The United States is experiencing a serious shortage of leaders. This comment is made about local, state and national political and commercial enterprises. Historians enjoy pointing out that at the time of our founding, when we were only 13 colonies and only three million people, we were blessed with an ample supply of proven effective leaders - people like George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Today we have more than 300 million people. Given that increase in the population, we should have 600 percent more people with the skills of those colonial forefathers. Do we? Do we even have the handful of Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons and Franklins with whom we began our statehood?

The shelves at the major bookstores as well as the magazine racks at grocery stores and convenience stores are filled with individual and corporate theories about leadership. Can leadership be taught, or is it inborn? American business, industry, the armed forces and the government have poured billions of dollars into new training programs that try to teach managers how to make their organizations more productive. This enormous investment has produced little measurable return. No one has established a consistent, direct correlation between the amount or type of a leader's training and the performance of the group being led.

John Wesley had a great deal to say about leadership and its importance to the work of the church. Dr. Lovett H. Weems Jr. points out that for Wesley, "The beginning point was always people and their needs." John Wesley was a "folk theologian," and he was eager for his faith to connect with the human needs of all people. Wesley's preaching always began with the real needs of the people. Be they poor and homeless or extravagantly wealthy, his sermons began with where the people were. Likewise, Wesley's leadership instruction began with the people. In other words, Wesley taught us that the beginning point for leadership was not "my style, my story, my vision, my needs, my values." The beginning point for the ministry of leadership in the Wesleyan spirit is the people God has given us to lead.

Russ Moxley of the Center for Creative Leadership takes that Wesleyan theory of leadership a step further. He maintains that leadership not only should begin with the people and where they are, but also it always should engage the people and capture their true spirit. Despite the importance of annual goals, objectives and budgets, they are rarely inspiring and compelling. A statement of vision that is shared by the people, Moxley says, is essentially a spiritual activity "that helps a workgroup move toward community." Moxley adds that, "being spiritual is being fully human."

The leader who would lead in the Wesleyan tradition must not forget the spiritual dimensions of leadership amid the slogans and motivational language of contemporary leadership theories. "Begin with the people and where they are," says Wesley. And so must we.