SCM Study Guide

Jon Coutts

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780334057789
• eBook ISBN: 9780334057802
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Resisting the urge to instruct with a more polemical voice, the SCM Studyguide to Church Leadership will encourage ordinands and trainee church leaders to reassess modern pressures and priorities and to re-orient creatively around the callings, giftings, and approaches that are suitable to Christ and particular to the Church.

Part 1: Ends

1. Tensions: What is So Good About Leadership?

Some people feel born to lead. Others feel physically ill at the thought. Not all of the former make for good Christian leaders, and some of the latter surprise themselves. In my youth I certainly balked at the idea of following in my father’s footsteps and becoming a pastor. Some of this was from seeing the stress involved backstage, but most of it had to do with my personality. Whether from introversion or insecurity, I preferred to observe rather than be observed, to read the room before speaking up, and to follow instead of sticking my neck out to lead. It was not until my twenties that I began to consider such a thing, and only then because of a conviction I could not shake. Even with a Bible College degree, a pastoral internship, denominational licensing, commissioning as a local pastor, and ordination to permanent ministry, I still struggled to feel comfortable in my own skin as a church leader. I kept holding myself up to the standard of other personalities, and falling short. For years I thought I was the only one who felt this way, but it turns out this is actually a common story.

In my experience it is not the case that Christian leadership always comes naturally – either you have it or you do not – and upon further study I have found that this is also not true theologically. Church leadership is received, discerned, and learned, even by those who find themselves apt for it. This is why those who do not gravitate towards leadership often find God calling and gifting them for it anyway, and those who seem like ‘natural leaders’ often have to work against the grain of their encultured habits and premises in order to lead the particular group called church. We will come back to this point in due course, but before we discuss whether leadership is natural we need to back up further and ask in what sense it is even good.

Our initial feelings about leadership tend to be a reflection of our life experiences.

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Explore this by reflecting on the following questions:

• Do you sit comfortably in the leader’s seat, do you prefer the ‘second chair’, or do you tend to observe and follow at a pace?
• Have you experienced negligent or abusive authority in your past which left you in a position of ambivalence or even revulsion at the whole idea?
• Have you had to lead in situations that have made you wary of ever taking on such an onerous and isolating burden again?
• If you were to place your feelings about leadership on a spectrum between necessary evil, provisional good, and flourishing ideal, where would you land?
• Do you have a different answer depending whether you are leading or being led?
• Has your life experience shaped the degree to which you think leadership is good?

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It is of course a theological question whether leadership is a created good, an evil impostor, or somewhere in between. Is it a God-intended part of our human flourishing or is it parasitic corruption of human equality? Is it a so-called necessary evil, an imperfect means of keeping human selfishness and competition in check? Or is it what we call a provisional good, temporarily provided by God for the preservation of sinning creatures on their way to fuller redemption? Do we envision a future in which there is no need for us to submit to leaders anymore, which is how we imagine it would have been if sin and enmity had not plunged us into conflict? These questions are not immaterial. How we answer them will go a long way to informing not just our theology of church leadership but our approach to its purposes and practicalities.

The trend in recent decades towards servant leadership and teamwork (even in organizations with clear hierarchical structures) suggests an underlying desire to downplay lines of authority and to emphasize equality and collaboration. All manner of global, socio-political, and cultural-historical stories could be told to explain this trend, and for the most part I imagine most of us would consider it a good one. Servant leadership is a positive societal development, both in and outside the church. However, there are motivational and implementational tendencies within this trend that might not be considered entirely positive. For instance, where there is a growing distrust of leadership that has even a whiff of authority to it, there is often an exacerbated self-centredness that demands everything be suited to personal specifications before submitting to a larger purpose or another’s plan. History has certainly shown that there are plenty of problems with normalized social roles of submission, but is all submission bad? If submission is bad then so is authority, which is why so many prefer to talk about leadership. But it is not altogether clear that a shift from authority to leadership gets us out of this jam.

The irony of servant leadership is that the effort to avoid authority and submission in principle may end up submitting nobody to anyone, and the leaders to everyone. The question might then be asked whether servanthood is a mode of leadership, or the undermining of leadership altogether. Anyone applying to be a servant leader certainly has good reason to inquire what they might be signing themselves up for. Will they be asked to lead or to do the bidding of a select minority? Will they be held responsible for outcomes over which they had little to no authority? Will their commission to lead be scaled to their powers of people-pleasing or persuasion? I do not think it is cynical to ask such things. For all we might say about the importance of servant leadership, we might also sympathize with those who say that accepting such roles feels like walking into a trap.

What this line of thought exposes is the fact that, however we might reframe it, leadership is all tangled up with questions of authority, submission, and responsibility. I suspect it is common to be relatively comfortable submitting to authority in a work environment (the boss is the boss after all) or in civil affairs (the law is the law after all), but to see church as something of a reprieve from such arrangements. Church may be attractive precisely because it comes with no such strings attached. We can choose our churches and lend support to leaders up to the point at which they ask us to do something we did not ask them to ask us to do, making church a liberating kind of group to which to belong.

Sometimes an intolerance for authority appears most pronounced within organizations that run on the goodness of people’s own hearts. It can be in church – where our motivations are often deeply personal – that we are least likely to want to submit to someone else’s rationale for doing something. ‘Servant leadership’ can be the good face we put on it when we are subconsciously unwilling to tolerate a more directive mode of leadership. Churches touting servant leadership may be thinking less about serving where their commissioned ministers guide them, and more about insisting the clergy service a particular set of social or religious demands. At worst, church leadership can become more like customer service than Christian service, and it is not always easy to tell the difference. I do not wish to over-generalize, but I daresay most of us will feel these dynamics at work well before we are able to name them, let alone do anything about them.

What is so good about leadership? The question is a timely one, but is not entirely the product of our times. There is a tension here which finds precedence in the Bible itself. We might suppose that the Bible takes leadership and authority roles for granted, but the picture gets fuzzier when we take a moment to consider the following two questions:

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1. When is the first time the Bible says any humans will lead other humans?
2. What does the Bible say when the people of Israel first ask for a king?

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In the first case, the answer is that the first time any human is explicitly said to have any sort of ‘rule’ over any other human is in the context of the curse of sin. It is Genesis 3.16, wherein God says to the woman: ‘Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ If this is not the origin of human leadership, it is at least an indication of its pollution by the advent of enmity.

And if this suggests that the evolution of human leadership is tainted by the curse of sin, the suggestion is only underlined in the second case, when God responds to the Israelite request for a king. 1 Samuel 8.6–7 says not only that it ‘displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to govern us”’ but that God said ‘they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them’. As the story goes, God provided a king and even made good on the provision, but left a hint that this was less than ideal. However we interpret all of this, we at least see the biblical precedent for starting our theology of church leadership with the question whether such a thing is in the first instance even a created good.

There is plenty of precedent for this question in the theological tradition of the church as well. Even before getting into the complexities of the Protestant Reformation, as an example we only need look at the inquiries of two of the foremost ancient church theologians who predated it. Consider the fourth-century North African bishop Augustine and the thirteenth-century friar Thomas Aquinas. To access these in a way that is true to the ancient context we need to frame the question in terms of government specifically rather than leadership generally, but when we ask if it is a created good we find that Augustine and Thomas are of two minds on the matter. The short answer is that Augustine suggested No, this was not the original plan, and Thomas suggested Yes, government is a created good. Of course, it is a bit more complicated than that.

For his part, Augustine considered the government of some humans by others to be part of God’s gracious response to the Fall into sin rather than an original good of the created order as such. In book 19 chapter 15 of City of God, Augustine rather famously said that ‘the first just men were set up as shepherds of flocks, rather than as kings of men’. This was part of an argument that the ‘order of nature’ in which God created us put humans in dominion over other creatures, but not necessarily over other humans (XIX.15). Augustine’s understanding was that peace between human beings coincided with ‘the duly ordered agreement’ of each person’s soul, mind, and body within the self as a consequence of peace with God. This ‘mutual fellowship in God’ is ‘the peace of the Heavenly City’ – ‘a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God’ – and it is this ‘state of peace’ which has been disturbed by our sin, even as we mercifully remain within ‘the scope of order’ (XIX.13). Now we are ‘at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion’ (XII.28). In other words, as the first 11 chapters of Genesis show us, proper dominion has turned to domination because of the fall of pride (XVI.4), which ‘hates a fellowship of equality under God, and seeks to impose its own dominion of fellow men, in place of God’s rule’ (XIX.12).

However, God has not withdrawn. In fact, Augustine says, ‘God turns evil choices to good use’ (XI.17) by graciously providing peace and order even within our structures of disorder. This is the earthly city, ‘created by self-love’, in which we live at the same time as we live in the heavenly city ‘by love of God’ (XVI.28). So for Augustine ‘the heavenly city’ is accessible to us by the grace of God even in the ‘earthly city’ of our enmity and sin, but as long as we live on this earth we are given modes of governance as a provision for our disorder (XIX.16). This is not a bad thing per se – in fact when it is ordered to the common love of God it has the potential to be a real reflection of the heavenly city on earth. But this earthly provision of peace is enacted within the circumstances of our prideful competition, which means it graciously works towards and sometimes enforces compromises (XIX.12). Those who by faith identify with the heavenly city do not abandon their neighbours in the earthly city, but like pilgrims in a foreign land they work towards and ‘make use of this peace also’ (XIX.17).

To come back to Genesis and 1 Samuel from an Augustinian perspective, then, we could say that Israel’s choice of a king signalled a rejection of God’s preferred mode of governance through prophets, but that God could still use it for good on the way to its fulfilment by Christ. We could also say that if the hierarchical relation between Adam and Eve was not a created good but an exacerbation of sin, it could still be made relatively good in the love of God, even if Christ’s work would bring about something better. From this perspective, relations and roles of leadership and authority are a provisional good that can be for better or worse to the degree that they serve peace in the earthly context and are oriented to the peace of heaven by virtue of the common love and grace of Christ.

For his part, centuries later and cultures apart, Thomas Aquinas came closest to addressing...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Part 1: Ends
• 1. Tensions: What is So Good About Leadership?
• 2. Confession: What Makes Leadership Christian?
• 3. Mandates: What Do Christian Leaders Do?
• Part 2: Means
• 4. Imitation: Does the Bible Show Us How to Lead?
• 5. Participation: What Posture Does Christian Leadership Take?
• 6. Rhythms: What Habits Are at the Heart of Christian Leadership?
• Part 3: Fitness
• 7. Growth: What Difference Does it Make to be a Church Leader?
• 8. Charisma: What Does it Take to Run a Church?
• 9. Expectations: If Leadership is a Spiritual Gift, Which is it?
• Part 4: Meetings
• 10. Size: What is a Good Way to Look After Numbers?
• 11. Politics: Does Jesus Inform Group Dynamics?
• 12. Deliberations: How Do Church Leaders Make Decisions Together?