But I wonder if the notion of 'leader' has any applicability in the church. After all, the church has servants, not leaders; we are all lead by Christ. The implication of 'leader' is that they know where we are going!
'Leadership' is about the one; service is about the others. Henry Mintzberg touches on this in a FT article on the subject.
So, I sent this to the church in question:
The conceptualisation of leadership in church life that I read in your blog seem to me to be at odds with the way the church is portrayed in the NT. In fact, it looks like a complete inversion of the notion of the church as a body of believers whose head (source) is Christ. As soon as you talk 'leaders' you talk the individual, inevitably, at the expense of the church as a body.
To think that a church needs a 'leader' installs a concept that is foreign to the NT theology of church. It uses a concept that is at best a modern misunderstanding of how a charismatic group 'works' (or that denies that it is charismatic, in the biblical, not the modern sense), and at worst uncritically apes the world in the installation of a paganistic hierarchy where there should be none.
In the NT, the church is a community, indeed, a family, where gifts are distributed for the mutual growth and edification of people working and living together in love. A leader at once demolishes this notion and makes of the church an organisation with someone, or a small group, who commands it, takes responsibility (in an organisational sense) and is not primarily a servant undertaking a role in a particular context.
Nowhere in the NT do I see an 'archon' mentioned in the church, which is the ancient world's equivalent of the 'leader' that comes to us from the secular world. The world of 'one is more important than the many', a world where political structure, whether in business, politics, or other social groupings is the default ordering mechanism, and social influence or the imperatives of the one are prime. This displaces the considerations of love, service and the promotion of others for a world where the leader is the front (usually) man, the one with the prestige, the one who calls the shots and sets the pace, if not the total mission.
I can't think of anything further from the church, or more likely to make the church a passive shell of what it should truly be: a mutually supportive and responsive body of serving believers.
Leaders are anti-humility, where as the notion of servant is pro-humility.
I think of the program of the church in the 1980s, when 'ministry' was often the theme in church 'development'. Ministry is where we seek how we are to serve, how we are to put the other ahead of ourselves, and how we are to express our love. Those we today would call leaders now appear to be the locus of ministry, and a magnet for prestige and adulation, at least by the secular media and institutions.
But we do not have leaders, we have people who serve in various ways and at various times, in various contexts. Some as teachers, some as pastors, some as administrators, etc. No 'leader' here, except that the whole church does the deciding, and the acting. It is the church that has presence in the kingdom of God, not 'leaders'.
Its well time that this was straightened out and we forgot about borrowing our structuring terminology from the hubristic world of business and affairs, and rather judged that world with a way of being community that showed up its puffery. Even the piece on 'anti-leadership' misses the point, I think, of the biblical passage cited, and makes of a structure, what was an organic and participative set of relationships...and, anyway, Peter was an apostle. We don't have them today in they way they were then.
Now, instead of 'leader' I'd like to see churches, and Christian organisations (ministries?) use Christian titles for their contributors: organiser would be good for people who organise things, convenor for those who bring people together for a task or activity, overseer has a biblical warrant; I think moderator also has a functional ring to it (apologies to the Presbyterians), facilitator is possibly OK, and administrator is directly biblical. Anything but the turgid puff of worldly organisations were titles are used to garner prestige!
