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Summoned to Follow
Leonard Sweet’s Antidote for the Leadership Cult
Anthony L. Blair, PhD, DMin
Maxwell’s House
“Everything rises and falls on leadership.” So says John Maxwell, the Wesleyan pastor turned leadership guru who has now become the world’s top seller of leadership literature. His organization claims to have trained over three million leaders in forty-seven languages in one hundred countries. But he’s not the only one saying that leadership is the sole or most critical factor affecting ministry. I have heard this mantra since my own days as a young pastor—from bishops and peers who were convinced that there was a crisis in the church (and in the world) that only strong, personality driven leadership could solve.
Over the past generation or so, Western Christians have embraced and attempted to sanctify the dominant models of leadership in our society without much reflection and very little critique. The illustrations are ubiquitous:
• Leadership Journal, a Christianity Today, Inc., organ, advertises itself as “the premier publication for today’s church” and has a readership of approximately eighty thousand. It is accompanied by a popular blog and an electronic newsletter, and provides quarterly advice for leading churches and other ministries.
• The Global Leadership Summit, sponsored by the Willow Creek Association, attracts more than one hundred and seventy thousand leaders from around the world. It’s billed as a “world-class leadership event,” and includes a fascinating mixture of evangelical leaders and others whose faith commitments are either unknown or “secular” in some respect.
• Perhaps no academic discipline has received more attention from Christian institutions of higher learning over the past decade than Leadership Studies. New programs have been multiplying at nearly every degree level. I am familiar with this pattern from personal experience; as a higher education administrator I have personally created or instigated the development of at least four of these programs myself (in part to offer a distinctly countercultural understanding of leadership). And I have seen nearly every other institution with which I am personally familiar do the same because of the market for these studies.
• The title “senior pastor” is in the process of becoming blasé. First, larger churches created the title of “executive pastor” for what is, essentially, the chief operating officer of the multimillion-dollar corporations that many congregations have become. And now “lead pastor” has come into vogue as a descriptor of the chief executive officers of those organizations, particularly those that are emphasizing the leadership aspect of the pastoral role.
• Undoubtedly the most popular model of leading change among American Christians is that of John Kotter of Harvard University, popularized in his book Leading Change. This model of leading change is top-down, linear, and dependent on motivating key followers to embrace a leader-delivered vision. Other models that place less emphasis on the leader and more emphasis on the people in the organization or community, such as the appreciative inquiry model developed by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University, have been largely ignored by the church.
• As a seminary president, the drumbeat I hear from both denominational leaders and from local churches is that seminaries should do better at training future pastors in leadership skills. I hear only occasional concern about the kind of character our graduates will have, very little concern about their theological commitments or assumptions, and almost no concern about the hermeneutical or homiletical skills. The most common question is, “Do they know how to grow a church”?
I could offer other examples or illustrations, of course, but these should suffice to demonstrate what the reader already knows or suspects about the importance of leadership in Western Christianity. It is about the careful acquisition and strategic use of power. It is about the person or persons at the top of the pyramid. It’s about changing things for the better. It is about everything rising or falling on leadership.
This is the house that Maxwell built. And Leonard Sweet is having none of it:
Shackleton’s Ship
To understand the strong emotion in that quotation, we need to appreciate Sweet’s early and prophetic evaluation of the patterns noted above. He addressed the topic at some length in two books published eight years apart. The first was 2004’s Summoned to Lead, which introduced Ernest Shackleton, the intrepid Antarctic explorer, as a model of the kind of leadership Sweet believes God is summoning in our own time. In that volume, Sweet began a critique of the dominant leadership models of Western culture, a critique he deepened and expanded in I Am a Follower in 2012. Together, they represent not only a surprisingly strong and helpful assessment of the leadership cult of Western society but also a thesis in motion, as the arguments of the latter book are more fully developed than those of the former. I have therefore used a combination of their titles as the heading for this chapter.
In these two volumes, I see Sweet articulating and providing support for four primary theses:
1. leadership is about hearing (a summons), not seeing (a vision);
2. leadership is about following, not controlling;
3. leadership is about the kingdom of God, not success; and
4. leadership is about character, not charisma or competence.
Each of these represents, I hasten to suggest, an artificial dichotomy against which some readers will push back, and such nuancing is offered at the end of this chapter by way of critique and application. However, Sweet’s purpose in setting them in such stark contrast is understandable: he wants to wake the American church from our sleepy compliance with values we dare not hold and patterns we should never have emulated.
Leadership is about hearing (a summons), not seeing (a vision)
The distinction here between hearing and seeing is not intended to distract from Sweet’s repeated insistence on a multisensory approach to life, worship, and even evangelism. (See, for instance, his book Nudge for the latter.) Rather, the difference is between hearkening to a call to action and claiming a special knowledge of the divine will for a particular community of faith. “Failure to probe the currency of hearing as well as the currency of seeing is one reason why leadership remains one of the most studied and least understood phenomenon of the last century.”
He illustrates this at some length by recounting the story of Shackleton, whose ship, ironically named Endurance, was crushed by sea ice during his attempted trans-Antarctic expedition in 1915, leaving Shackleton and his men trapped on the ice for nearly two years. Shackleton distinguished himself by the survival of every single man of his party in that most inhospitable of environments, even as he failed to accomplish his stated objective.