Follow the leader: the myth of church leadership

At present, my wife works as a teacher in a daycare. In true kindergarten fashion, she chooses a line leader whenever she takes the younger children outdoors. Apparently, some are better at this than others. Some walk slowly, ensuring that those behind keep pace, while others run ahead without regard for whomever is following. To the latter, my wife says, “To be a good line leader, you need to make sure you’re being followed.”

I remember another conversation, this with my father. In a much different context, he expressed to me this exact sentiment. The common wisdom here is evident: In order to be a leader, you must have followers.

I agree – sort of.

Obviously, a person that no one follows is not a true leader, regardless of what title or name they go by. But by the same token, measuring leadership solely as a function of an individual’s followers is a complete misplacement of emphasis. Take, for example, Jesus: If we were to judge him on this one criterion, we would likely deem him a very inept leader. After all, by his own admission he came for the dropouts, losers, sinners, failures, and fools of this world – and restoration is at times a painfully slow process.

Furthermore, defining leadership thus engenders undue pressure to conform. In other words, if I’m not a pied piper of the masses, then I must being doing something wrong. Consequently, I will likely settle for a path less demanding and more palatable to the consumer. In short, leadership becomes a popularity contest. Clearly, this isn’t in keeping with biblical leadership.

And what about those who have no followers, per se? What of those pioneering spirits, trailblazers who venture off of the beaten path to discover new and better avenues? Certainly we would label such individuals as innovators, visionaries, and, consequently, leaders. Yet by definition, they did something no one else had done before, without the benefit of multitudes shadowing their every step. More likely, they bore the scorn and disregard of their peers for their unorthodox approach. Sometimes leadership is doing precisely what other people believe is crazy.

Once again, consider the example of Jesus. At times in his ministry he was a cultural icon, pressed all around by the period equivalent of today’s screaming fans and paparazzi. But when the fad wore thin, revealing Jesus’ less-than-glamorous purpose, his popularity plummeted: “At this point many of his disciples turned away and deserted him. Then Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked, ‘Are you going to leave, too?’” (John 6:66-67 NLT).

Later, at the cross – the crux of his earthly ministry – Jesus was largely abandoned. Of the Twelve, John was the only one who remained; he was joined by a handful of Jesus’ female followers. At this crucial moment, the culmination of his earthly ministry, Jesus was practically alone. Does this make him an incompetent leader? Quite the contrary; he was willing to do what was necessary, even if no one came with him. When it comes to true leadership, resolve is a telling characteristic.

One reason we so readily associate “good leadership” with a mass following is ease; numbers offer us a straightforward, quantifiable benchmark of success. This permits us the luxury of simplifying an otherwise complex dynamic. But it goes much deeper than that, stemming from the depths of the human psyche: We want to belong. We want to be part of the in-crowd, part of something sought after. And when our leaders don’t provide that, we crucify them – sometimes literally.

We would be wise to remember what Jesus told his devotees: “The gateway to life is small, and the road is narrow, and only a few ever find it” (Matthew 7:14 NLT, emphasis mine). Let us celebrate the growth of our ministries and welcome those who join us as companions on this journey of faith. Let us labor to fill our pews and chairs and cultivate vibrant, thriving churches. But let us also avoid the pitfall of believing that few and failure are synonymous.

what we can learn from babel

This morning, as I contemplated what to write about, I heard a song. I’d heard the lyrics countless times before, but they hit me as if I were listening to them for the first time: “Every day the world is made, a chance to change.” Those words speak of such a profound, yet simple truth: Each day is an opportunity to recreate the reality we live in. Our world is daily defined by the collective decisions of the human race. There is no universal law dictating that the systems we lived beneath yesterday must also reign supreme today. And that realization gave me hope.

There is a peculiar and intriguing story found in Genesis about the origins of human interaction as we know it. Early in our history, everyone shared a common language; people spoke without the constraints of linguistic barriers. Lacking any such restrictions, the world’s populace undertook an unprecedented endeavor: Working together, they would build a stairway reaching to heaven.

Wanting to inspect what his creatures were up to, God visited the construction site. What he found unsettled him. The idea, embraced by a united front, was becoming a reality: “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:6, NRS). The implication here is staggering: When we unite together, we can accomplish anything.

It’s important that we understand the reason God confounded their language and halted the project. The issue was not their unity, nor was it their capacity to attain whatever they set their minds upon. Hubris was. Humanity wanted to cut God out of the picture by eliminating their dependence upon him; they wanted to ascend to heaven as gods. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4, NRS; emphasis mine). Note the conspicuous absence of God from their plans.

But consider what might have been had their designs read differently, if their proposal was instead God-centered: “Come, let us build a city, with a tower to direct our gaze to heaven, so that we may make a name for our God.” Ambitions properly aligned, humanity would have succeeded in its God-honoring enterprise. And the outcome – a global city united under God – would be vastly different from the pandemonium that ensued at Babel. We can only speculate how history would read if that were in fact the case.

The crux of the matter is this: What are we building? I find in the course of my daily life that it is all-too easy to become stuck in my petty routines, anesthetized by the narcotic of predictability; I lose the plot. And in constructing a monument to me, I, like the tower-builders of Babel, waste my time on what is transient and bound to fail.  But now and again, I awaken to the whispers of possibility: What if Jesus-followers put down their individual pursuits for the sake of something much grander? What if our visions weren’t so small? What if we, the Church universal, united in a singular passion? I daresay, as God himself attested, that nothing would be impossible for us. So let us strive to be Kingdom-builders, a society whose aim is to heed the call of Jesus in blurring the lines between earth and heaven. “Every day the world is made, a chance to change…”

Shake off the dust

Shake the dust off. Coming from Jesus, it may seem to us a shocking statement. “If any place will not welcome you or listen to you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave, as a testimony against them” (Mark 6:11, NIV). These were his instructions to the Twelve as he sent them out on their first evangelistic campaign.  And yet, I wonder: When is it time to “shake the dust off”? When is enough, enough? When do we finally give up on people as a lost cause?

I suspect that the Church universal has placed too much emphasis on the last part of the verse (“as a testimony against them”) and not enough on its context. In our humanity, we want to abandon to their fate those who we feel have rejected us. But is that really what Jesus meant? He spoke these words immediately after he was himself rejected in his hometown of Nazareth. He did eventually leave, moving on to other towns, but not before he did everything he could. Mark’s Gospel tells us that despite the prevailing air of disbelief, Jesus did heal some people (1:5). Even though Nazareth’s faithlessness greatly inhibited the work of the Kingdom, there were a few who believed – and Jesus met them in their faith.

I don’t think that Jesus gave up on Nazareth. He recognized the reality of their hardheartedness, and he chose not to spend time there which would be more productively spent elsewhere. But notice what he does: He takes his ministry to nearby towns and commissions his disciples to do the same. Essentially, he circumvented the disbelief of Nazareth. He was surrounding them with the Kingdom. We would be wise to emulate his strategy.

Perhaps the sense of what Jesus was communicating is, “Don’t let it get you down.” As The Message translation has this verse, “If you’re not welcomed, not listened to, quietly withdraw. Don’t make a scene. Shrug your shoulders and be on your way.” The disciples, like Jesus, would face their share of rejection. Some people would believe, some wouldn’t; such is the nature of evangelism. But instead of taking it personally and harboring resentment toward those who don’t believe – as a traditional “testimony against them” interpretation might lead us to do – the Twelve simply moved on to the next town and tried again.

To read this verse as a justification for giving up on people not only violates its context, it goes against the grain of Scripture and the very heart of the Gospel as well. Consider the numerous “lost causes” that God transformed into pillars of the faith: Abram the idol worshiper was called out to father a new, godly nation as Abraham; Jacob the conniving thief wrestled God and was henceforth known as Israel, patriarch of God’s people; Rahab, woman of the streets, risked everything to hide Israel’s spies and is remembered as a direct ancestor of Jesus; Saul, the enemy of the Church and murderer of Christians, encountered Jesus and became Paul the evangelist. All of their stories are recorded for us, to teach us a singular truth: In God’s eyes, there are no lost causes. He will go to any length to salvage and restore humanity, no matter how far fallen; the Incarnation is proof enough of that. God never waves the white flag, as Paul, recipient of God’s relentless pursuit, so eloquently reminds us: “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (1 Corinthians 13:7, NLT).

Jesus tells us to shake off the dust – not as a concession for giving up on people, but as an invitation to relinquish the weight of ministering to a broken race. That burden is not ours to bear: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you…for my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light” (Matthew 11:28-29, NLT). In ministry, we must do this daily.

The issue at hand is particularly salient in the youth ministry setting. When we encounter students, many of them are broken and coping as best they are able. They are not the ideal children or model citizens we might want them to be. Yet we must be quick to remember that the icons of our faith – and we ourselves – have a past. Rather than judging these students for what they are not, we must see in them the potential for what God can create. Our role is to help them to encounter Jesus and, through it all, to shake off the dust we accumulate.