Leadership in the Church

Why do we use secular leadership texts within the church?
There is much chatter about how to lead in the church in the early days of the third millennium of the Christian Movement. Much ink (or pixels) is being consumed in reflections upon the future of the church and where we are going. Often times, I find my clergy colleagues utilizing secular leadership texts as we try to reform the church. There seems to be a dearth of quality leadership texts in the mainline protestant traditions. The few that do exist are lessor known than their more “evangelical” counterparts. When a mainline protestant thinker publishes a text that ties leadership and the church together, it is often academic and somewhat inaccessible to clergy with their seminary training, much less the laity who likely do not have advanced theological degrees. When an “evangelical” writes such a text, we often dismiss it because it is not as theologically rigorous as we would like, or doesn’t espouse our point of view. When we look to secular texts though, we think there is no theology there, it is pure leadership, not distorted by a particular take on theology. With such a text, we can grab what we need and apply it to the context we are in. If it doesn’t work we can just go back and find something else in a newer book and use that, continuing the cycle.
Today in the church, our use of secular leadership texts is a new phenomena. Previously there has not been such a field. Secularism has gained much in the past century. As the old world order is finishing its collapse, the institutions that guided society are no longer there, or no longer have the authority they once had. In this absence we ask questions about what is next, and we find people answering the question. Sometimes the questions answered are ones we have not even yet thought to ask. As the secular age finishes its ascendancy and takes on the sole responsibility of leadership, texts about how to lead are flooding into the vacuum left by the collapse. We, in the northern and western hemispheres have all been caught up in the changing of the guard. The church has begun to look to the ascendant secular ways of thinking to rethink what leadership is and what it looks like.

There is an issue with this though. Many of these leadership texts are caught up in the idea that all we need to do is to think right, or lead our parishioners into a right way of thinking, and all our problems will be magically solved. If we build the right momentum in our lives or in our congregations all will be well. This is a gross oversimplification, but much of these texts boil down to just this. If you think right, all the suffering will go away, and prosperity will come yet again. When we co-opt these texts for use in the church and don’t take the time to theologically reflect upon them, we can be unwittingly spreading bad theology. These texts can be of use within the church and within the continuing reform of the church, but to lift them out of their context of ways to improve profitability or growth within secular organizations and place them in the church is fraught with concerns about how the people we lead will appropriate these ideas into their own lives.
I encourage the reading of these texts and use of what can be used for the reform of the church. I ask that though that these ideas be put up against biblical ideas of leadership. Do they compare? Are they compatible? Can they be in conversation in fruitful ways? We want to make sure that we are not doing what those who were instructing believers in Ephesus were doing. As the Apostle Paul proclaims in 1 Timothy 1:4 “… Their teaching only causes useless guessing games instead of faithfulness to God’s way of doing things.” Making sure that we are placing all that we say and do along side the life and work of Jesus Christ it of tantamount importance in the church. Not that we worry about doing just the right things, but that what it is that we are doing is informed by the person of Jesus and his ministry to the children of God.

The Church has been around for two thousand years. We have had various times of suffering and upheaval. This is another one of those times. I am confident that at the end of the day, the church will be around till the return of Christ and we are all called from the grave. As Gamaliel suggested in Acts,
“…If it (The Christian movement) originates with God, you won’t be able to stop them. Instead, you would actually find yourselves fighting God!”
God will not be stopped. The church will be ok, and we will be just fine. May it be so.