Welcome to SLiWelcome to SLi
The new SLi website is up and running! We hope you find it helpful and engaging. We are excited to see how the Lord will continue to use this program to inspire and prepare young people around the nation-- even around the world-- to embrace their calling to be Christ-like servant-leaders. Please take a look at SLi's upcoming conferences to see when you can partner with us in working toward that mission.
We at SLi see Jesus Christ as the ultimate example of leadership. We take seriously his pronouncement that "whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave- just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:26-28). A leader is not one who lords his power over others and makes them serve his every whim. A leader is one who kneels down and washes the dirty feet of his friends.
Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates found himself in a city (ancient Athens) where everyone- the statesmen, the poets, the artists, even the scholars- seemed to be living unexamined lives. With only a few questions and a little prodding, Socrates exposed the inconsistencies and shortcomings evident in the thinking of his fellow Athenians. Indeed, he found that "the men most in repute were all but the most foolish."
It is easy for people today, twenty-four centuries after Socrates, to go their whole lives without pausing to reflect on the most important questions: Who am I? Where do we come from? What is good? What is just? It is easy today for someone to rise to a position of leadership while remaining "all but the most foolish" of people. SLi exists for the purpose of prodding young people to examine their lives, to pursue virtue and wisdom, and to confront the challenges of the day with both courage and understanding.
For Socrates, dialogue was a crucial element in the pursuit of wisdom. It is in dialogue perhaps more than any other endeavor that we can bring to light the inconsistencies in our thinking, the strength of particular arguments, and the path to deeper understanding. Different people bring to the table different knowledge and different experiences, different passions and different resources. To fail to partake in dialogue is to rob ourselves of a deeper and richer understanding of ourselves and of the world. It is with this conviction that we launch this blog. While there are many avenues for dialogue- e.g., face-to-face discussion, the writing of books or articles, the exchange of letters or email- a blog is special in its capacity to facilitate conversation among numerous people with diverse schedules living in various places. Our hope is that this blog, and even more, that SLi as a whole, will foster the development of a youth culture engaged in dialogue and centered on the servant-leadership model embodied by Christ himself.
In committing ourselves to dialogue, we must bear in mind that our ultimate goal is not merely to maintain an exchange of ideas. Our ultimate goal is to know and serve Christ. The apostle Paul wrote, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5). Dialogue is worthwhile only if it is dedicated to the service of Christ; an exchange of ideas is valuable only insofar as it aims at consecrating those ideas to the Kingdom.
Welcome to the dialogue!
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