A Better Way To Lead
As we emerged from COVID, I was struck by the leadership burden that many church leaders were feeling.
I met with senior pastors suffering from anxiety and panic attacks due to overwhelming pressure, complexity, and differing opinions regarding change. Why was the weight of change being carried by so few?
This is a question I have been wondering for some years now. Years ago, we learned that approximately 75% of our pastors were feeling some level of exhaustion or burnout.
About 12 years ago, I left leadership in the industry to support church leaders. I was confronted by a leadership model I had rarely seen before - the ‘superleader’ - a model where the leader is the person who leads everything.
Don’t get me wrong, as a leader in business, I was responsible for the business. I was responsible for everything, but there was no way I was expected to be involved in everything. If I were, I would have been burned out by the age of 40. As I took on my first Managing Director role, I had to learn to entrust the leadership of major operations to Operational Directors. That was an enormous (and challenging) learning curve for me, but it was an essential transition if I were to oversee the organization.
There seems to have emerged a model of leadership whereby the paid pastor leads and does the ministry of the church whilst the church members fund it. We appreciate ‘superleaders’ who will lead and do the ministry of the church and, when the ministry grows, we ask for generous people to fund more ‘superleaders.’ I commonly witness this model of leadership in church culture – by both lay and clergy. In fact, in the last twelve years of coaching and consulting pastors, this has been a source of great wrestling.
I’m sure it is a major factor in minister burnout. Grant Bickerton’s wonderful work on burnout within Australian ministers demonstrates that the step change to burnout involves a loss of spiritual resources (read personal devotion). That is as leaders find less time to spend in personal devotion to the Lord they maybe more likely to become depleted. It seems that the step away from spiritual resources seems to be caused by busyness. (“I don’t have time for devotion”) Where does this busyness come from?
I don’t see any evidence for the ‘superleader’ in the scriptures.
I read that:
God has equipped his church with a full body of people with different gifts
Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers, to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up…
I see the example of Moses (Exodus 18) having to learn not to do all the work himself and the apostles finding others to do the important work of serving the widows (Acts 6).
In both of these examples, the leaders:
needed clarity of the task they were most responsible for;
selected trustworthy people to delegate the tasks to;
and remained responsible for the oversight of the overall ministry.
Let me encourage church leaders to listen to the scriptures on church leadership and not to decades of culture. Christ never called church leaders to be the person who does everything in the gathering.
James provides important insight on God’s wisdom when he writes:
But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. (James 3:17 ESV)
The best leadership gurus of the world have done survey after survey of people across all industries and continents to find out what people (not just Christians) trust or follow in leaders. They could have just read the scriptures, and they would get the same answer. People follow or trust leaders (voluntarily/without coercion) who are trustworthy.
I am particularly drawn to the phrase “open to reason” in James’ letter (NIV uses the word “submissive”). I wished I had understood the meaning of this as I first struggled to lead a company. In my leadership journey this was a key part of leadership I wished I had learned earlier. When I first became the leader of the organisation , I had to learn the hard way that I didn’t have all the ideas, all the wisdom to come to the best decisions or to lead the company on my own. I had to learn to ‘submit’ to (respect) the operational leadership and expertise of those leading different parts of the organisation. I couldn’t tell them what to do. I couldn’t do their job for them. To lead, I had to learn to trust them to do their operational leadership role (even for those whose job I used to do). I had to equip them into their leadership role and had to be ‘open to their reason’ as the operational experts they needed to be. My job as the head was to bring the leaders of the organisation together to make a whole. Together we had more wisdom. Together we could make better decisions and lead the company more effectively.
Surely this is how church leadership is meant to function. The leader is meant to be competent. But not superhuman.
We are called to point to Christ by His Word, in His Spirit. Called to imitate Christ in character and love. Leaders are appointed to teach and to equip the church to serve in ministry together in unity …. that the church might be built up…. that more might come to know Christ as Lord … that he might be glorified.
I’m confident that this is a better way to lead! The secular world has learned that this is what good leadership looks like (there are lots of good leadership books on this). I wonder how often they realise their wisdom is sourced sourced from our textbook – the Holy Scriptures?
I am very aware that it is a difficult transition in leadership – from the ‘superleader’ to the one who leads and equips. I am confident it is worth it.
Personally, this is what I have devoted the next part of my life to - supporting church leaders to be healthy, spiritually and personally, and effective. I long to see church leaders endure in ministry for longer, leading churches to flourish so that, ultimately, Christ might be glorified.