When I was nine years old, a missionary visiting our gray Foursquare church put his hand on my head and loudly prophesied that I would become a church leader. I would, he said in a voice that filled the foyer, rise to face the church's "leadership crisis," and grow up to cross oceans, leading many sheep into the fold of God.
I don't remember much more than that (I was young, probably squirming awkwardly in one of my favorite grubby turtlenecks), but those words stuck with me.
Leadership crisis. I didn't understand what he meant, but it sounded like a problem. And I, according to this man from across the sea, was going to be part of the solution.
Break down
Today, I don't know what the heck to think of his words. But I came across them again a little while back.
A new survey from Barna (referenced in "A Missing Link in Christian Leadership") finds that 58 percent of Christians in America identify themselves as leaders, but 82 percent of the same survey's participants believe that the United States is facing a "leadership crisis." What do they think is the problem? Not enough leaders.
Let that steep for a second.
Out of a church made up of 1,000 of these Christians, 580 would describe themselves as leaders. Followers are a bald minority in this hypothetical congregation, where 160 of the leaders will have to double up just to share a single follower. What do Sunday mornings look like there? Do they put the pews on stage?
I'm usually skeptical when people pull the "crisis" card. In my view, crises are mighty hard to spot until you're 5 or 50 years past them. But in this case, I think I agree. If Barna's survey stands true for the wider church, then we do indeed have a crisis of leadership. A bad one. But not the one we think.
There could be a number of reasons for the break down in our collective understanding of ourselves and the leadership landscape of the American church. I think the problem is one of perception. En masse, we have swallowed two indigestible misunderstandings. One is sociological—we've misidentified leadership as influence. The other is theological—we have largely missed the "Christ" part of Christian leadership.
We're conflicted and self-deceived. As a result we sense the gap in leadership, painting it as a crisis of numbers, when the root problem is more pernicious.
One-way equation
In a sentence sadly destined to become cliché, John Maxwell said this:
"Leadership is influence: nothing more, nothing less."
He's basically right. Leadership distilled is influence. But in our present culture, we often make a fatal swap. While leadership might equal influence, influence does not equal leadership. It's a one-way equation.
All leadership is influence. Not all influence is leadership. Advertising influences me. It doesn't lead me. If I get thirsty when I see your beer commercial, you may have influenced me. But that doesn't make you a leader.
We are particularly tempted to make this mistake when so much of our lives take place online. It's an environment where our social influence has hard metrics: followers, friends, retweets, shares, tags. Our interactions with other people can be tracked and tallied. We can see the ripples as we splash around in the social pool, and something in the back of our minds paints this as leadership.
Of course, the issue is in the analog world too. A well-intentioned (and worthy) national leadership conference touts itself as a gathering of thousands of "young influentials." Fair enough. But it betrays us a bit, when we appeal to our influence—increasingly defined as the number of people who listen up when we say something—as practically synonymous with leadership. They aren't the same at all.
Barna's numbers are now coming into focus. If we define influence as leadership, then it's an easy sell (at least for 58 percent of us) that insofar as we influence others, we are leaders. For in the day of shares and likes and armchair internet activism, in this day of "the young influential," who doesn't think that they're an influencer?
But we deceive ourselves. It's just high-volume puffball "influence," long on hype and short on wisdom, and we are too buzzed from mainlining megabit heroin—or the drug of in-person "influence"—to even recognize it.
We're all leaders. Right?
We're confused because we don't quite know what leadership looks like in the 21st century. Some of us want something more than the mobby, content dumping world of Christian blogging and online debate. But we also can't discount the web's ability to share and shift ideas, which overlaps with leadership.
I don't know how it all breaks down. But in my own confusion, I sense that true Christian leadership still consists of what it always was: the ability to transmit the genuine call to discipleship to those who look to us for guidance. To say to another, "follow me as I follow Christ," and then live that out, through 10- and 20-year friendships, struggles, and victories.
A different definition
Another overused leadership definition states that a leader is simply anyone with a follower. I like this, and think that it's true, though incomplete.
For me, leadership is tied to community, to the particular needs and challenges and direction and culture of a particular gathering of people. The chief of a tribe is a leader. The pastor of a church is a leader. The CEO of a business is a leader. The organizers of grassroots activism are leaders. The prime minister of a nation is a leader.
Such positions demand more than influence. They demand the consent and support of those who are led, an acknowledgment of who their leaders are. They demand investment beyond the digital. If you ask the tribe who their leader is and get 580 different answers, something is wrong.
I'm not a fan of drawing sharp digital/analog divides, but this is one that really matters. I simply find it hard to accept that true leadership can happen outside a group of people whose embodied destinies are somehow bound up closely together. Influential thinking? Of course. Dialogue? A given. Encouragement, inspiration, pushback? Sure.
Leadership? I'm skeptical.
"Not so with you …"
Examining this inside the walls of the church demands us to narrow our focus even further. While I cringe at appeals to "biblical leadership" (such attempts always look curiously like the people who are defining "biblical"), the Gospels do radically narrow our concept of appropriate Christian leadership.
Mark 10 tells about James and John's presumptuous request to sit on the right and left of Christ in his kingdom:
Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. "Teacher," they said, "we want you to do for us whatever we ask."
"What do you want me to do for you?" he asked.
They replied, "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory."
"You don't know what you are asking," Jesus said. "Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?"
"We can," they answered.
Jesus said to them, "You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with …
The other disciples, peeved at the sons of Zebedee, are called together by Jesus.
"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them," Jesus says to the gathered group (James and John stand proud or embarrassed or silent among the others).
"Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
It's familiar, the defining passage for "servant leadership," a fawned-over term with the potential to upend the universe. But let this eviscerate you as it does me; for those of us who desire thrones, with their influence, power, and nearness to the King, Christ instead offers us his own cup.
I understand that in our communities there (nearly) always needs to be someone standing up in front, someone choreographing the mad dance that is the local church and her ministries. But that "not so with you" feels like it should define not just the individual ministries of leaders, but our popular Christian conception of the role. We pay lip service to servant leadership, but still structure our communities like the outside kingdom. There's a problem in our formation if we don't recognize the danger of this.
And there lies the true leadership crisis in the church. We face the same problem that we always have, the same problem that James and John (desiring to be young influentials) fell prey to when they desired glory at the right and left hands of the Enthroned Christ instead of longing to join the Servant-king in the empty place of true leadership.
You see, there has always been a crisis of leadership in the church. It is this: few of those Christians called to lead seem to embrace Christ's model of leadership. Why? We cannot drink Christ's cup.
A throne or the cup?
In In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen describes the path to Christlike leadership as a journey of three movements: the movement from relevance to prayer, from popularity to ministry, and from leading to being led.
Never has that wise priest's little book been more timely.
Nouwen grounds our leadership squarely in our inner life. He, an unusually gifted and recognized man by anyone's standards, found in the latter half of his career that his success—the scope of his influence—hamstrung the work of Christ through him.
You're familiar with the story of course. Nouwen, the Ivy League professor and "star" priest was called at that time of outward success and inner despair to Daybreak, a L'Arche community of mentally handicapped adults who were utterly unable to appreciate his education, natural brilliance, spiritual acumen, acclaimed writing career, or any other of the myriad reasons everyday folks thought he mattered.
Writing from Daybreak in the early 1990s, Nouwen says "… it is clear that a whole new type of leadership is asked for in the church of tomorrow, a leadership that is not modeled on the power games of the world, but on the servant-leader Jesus, who came to give his life for the salvation of many."
We'd all pay lip service to this. But does it change our lifestyle? Does it terraform our inner landscape? Do we actually change how we lead or just piously rebrand the same ancient power games that try to enthrone us on the right hand of Jesus instead of kneeling down with him?
For one person, rejecting the power games looks like monasticism. For another, it could mean standing in a spotlight, that one may draw others into it before stepping off the stage. It could mean deleting a Twitter account that (if one was honest) exists more to make one the star of their own sitcom than to search for truth and wisdom. For another, it could mean engaging with whatever cutting edge technology we create, so that Christ might have a humble witness there.
The specifics can change. The generalities will not. We must decrease that he may increase. Our desire for influence breaks the legs of our true call—to servant leadership.
A darkly pious throne
Looking back, I don't know what to think of the prophesying missionary and his prediction over my 9-year-old buzz cut. I probably shouldn't think about it much at all. I don't even know how he would have defined the leadership crisis that I was supposed to respond to.
We are self deceived, in the pew and in the pulpit. We crave power and crave influence. We crave a throne, but a darkly pious one—think how closely the desire for rulership, the need to be seen sidled up to Christ the King, the need to be in front correlates to our culture of Christian celebrity!
Because we believe that influence is what gives us significance in the kingdom, we lose sight of the truth. We've been romanced by the lie that the "young influentials" are the real leaders of Christ's church worthy of emulation.
But we lack leaders who can show us downward mobility. Leaders who can walk the paths of death a few steps ahead of us, with grace and in vulnerability, as we all follow Christ through the grave and into the light of the Resurrection. Beyond influence, beyond "thought leadership."
Like the Hebrews crying to Samuel for a king, we whine and jabber to be led by people we can look up to, people we have lifted up—by people on thrones instead of in the gray dust raising Christ's cup to their mouths. And those of us called to lead need to be the first to reject the system. That's as easy as death.
Not enough leaders? No, not enough leaders like Jesus.
We should weep and tremble, because in our leadership crisis, God is giving us what we have asked for.
Paul Pastor is associate editor for Leadership Journal.
