This is a faithful word; if someone aspires to exercise oversight (of the community), that one longs to do a good work. As such, it is necessary for the overseer to be beyond reproach, a one-woman-man, level-headed, self-controlled, honourable, hospitable (Gk. lit a lover of strangers), a skilful teacher, not a drunkard, not a bully, but gentle, tolerant, not obsessed with money, managing his own household well, having subordinate children with all dignity (for, if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for the assembly of God)? He must not be a new believer, in order that he might not have an inflated ego and fall into the condemnation of the Devil. It is also imperative to have a good testimony from the ones outside the community, in order that he might not fall into disrepute and into the Devil’s trap (1 Timothy 3:1–7, my translation).
When I consider the above - and I opted to offer my own translation so I could really think through the challenges - I wince as I survey the landscape of global Christian leadership. What we have in 1 Timothy and Titus are, in my view, attempts to address the question of what it might look like if our communities were led by those people visibly, palpably and unequivocally influenced by the life and teaching of Jesus. The influence could never be perfect because we are flawed human beings – but that is merely to state the obvious. How many times have we seen people who are relatively young in the faith go into leadership because they are charismatic, educated, “efficient” and intelligent? Why is it that so many Christian leaders are ousted for being egomaniacal bullies whose ability to teach is questionable? There are many full-length treatments attempting to address these questions more thoroughly - I present this short reflection to follow up my first addendum to Chapter 20 of Christ-Centred Deconstruction and hopefully facilitate any discussion which emerged from it. It is my fervent hope and prayer that this forms part of the conversation by which we give careful reconsideration to how we select leaders in the future.
In my undergraduate years, I did an independent study unit on two progressive believers - Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. They are two brilliant and creative Jesus scholars, (Borg passed away in 2015); although I had several disagreements with them, I learned much from them both. As I have pondered what constitutes an ideal Christian community-leader, I find myself drawn into a rethinking of my agreements and disagreements with the latter of these two scholars, J. D. Crossan.
A former Roman Catholic priest who abandoned the priesthood for romantic reasons and a founding member of the Jesus Seminar from the Westar Institute in California, Crossan, in his magnum opus on the historical Jesus - The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant – attempted to interpret his conceptualization of leadership in Jesus’ day around the notion of ‘brokerage’. Rome was the brokered empire; Judaism represented embattled brokerage; Jesus bucked all known trends by preaching and modelling what Crossan referred to as the “Brokerless Kingdom”. This, for Crossan, was how Jesus envisioned the Kingdom of God would undermine and dismantle the systems of hierarchy, Imperial and Jewish, that surrounded him on all sides.
For Crossan, both Imperial and Jewish leadership needed brokers; that is, intermediaries who distributed resources, influence and power. Jesus, on the other hand, was a “community organizer” engaged in “commensality” – he opened the doorway to unimpaired and complete access to the Divine, doing away with the need for institutional gatekeepers to mediate between heaven and earth. In Crossan’s universe, believers experience God’s presence in their fellowship and the mutuality of a shared life, rather than the kind of cataclysmic interventionist arrival of God characterised by the preaching of John the Baptiser. (It is in this regard I find myself most sharply disagreeing with Crossan – firstly, I do not see his conclusion as an either/or choice, but a both/and. Secondly, to effectively deny that Jesus was a first-century Jewish apocalyptic thinker is to totally decontextualise him historically). [See John Dominic Crossan, “Jesus and the Challenge of Collaborative,” in The Historical Jesus: Five Views, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, Spectrum Multiview Books (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 106. Luke Timothy Johnson, “Response to John Dominic Crossan,” in The Historical Jesus: Five Views, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, Spectrum Multiview Books (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 138].
Indeed, Jesus could be a ‘prophet’, since this is a title for a broker. Instead, Crossan’s Jesus was a Jewish Cynic, who ‘proclaimed and sought to institute a brokerless and egalitarian kingdom, a kingdom without any mediators between individuals and God, not even Jesus himself [David S. du Toit, “Redefining Jesus: Current Trends in Jesus Research” in eds Michael Labahn, & Andreas Schmidt, Jesus, Mark, and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and its Earliest Records (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 136].
For both my agreements and (many) disagreements with Crossan, I think his thesis does raise a number of really important questions from which we could learn much. What does leadership without hierarchy look like? Alternatively, might we rethink hierarchy, such that it is not a stepladder of power, but a stepladder of compassion and humility. What if the highest level of the food chain was not the one who wielded the most authority, but the one who wielded the most gentleness(!)? What if leadership were not a competition for power but a competition for love?
The Kingdom does not need to be free of brokers; it needs to recalibrate the currency of brokerage. If the currency is power, authority, ‘manliness’, position, reputation, status and honour, then at best we have a corporation, a battlefield or a boardroom. If it is humble and compassionate servanthood, then we have what is captured in this most perfect adage:
And the ten, having listened to this, began to vent their fury about James and John. Jesus, having called them forth, explained to them, “You know that the ones who appear to rule over the nations exercise lordship over them and the great ones among them hold them under their power. Yet it is not this way among you; instead, whoever wants to become great among you will be a servant of you all. And whoever wants to be first place among you will be a slave of everyone. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his very self as ransom price in place of many (Mark 10:41–45, my translation).
Which Eugene Peterson wonderfully renders:
41-45 When the other ten heard of this conversation, they lost their tempers with James and John. Jesus got them together to settle things down. “You’ve observed how godless rulers throw their weight around,” he said, “and when people get a little power how quickly it goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not to be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for many who are held hostage” ((Mark 10:41–45, The Message Translation).
How ought we think through and internalise Jesus’ challenge here?
I have been particularly concerned recently with how the antics of some Christian leaders are interpreted by young people – not least of all because how youngsters interpret the faith can teach us so much. As chapter 20 of Christ Centred Deconstruction attempts to navigate, Generation Z is proving a uniquely spiritually attuned generation to speak the gospel to. They are deeply sensitive to inauthentic Christian leadership and very sensitive to how much it resembles Jesus – or indeed does not. Mark 10:41–45 captures the heart of the kind of leader Jesus would appoint. Leaders pursuing this heart ought to consider the following:
Authenticity beats perfection - no one wants to be led by someone who thinks they are flawless. People want to be led by those who are proud of their scars, honest about their limitations, humble enough to say, ‘I don’t know’, in tune enough to say, ‘I need help’ and someone who resists the temptation to put on a performance at the pulpit.
Transparency conveys servant leadership - it is debilitating for congregations when leaders decide that believers are too weak and unstable to know the truth and, therefore, have to be lied to. Congregations who know and are, therefore, connected to the goings on of leadership, are empowered to pray for, engage in conversation with and offer insight into leadership.
Nothing detracts from servant leadership like the desire for titles, status, rank, and position. Whilst appointing leaders and the bestowing of titles can serve to recognise work that is already being done, titles and appointments can surreptitiously create hierarchy.
Internalising servanthood as greatness is the grounds for articulating our purpose. As the most recent studies both by the Barna group and Deloitte routinely show, young people are not simply abandoning the Church, but rather particular hierarchical, over regulated, socially disconnected and bullish expressions of it. Generation Z is actually craving spirituality; it is not, however, seeking rules or leaders to follow, but an exploration of purpose, meaning, vocation, intimacy and relationality.
Discipleship and church culture are not identical. One cardinal error, which I have seen particularly profusely within the denomination in which I have spent most of my believing life, is the confusion between the Gospel and ecclesiological culture. Jesus is not one and the same with the cultural package which typically surrounds him. Those who embrace Christian leadership must be committed to teaching the gospel and not the culture of the local church. The Bible must be used to interpret church culture – routinely, this happens the other way around. One of the challenges I raised in the previous addendum is what I called the demonization of ideas. This is one of the first signs of a community leadership which teaches how to belong to a local church rather than the Gospel. Of course, most leaders engaged in this practice would equate the two (which is part of the overall problem). However, when the church culture becomes a box which congregation members are effectively prohibited from thinking beyond, no matter how subtly, and when the beliefs of Christians of other denominations are routinely denounced as heresy, church culture is smothering the Gospel. Beware when leaders enforce rules about music preferences, in house traditions, political persuasions, unwritten behavioural regulations or “that’s the way we’ve always done it” style rhetoric.
To conclude for now, in my view, a leader in Christian community should:
Exemplify the influence of Christlikeness.
Model humble servitude.
Go out of their way to consort with the ‘misfits’ (all the modern-day tax collectors and sinners).
Champion compassionate masculinity.
Value everyone equally.
Embrace honest and loving criticism.
Resist treating people who disagree with them as the enemy.
Intentionally engender congregational trust.
Articulate the full missionary vision of Jesus.
Oppose manipulative leadership.
Place example over dictatorship.
Listen to their consciences.
Welcome the broken.
Walk with the traumatised.
Hug the sinner.
Revere Messiah Jesus.
A saying, falsely ascribed to Martin Luther, reads:
The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes.
In my current thinking regarding Christian leadership, we have far too many examples of poorly made shoes with crosses on them. Worldly, egomaniacal and performative leadership, which might be at home in corporate boardrooms, is being draped in the iconography and vocabulary of Christian thought and passed off as Christlike leadership. Bullish, “I get things done,” style leadership is being passed off as “strength”. Loud and aggressive sermons are being passed off as deep Christian convictions. Impressive church growth metrics are being passed off as evidence of divine blessing. Articulating the agenda of a local church is being passed off as Spirit-filled biblical exegesis. Espousing right wing values is being passed off as being an ambassador of Christ. There is a huge mountain to climb and, at the risk of sounding fatalistic, in my honest opinion, it is too big to really make a difference that deeply affects my generation. However, the work we do now will determine what kind of community our children and our children’s children will inherit. I think that is a cause worth devoting considerable energy towards. This is the hope that continues to burn in me - and I know I am not alone.
