In addition to Wisdom Hunters, Boyd is the co-founder and CEO of Ministry Ventures, a faith based non-profit, where he has trained and coached over 1000 ministries in the best practices of prayer, board, ministry models, administration and fundraising. Prior to Ministry Ventures, Boyd was the National Director for Crown Financial Ministries and an Associate Pastor at First Baptist Church of Atlanta. Boyd serves on numerous boards including Ministry Ventures, Wisdom Hunters, Atlanta Mission, Souly Business and Blue Print for Life. Boyd received his Bachelor of Arts from Jacksonville State University and his Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Seminary. He and Rita, his wife of 30 plus years, live in Roswell, Georgia and are blessed with four daughters, three sons-in-law who love Jesus, and a granddaughter and grandson. Boyd and Rita enjoy missions and investing in young couples, as well as hiking, reading, traveling, working through their bucket list, watching college football, and hanging out with their kids and grand kids when ever possible.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

BECOMING THE SPIRITUAL LEADER YOU WANT TO BE

Hundreds of books have been published on how to become a better leader, and new ones can be added to our shelves nearly every month. In fact, I’ve written a couple of them myself. Most of these books primarily offer techniques and methodologies to help you expand your leadership skills, and many of them can be quite helpful.

But I think most books on leadership miss this truth: you’ll become a better leader as you become a better person. The best leaders, I suggest, aren’t those who have learned the most tricks and techniques of leadership, or are skilled in taking charge, or have memorized a bunch of leadership principles. The best leaders have a high level of spiritual maturity—they’ve learned to walk with God in intimacy and let that relationship spill into their leadership style.

In this book I argue that recognizing your spiritual strengths and being honest about your spiritual struggles are key to your leading effectively. So, then, we’ll explore these three areas:

1.the spiritual life necessary for a spiritually mature leader

2.the spiritual qualities that underlie mature leadership

3.the oft-neglected spiritual practices that will help you grow not only as a person but also as a leader

It all starts with our personal transformation, which will change the way we understand our roles as leaders and how we operate in those roles. Whether in businesses, organizations, or churches, we face unique spiritual challenges and temptations others don’t have to address. And to meet those challenges and temptations, we must shape our leadership styles with biblical principles and values. We need to embrace the spiritual practices that can help us grow closer to God and thereby become the best leaders we can be.

The bottom line is that spiritually mature leadership begins with an intimate, vibrant, and growing relationship with God. Giving more focus to that primary relationship changes the way we relate in every relationship. Knowing we are well loved by God empowers us to love other people as well, especially those we are called, in whatever context, to lead.

I didn’t always understand this principle. While still in my teens, I was already busy learning about leadership and in the process of building a new business. But this was before I became a person of faith. Then as a 19-year-old college freshman, I wanted to date this amazing girl who had caught my eye, but she announced that I had to get her father’s permission. How hard can that be? I thought. After sizing me up and asking me a few questions, her father told me I would need to attend church with their family if I wanted to date his daughter.

I was pretty apprehensive, with no idea what to expect since I hadn’t grown up in a church setting. Would I find this embarrassing? Would people ask me questions I couldn’t answer? Would the whole experience be…weird? But I really liked Rita, and I thought I could get some good market research done by hanging around Christians. And any contacts I could get for my business would be a plus! In my mind, then, church was just another useful tool for