What Young Washington Reminded Me About Leadership

I recently went to see Young Washington, the new film about George Washington’s formative years. I walked out realizing how little I knew about them.

I was surprised by how much of his early life was shaped by limitation, insecurity, and being outside the elite education available to many of his peers. He obviously rose in the ranks. But according to the story the film tells, he only came to be at peace with who he was, and only became someone God could use, after he experienced significant brokenness.

In other words, as long as he was chasing the respect of the British aristocracy, he was trying to be someone he was never cut out to be. He wasn't aristocracy. He was a young man with no formal education and no military training. Only when he accepted that was he able to learn new ways of leading and fighting.

Failure changed the kind of leader he wanted to be

That acceptance changed what he thought his position was for. He stopped seeing it as a privilege and started seeing it as a responsibility to care for his men.

Before he was broken, he sought success for himself through his men. Then he watched his closest friend die in battle because he wouldn't listen and learn. He was more concerned about his own image.

So in his brokenness, he gave up his lifelong desires and ambitions and went home.

That's the part I keep thinking about. Only when he eventually recommitted to leading did he begin risking his life repeatedly to save his men. And the irony is that this is when his life was spared, and when his men committed to follow him anywhere.

It took devastating events and difficult circumstances to break him.

Leaders have to keep learning

The brokenness shaped him. But something else had already prepared him for it. He was a reader, a writer, and a thinker.

His half-brother Lawrence took him under his wing and educated him informally, gave him books to read and lessons to learn. George kept writing throughout much of his life. He wrote letters, kept journals, and made maps. I would suggest that his reading and writing created the fertile soil his thinking grew out of, and that this is much of what equipped him to lead.

Maybe great leaders aren't always the most educated people in the room. But they are almost always still learning.

The movie doesn't try to make him a Christian

The movie presents him as a moral, maturing, wise man who came to believe in a sense of Providence, in God's hand at work.

Even so, I think the movie describes the process of developing leaders well. Leaders aren't born, and they aren't produced by class, education, or ethnicity. Great leaders grow through a season of brokenness in which they give up their own aspirations of greatness and give themselves to serving.

Jesus turned leadership upside down

You can find the whole pattern in John 13:1–17, and it's modeled throughout the gospels.

Jesus said and did hard things. For many people, they were too hard. So, His servant leadership wasn't a soft leadership. It was a challenging one. But it was ultimately not for His benefit. It was for those He came to serve, including us today.

He served God's purpose of creating followers who would live Christlike lives and be empowered to do the same with others. It was multiplicative. It went viral because they were enabled by the Spirit, and they modeled servanthood, something that had not been seen before in religious or political circles.

When leadership becomes about the leader

Too few popular pastors and politicians are willing to risk their lives for the people they serve. In many churches it doesn't look like the pastor serving the congregation; it looks closer to the congregation serving the pastor. In politics, it isn't about the constituents; it's about getting reelected.

This isn't always true. I can point to pastors of large churches and to politicians who genuinely serve the people they lead. But size, fame, and fortune mess with a person's head.

Including mine.

And then I have to look at myself

I believe all of this because I know I am the worst of all sinners.

Even in planting, even in the huge sacrifice our family made, underneath it was a drive to be large, famous, and impactful. It was only through my decade of breaking that You were able to show me my latent aspirations.

Father, thank You for Your forgiveness, for the times I too sacrificed the lives of friends on the altar of my success. I don't think I did it often. But it happened.