110 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY statement from Luke, where he says “Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.”29 What we seek to control, in the final analysis, actually comes to control us, including time. One of the greatest leadership lessons from the New Testament is that God’s mission of rescue and redemption is not dependent on any one single great leader. The church did not wither and die after Paul or Peter or James died. They strove and fought against the darkness with all their might in the appointed time given to them, but once their time was over God raised up new men and women to carry on the task. God’s work through leaders is essentially generative, because that is one of the defining qualities of his work as a whole. When we rest in the way God works, we realize that what he calls us to is faithfulness and obedience, not success as defined by measurable outcomes. We are able to abandon outcomes to God because we can trust that his plans and purposes will prevail even if we cannot see them reach fruition. This is why there is ultimately freedom to be found in embracing limits and limitations. Tolkien’s work reminds leaders that there are riches to be found outside the bounds of a pragmatic course of leadership study. As many other scholars in the field have already noticed, my hope is that more people in the field of leadership will consider the way that great literature and great storytellers like Tolkien can help expand their understanding of the broader subject. Exploring the latent connections between literature and leadership will help combat the rampant reductionism of our times and further enhance the multi-disciplinary aspect of leadership studies as a whole. NOTES 1 Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire, 2021). 2 Tom Shippey, “The Lewis Diaries: C.S. Lewis and the English Faculty in the 1920s,” in C.S. Lewis & His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan N. Wolfe, eds. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135-50.
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