"Personality Cult leadership is a HUGE factor in the church today. Churches are built around a "man" and not THE Man, Christ Jesus. New Testament pattern of "plurality" in leadership is crucial...."Jeff went on from there, but I wanted to focus on this topic first.
I certainly have to agree. A few weeks ago I turned on CNN as I was eating a snack and listened to Piers Morgan interviewing Joel Osteen and his wife. Besides all the problems with his theology and view of God, what struck me was how he was clearly the center of a church and a financial empire. While he talked about God, everything was really about him.
That is an extreme example, but, though maybe more subtle, not really all that uncommon. We don’t have to look far to see many examples of this and in fact, there are times in almost every church when you can at least see shades of this. In many churches, no one questions the pastor, and if they do, it becomes a huge and divisive issue. There is a Chinese saying that you might hear in a Taiwan church which roughly translates as “To be submissive is to be blessed (祝福就是夢福)”. In other words, we'll all be better off if we just do what the pastor says. Leaders lead, the rest follow.
But, is this really the way it is supposed to be? I remember a quote by Peter Jensen to the effect that God is sovereign and he does not delegate and I think that is true. It’s not that God doesn’t give us the privilege of serving and even the privilege of some kind of authority. The issue is what that means.
Do we really believe that we are sinners; that we really are depraved? Do we really believe that this sin nature has affected every facet of our selves? Or, do we think that this is somehow changed when a person becomes a pastor? I can't see anything in the Bible that would imply this and all we have to do is look at so many examples of “fallen” pastors to know that this isn’t the case. Pastors fall just like everyone else at times and it’s a bit disingenuous to think that this is because they are somehow not real or something like that. If we truly believe in a sin nature that is common to all, then no matter how good our intentions are, no matter how strong our faith is, we must keep that in mind. We are still sinners and if so, we cannot completely trust any decision or action that we (or others) make.
I don’t in any way mean that we should become suspicious people, no more than we should be suspicious or our own selves. But, maybe that’s a key to understanding the concept of servant leadership. We know that we ourselves are not always perfect (unless we are a bit psychotic). We know that our motivations are not always the best. We know that we make mistakes and some are big (and embarrassing). We know that we are not always completely honest. That doesn’t mean that we don’t trust ourselves (otherwise we wouldn’t argue our points so forcefully and defend our views or ourselves), but it does mean that our trust is tempered with reality. It means that we study “experts.” It means that we ask others’ opinions about things. We even define “smartness” sometimes by saying things like “smart people are people who know what they don’t know.” We know that we need other people to get by and make progress.
So, why would we build a church around a single man? In a sense, to the extent that a church does that, it is to that extent setting itself up for failure. But, even if we leave out the possibility of catastrophic failure, anyone time we give one person too much power or influence in an organization, we then limit that organization so that it can never grow beyond that person’s limitations. It will develop along the lines of his strengths and those are the things that may be most obvious in the beginning, but it will also build in his weaknesses. The longer this goes on, the more “warped” the organization or church will become.
I think that’s why we need to go toward a type of team leadership. That doesn’t mean that we lead by consensus or that there can’t be one person in charge. Those mistakes are recipes for failure or at least mediocrity. But, leadership is not absolute and untempered. It's not enough to say that the leader must depend on the Lord to guide him. Certainly that is true, but the reality is that no one ever fully depends on the Lord, and we need the help of others. A man who cannot follow has forfeited the potential to lead.
There are Bible passages dealing with this that I think we sometimes overlook or explain away. Paul includes in his exhortations on submission to authority the statement that we are to be submissive to one another. Even leaders have to submit. Jesus mentions the Gentile rulers who rule by authority and power and then tells his disciples that they can't do that. He destroys the argument "but I'm doing this for their own good" by a little aside that these Gentile rulers consider themselves to be acting out of benevolence. It's not enough to have good motivations. You can't be like that. He uses the example of a servant (who might have some authority over another servant, but still are quite limited) and then to make sure that we don't explain that away, he mentions the example of a small child.
We need to think seriously about leadership and what it means in the church. I'm afraid we've taken our own understanding of leadership and read that into the Bible. The problem is not just pastors who make themselves the center or who don't listen to others. The problem is maybe even more that this is what we expect and what we promote.
Children, especially in the society that Jesus lived in when he spoke to his disciples, were not allowed the room to express any of the traits that we would normally associate with a leader. But, Jesus told his disciples that they needed to be more like a small child and even that the more they took on the position of a child, the greater they were.
It may not make sense to us, but we can't dismiss it just because it doesn't make sense. These are the words of Jesus, not just the words of a disciple. He said it. Do we understand? The more we try to explain it away, or the more it doesn't make sense, the more it means that we are off the mark. Maybe we are clueless, but we need to look at this further.
Your thoughts?
