What Servant Leadership Really Looks Like When Love Leads

 Blog by the Unhurried Living Team

What does servant leadership look like when it's stripped of titles, strategy, and the pressure to perform? At its core, it looks like love — patient, present, and willing to pull up a chair at a bedside instead of rushing to the next meeting. Jason G. Green, attorney and author of Too Precious to Lose, discovered this not in a boardroom or the halls of the Obama White House, but sitting with his 95-year-old grandmother as she shared a story he had been too hurried to hear.

His journey from Washington to Gaithersburg, Maryland — and everything it cost and gave him — is an invitation to every leader who has ever felt the quiet gnaw of a life moving too fast for the things that matter most.

What Does Servant Leadership Really Mean if It Starts with Love?

When Jason Green was asked what the single most important quality was for running a political campaign, his answer stopped people cold. "Leadership is a manifestation of service," he said. "You have to love your constituents." The room expected tactics. He offered theology.

This is the kind of servant leadership that 1 Corinthians 13 describes — not a management philosophy or a leadership style, but a way of being oriented toward others. Paul's famous passage doesn't say love is efficient or love is strategic. It says love is patient. Love is kind. Love never fails. These are not the words of a high-output world. They are the words of someone who has sat still long enough to actually see the person in front of them.

For Jason, that person was his grandmother, Ida Pearl Green. She had spent decades volunteering at the local hospital, sitting with strangers in their final hours, offering what he called "gifts of dignity" — a steady hand, a devotional, a joke, an ice chip. She always knew what to do. He had watched her do it as a five-year-old tagging along on her rounds. And then, like so many of us, he had grown up and gotten busy and forgotten what he had seen.

Servant leadership doesn't begin in the executive suite. It begins in the posture of someone who is willing to go low, stay close, and offer themselves to another without measuring the return. 

Learn more on servant leadership and soul care.

Why Is Slowing Down So Important for Faith and Leadership?

Jason Green didn't slow down by choice — at least not at first. He was four years into his role as associate White House counsel when his mother called. When that first call came in, he sent it to voicemail. It took a second call — placed directly through the White House switchboard, an unusual move — before he answered. His grandmother had fallen ill. She was ninety-five.

What followed was a gradual dismantling of the hurried life he had been living. He began visiting the hospital, then more and more frequently, until eventually he left the administration altogether to be fully present — not just for his grandmother's declining health, but for her stories. Stories about a place called Quince Orchard. About a community built by his ancestors after emancipation. About three churches that merged on the very night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

He had been running around the White House between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-one, he said, trying to get people to listen to him. In retrospect, he didn't have much to say. His time with his grandmother gave him his story — and his story gave him his foundation.

This is what the contemplative tradition has always known: we cannot give what we have not received. The leader who never stops to listen — to God, to elders, to the quiet voice beneath the noise — will eventually find themselves with a platform but no roots. Speed is not the same as significance.

How Do We Steward the Community We Inherit Rather Than Just Build Our Own?

One of the most arresting moments in Jason Green's story is the realization that he had been baptized at Fair Haven United Methodist Church — the very congregation born from the courageous merger of three churches in 1968 — and had never known it. He had lived inside a legacy of racial reconciliation without knowing what it had cost.

The three churches that merged that night did not take the easy path. They didn't keep one name or one building. They built something new together, borrowing from each community's heritage and choosing a name — Fair Haven — drawn from Acts 27, where the Apostle Paul's ship took refuge in rough seas. They knew the coming together would not be smooth sailing. They named themselves after the shelter, not the storm.

What sustained that experiment across decades was not momentum or enthusiasm. It was what Jason called "long obedience in the same direction" — people showing up, week after week, choir practice after choir practice, choosing to sit beside someone who hadn't wanted them there, until proximity began to dissolve what distance had built. His grandmother's brother, still driving an hour each way to Fair Haven at one hundred and two years old, put it simply: "It was important that they see my face in 1968. It's just as important now."

This is the kind of community we are called to steward, not manufacture. We inherit it. We tend it. We pass it on to people who will reap benefits we will never see.

Learn more about soul care and sustainable leadership.

What Are the Signs That Hurry Is Pulling You Away from What Matters?

How to Apply This to Your Life This Week

Slow down enough to listen to someone older than you. Call a grandparent, a mentor, a longtime church member. Ask them about their story. Don't rush to fill the silence. Let them tell you something you didn't know.

Notice where ambition has become idolatry. Jason Green wasn't doing anything wrong at the White House. But he had let it consume the other parts of his life. Ask yourself honestly: what is currently crowding out the relationships and rhythms God is inviting you into?

Choose connection over control. When chaos presses in, the instinct is to withdraw and manage. The more faithful response — and the harder one — is to move toward people. Proximity is the practice.

Ask whose story you're living in. You didn't build the community, the church, or the family you've been given. Spend time this week learning something about what was planted before you arrived — and what you want to tend while you're here.

You Already Have More Than You Think

The opposite of chaos is not control. It is connection. And the foundation you need for servant leadership may not be something you have to build — it may be something you have to slow down long enough to receive.

Jason Green went to his grandmother's bedside expecting to give. He came away with his story, his roots, and a vision of leadership rooted not in self-importance but in love. First Corinthians 13 doesn't describe what love accomplishes. It describes what love is. Patient. Kind. Long-suffering. Willing to sit in a hospital room and listen to a woman who has always had more to say than anyone thought to ask.

You are likely surrounded by more wisdom, more story, and more inherited community than you realize. The question is whether you are moving slowly enough to receive it. 

FAQ

Q: What does servant leadership mean in a Christian context? A: Servant leadership in a Christian context is rooted in love as described in 1 Corinthians 13 — patient, selfless, and oriented toward the flourishing of others rather than one's own advancement. It draws from Jesus' own model of leadership, which prioritized presence, humility, and service over power or status. It is not soft; it is one of the most demanding ways to lead.

Q: How do I know if my career is consuming my faith and family relationships? A: One honest question to ask is: when did I last slow down long enough to truly listen — to God, to family, to the people I say I love? If the answer requires significant thought, that may itself be a signal. Busyness is not the same as faithfulness, and the things we keep sending to voicemail eventually stop calling.

Q: What is the connection between slowing down and servant leadership? A: Slowing down creates the conditions for true servant leadership by making us present enough to actually see and hear the people we serve. Speed prioritizes output; presence prioritizes people. Many leaders carry great ambition but have lost touch with the story, roots, and relationships that give their leadership meaning and staying power.

Q: How can a church pursue racial reconciliation without losing its identity? A: The story of Fair Haven United Methodist Church offers one answer: honor what each community carried, build something new together, and commit to the long obedience of showing up, week after week, even when it's uncomfortable. Reconciliation is not an event. It is a sustained practice of proximity, humility, and shared responsibility.

Q: What does it mean to be a "doer" in faith? A: A doer in faith is someone who looks around their community, sees a need, and takes action — not after analyzing every variable, but because love compels movement. Jason Green's great-great-grandparents pooled fifty-four dollars after emancipation to build a schoolhouse. They didn't wait for perfect conditions. They saw a need and acted, planting seeds under whose shade generations would one day rest.