In the public arena, people tend to exit less than gracefully. They try to manage it, but it rarely works due to the conflicting desires of the players involved. We even have a term for it: the “Kirribilli agreement”. This notion harks back to the 1988 deal to transfer leadership from Australian prime minister Bob Hawke to his then treasurer, Paul Keating, “in the fullness of time”. It didn’t happen.

The same agreement didn’t work out between John Howard and Peter Costello in 2003, and in the UK in the mid-90s between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (they called it the “Granita Pact”, named after the restaurant where allegedly the deal was done).

The ultimate success in public life, it is said, is to be able to control the time of your departure. As a corporate chairman once told me, leaders get one choice about how to leave the job: should I jump before I am pushed?

The ethical debates around euthanasia revolve around this question of how much control one might have over his or her exit. So do most conflicts around divorce laws, employment conditions and touchy subjects such as ministerial conduct. It’s all about who has to leave, how, why and when. It’s all about who is in control.

In the church, exiting takes on a new dimension. When a significant minister leaves a church, it affects that community a bit like a divorce might affect a family. One half of the “marriage” is taking off. The church is like the remaining family members who have to puzzle out what the new reality looks like.

Whether it is a happy departure, or a forced one, it still breaks a bond and causes real pain, real reflection, and real change. And it is rarely done very well. If a church can manage the minister’s exit, it is probably a good sign of its health as a body of believers.

Why is that?

Perhaps it is because, boiling it down, there are just two ways to leave. Either you do so as if you are everything, or you do so as if God is. You can leave as if the church will never be the same again; or you can leave, praising God for what he has managed to achieve with such a jar of clay as you. Leaving can be all about the leaver, or the left. The most valuable role a leader can play is to care about those who are being left, regardless of the circumstances behind the departure.

Which is precisely what the incomparable Jesus did on his departure. Unjust as it was, he was silent before his accusers, concerned for those around him (the thief on the cross next to him, his grieving mother), and resolved to carry out his ordained task to the painful end.

Public life can be pretty grim, but in the moment of exit great leaders care more about those they lead than themselves. If you are going to be crucified, Jesus showed you the way to do it.