In the midst of “the wreckage” of our fallen and sinful world—wrecked bodies, wrecked marriages, wrecked plans, wrecked communities, and wrecked families—God calls certain people to lead the church. The church needs these leaders to stand fast by leading with strength and conviction—even when it’s tough. If we could hear the church’s cry for strong leadership, it might sound something like this:
We desire leaders who can articulate and live the gospel.
We want leaders to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.
We believe all this, but we don't see it. We see, like Ezekiel, dismembered skeletons whitened under a pitiless Babylonian sun. We see a lot of bones that once were laughing and dancing children, adults who once aired their doubts and sang their praises in church—and sinned. We don't see the dancers or the lovers or the singers—or at best catch only fleeting glimpses of them. What we see are bones. Dry bones. We see sin and judgment on the sin. That is what it looks like. It looked that way to Ezekiel; it looks that way to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think; and it looks that way to us.
We desire leaders who bring dry bones to life.
A leader’s task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.
We believe in the coming together of these bones into connected, sinewed, muscled human beings who speak and sing and laugh and work and believe and bless their God. We believe it happened the way Ezekiel preached it, and we believe it still happens. We believe it happened in Israel, and we believe it happens in today’s church. We believe we are a part of the happening as we sing our praises, listen receptively to God's Word, and receive the new life of Christ in the sacraments. We believe the most significant thing is that we are no longer dismembered but are remembered into the resurrection body of Christ.
We desire leaders who help keep our beliefs sharp.
We don't trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want spiritual leaders in the midst of this world's life. Leaders who minister with Word and sacrament in all the different stages of our lives—in our work and our play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and our sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle.
We desire leaders who tell us the truth.
We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won't feel like believing anything and won't want to hear it from our leaders. And we know there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when our leaders themselves won't feel like saying it. It doesn't matter. Speak truth anyway.
There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, but without the foundational realities—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. A leader’s task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.
