Ministry of Rivals

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.

David Fitch pastors the Life on the Vine Christian Community, a vibrant emergent church work in the Chicago area. At fifty, and in possession of a PhD from Northwestern (Theological Ethics, Church and Society), a professorship, and a lengthy list of books and articles, few could blame him for preferring life’s rounded corners and softer edges. And no one would expect him to invite discomfort and disquiet into his own church. Yet, that is what he did by bringing on Matt Tebbe, a generation younger at 31 and fresh from seminary. Matt’s earlier life also included a ministry experience that was considerably different from that of Life on the Vine. Fitch knew that the arrangement would have its rough edges—Matt had worshipped at the Vine for a year-and-a-half before joining the ministry there, and the styles of the two men were clearly different. Why would a pastor forge that kind of iron edge into what should be a gratifying middle-aged ministry?

Fitch concluded that “the rewards outweighed the pain. [Matt] pushed us regarding people we were missing [in the church],” and Matt possesses the vital capacity to tell his senior pastor when he is being unreasonable. There is no sappy sit-com; there is no easy happy ending to the story. But since Matt came on board Fitch says he can recount numerous times when he has helped the older minister practice the “discipline of submitting,” something senior ministers are usually better at requiring than modeling. Fitch believes that many of those encounters “changed our relationship.” He recalled a time when the younger minister called the older one to thank him for his humility and willingness to listen. Those incidents highlight another unsuspected benefit in a ministry of rivals done well: the personal and spiritual growth of the rival which Fitch says has been “astounding.”

Sometimes the ministry of rivals can play out in less tumultuous ways, and over longer seasons. C. Robert Wetzel, now president of the Emmanuel School of Religion in East Tennessee, recalls his simmering feud with a fellow member of the Milligan College faculty many years ago. Wetzel’s rival, Education Department Chair Paul Clark, would become his subordinate some years later when the former became the academic dean of the college, but both men served the college superbly despite their differences. Says Wetzel, “He was relentless but kind in his advocacy of the philosophy of education he championed. I was also relentless, but had to have my quality of kindness chided and instructed. In any event, I think Milligan College is stronger today because of these prolonged discussions.” Recently Milligan named a wing of the new faculty office building in honor of Paul Clark, a reward Wetzel described as “a well-deserved recognition.”

We men, in particular, are fond of glibly citing Proverbs 27:17 concerning the way in which “iron sharpens iron” when two strong personalities pursue their differences in a truly Christian context. But too often we flee that ancient wisdom when the sparks from the grating iron begin to fly. There is no evidence of such a costly retreat in the New Testament, all of its unity pleas notwithstanding. Paul and the earliest Judaizers—Christians, all—went at each other hammer and tongs, a fact that neither Paul nor the early church fathers tried to keep under literary wraps even when Paul’s anger extended to Peter and James.

Doris Kearns Goodwin concluded that Lincoln’s “unprecedented decision to incorporate his eminent rivals into his political family, the cabinet, was evidence of a profound self-confidence and a first indication of what would prove to others a most unexpected greatness.” The decision was neither a sign of weakness nor cowardice, but rather of strength and hope. In the end, Lincoln’s adversaries were some of his greatest disciples. Seward became one of his closest personal friends and advisors, and Goodwin states that the irascible and always composed Stanton would weep uncontrollably at the mention of Lincoln’s name after the assassination. So, too, for Jesus’ disciples, men who only hours before his arrest and crucifixion engaged in a juvenile argument over who was to be the greatest among them, but who three days later became a singular, world-changing force. Rivalry and unity, it seems, are cut from the same cloth.

Jeff Knowles is a writer and retired research administrator who lives with his wife, Lezlee, in Columbus, Ohio.