Leadership Journal

Our church's elders have a pretty good safeguard against unwanted persons slipping into our leadership team during the annual elections. Of course the elders had to approve all candidates for church office, but we also followed the convention of allowing any one elder among the twelve to veto the name of any candidate he "had a problem with," even if that problem was unsubstantiated or described as "just a bad feeling."

On the surface the practice seemed reasonable enough. After all, we had a fine, tight group of men with a good chemistry. We didn't want anyone coming in who might disturb that fragile balance or who might not be a team player. We were all painfully aware of churches where a poorly chosen elder or staff person had kept things in a continual uproar. So, we thought it was best to be safe. But safe leadership isn't good leadership.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's remarkable 2005 book, Team of Rivals, uncovers the many leadership lessons to be learned from Abraham Lincoln. Her entire work is dedicated to the idea that Lincoln's greatness is to be found in his willingness to embrace the concept of a leadership team composed of men who were not only diverse in their views, but were his personal rivals as well. In exquisite detail Goodwin tracks the careers of Civil War cabinet members William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates, three men with far more national recognition and, seemingly, presidential capabilities than the lightweight lawyer from rural Illinois. Each had gone to the 1860 Chicago Republican Convention assuming that one of them would be running for president in the fall; none had given a second thought to Lincoln or his chances.

When Lincoln deliberately decided to include these men in the innermost workings of his daily administration he was taking a risk. Senator Seward took the offer to mean that he would be the acting president behind a figurehead Lincoln. Then, as if he had not invited enough trouble into his house, Lincoln chose three Democrats to be Postmaster General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Navy.

It did not make for an easy beginning. Seward immediately invited Lincoln to come to his home, hat in hand, where the greater man could instruct the lesser one on cabinet selections and other pressing matters. War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton rather openly referred to the president as "the original gorilla," and the upper crust ladies of Washington, including the cabinet wives, were socially brutal to Mary Lincoln upon her arrival, going out of their ways to insult and embarrass her.

These were just the kinds of difficulties the elders at my church were trying to avoid with our unwritten veto rule. Surely God wouldn't want us to actually invite potential disunity into our leadership. Yet Goodwin's thesis that great leadership neither punishes nor ignores ideological foes, but rather embraces them, has important implications for our increasingly large and complex church governmental structures. The danger of group-think is ever present in congregations where dissent is seen only as a problem. Church leaders often extol the virtues of 90 percent congregational confirmation votes for the new building program or the new minister, or the elders' "unanimous agreement" that the church needs to take a certain action. But we forget that many of God's commands in Scripture required leaders to go against the tides of popular opinion. If Abraham Lincoln could use the power of diverse opinions and contrary egos to save the nation, then we ought to look more closely at the benefits of dissenting opinions in our churches as well.

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