Are we Christians in North America overemphasizing the need for leadership in the church? We’re awash in leadership seminars, leadership books, leadership videotapes, leadership consultants. We have conferences, consortiums, courses, kits. The unspoken assumption seems to be “If only we increased our level of leadership skills, we would usher in the kingdom.”
For too many years in the church, leadership was undervalued and almost despised. But the solution is not to swing too far the other way. Leaders must be trained and skilled, but this truth can be blown out of proportion. By overemphasizing leadership, we underemphasize other crucial gifts, such as service, prayer, and teaching. By overemphasizing skills, we may under-emphasize character. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when we find giant leaders with midget souls.
In an Age of Institutions and Enterprises, leaders have become more needed for our complex organizational lives. Leaders remain essential for any project of scale. But they are not essential in order to pray, to listen, to read Scripture, to give to the poor, to love.
Our near-obsession with leadership, I suspect, stems as much from our culture as from Scripture. Our culture values size, activity, results. We’re impressed by bigness. And only leaders can grow the size, catalyze the activity, and build the numbers. We must never forget, though, as Malcolm Muggeridge writes in Something Beautiful for God, “Christianity is not a statistical view of life. That there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over all the hosts of the just is an anti-statistical proposition.”
Missionary statesman J. Oswald Sanders called for caution more than three decades ago and quoted Stephen Neill: “If we set out to produce a race of leaders, what we shall succeed in doing is probably to produce a race of restless, ambitious and discontented intellectuals. To tell a man he is called to be a leader is the best way of ensuring his spiritual ruin, since in the Christian world ambition is more deadly than any other sin, and, if yielded to, makes a man unprofitable in the ministry.”
Sanders concludes with words that sound like a prophecy: “The church needs saints and servants, not ‘leaders,’ and if we forget the priority of service, the entire idea of leadership training becomes dangerous.”
Counter to much conventional wisdom, Dann Spader, director of Sonlife Ministries, explains that “Jesus’ model is not to make leaders; it’s to make disciples. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell us to make leaders. It says to make disciples, and then to choose leaders.”
This explains why in the 20 centuries of Christian writing, from Justin Martyr to Julian of Norwich to Jonathan Edwards, you find precious little emphasis on leadership skills. What you find over and over are exhortations for all Christians to pursue holiness, renounce self-centeredness, endure suffering, pray. Yes, some writers present extended teachings on leadership—Gregory the Great and Richard Baxter come to mind—but even then, they focus less on skills and more on character.
The sages apparently believed that God will raise up leaders; our primary work is to make sure the ones he raises up become like Christ.
Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large for Leadership.kevin@christianitytoday.com
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