CBA of PA State Meetings

On Wednesday, April 6, a small VIP jet turned onto its final approach to the main runway of the international airport in a city named Kigali. Suddenly, hidden anti-aircraft weapons on the ground that had been silently tracking the aircraft burst into action. The plane plummeted to the ground in a ball of fire. Killed in the crash were the presidents of the Central African nations of Rwanda and Burundi.

The assassinations of those two leaders triggered an outbreak of killing in Rwanda that boggles the imagination. Latest estimates are that over 20,000 people have been slaughtered, many of them in the most savage ways imaginable. 100,000 refugees have fled from the capital. Rwanda is not a happy place to be.

What does that have to do with us here today?

The theme of our meetings this year is ADVANCE - Biblical Strategies for the 90’s. As you know, a rather unfortunate set of circumstances has led to my being here this afternoon in place of Dennis Baker. In light of those circumstances, I felt that it might be appropriate for us to consider the issue of how we do leadership.

If our churches are going to advance in the 1990’s, we’re going to have to stop killing our leaders. As Baptist churches, by and large, we have adopted and are practicing a model of pastoral leadership which is toxic to our pastors and to our people.

This afternoon, I want to examine with you some of our assumptions about what it means to be a pastor, and about the way we do leadership in the local church.

The evangelical church is in the midst of a leadership crisis. We are only beginning to appreciate the dimensions of it. The evidence is all around us; both statistical and anecdotal.

Which of you has not recently heard of yet another pastor or Christian leader who has been knocked out of the ministry by burn-out, moral failure, or just plain disillusionment? Our own CB movement has seen its share of casualties.

And even where pastors have maintained their integrity, it seems that churches nowadays are much less ready to put up with someone who doesn’t quite live up to all their expectations. I am hearing more and more instances of pastors who are being asked to leave their churches.

The ministry has become a high-risk occupation. Peter Drucker states that the three most difficult jobs in America today are being the president of a university, being the administrator of a major hospital, and being the pastor of a local church.

For pastors, the expectations are high, the stress is high, the material rewards are usually low and the isolation can be intimidating.

In surveys conducted by Leadership Journal, 63% of pastors said that unreasonable congregational expectations were causing stress on their marriages.

70% said that they were having financial difficulties and that this was causing tension in their family relationships.

9% admitted to having had an extra-marital affair while in the ministry. Another 15% said that they had had inappropriate contact with the opposite sex.

55% said that they had no close friends with which to talk about problems in their personal lives.

In the KJV of 1 Cor. 16:13, Paul urges us to “quit you like men”. But when you look at those statistics, and at the number of pastors who are crashing and burning on the leadership landscape, you could reverse that to read “men like you quit”.

Why is this happening? It’s happening because we’ve allowed ourselves to be pushed into an unbiblical model of leadership for the local church.

Now this hasn’t happened overnight; it has taken years, indeed centuries, to evolve. And the forces that have been pushing us in this direction have been big forces. Tradition. Church history. Culture. American culture in particular.

When you look at the way Americans think about leadership and do leadership, you see some very interesting things.

I want you to know that I am not an American by birth. I was born and raised in Canada. I lived there for the first 26 years of my life. I just became an American citizen two years ago.

So I think I might be able to offer you a perspective from the viewpoint of somebody who was brought up outside American culture.

Christianity Today reported on a study that was conducted by an evangelical church growth organization on the differences between Canadians and Americans when it comes to church leadership. There were some significant differences.

Americans, culturally-speaking, tend to like their leaders larger than life. The history of the United States is full of heroes. You have a whole pantheon of pioneers, explorers, risk-takers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, and inventors. Americans place a great premium on the charismatic individual leader.

Take George Washington, for instance. We call him the Father of our Country. He is revered to the point where he is almost deified.

There is no such equivalent in the history of Canada. In fact, Canadian history is less about individuals than it is about groups. For that reason, Canadian history is much more mundane. Much less turbulent. There was no revolution, no civil war. They did everything by consensus.

This is how Americans and Canadians are quite different. Americans tend to value individualism; Canadians tend to value the group. If you want to put it in terms of old-fashioned TV Westerns, Americans prefer the Lone Ranger; Canadians prefer Wagon Train.

Look at the national sports of the two countries. The National Pastime here in America is baseball. Baseball is supposed to be a team sport, but it really comes down to a series of individual confrontations between a pitcher and a batter.

All the significant baseball statistics are individual statistics. Nobody cares how many runs the Phillies scored as a team last year, but they do remember that Lenny Dykstra led the league in runs.

In Canada, the national sport is hockey. Hockey is a team sport. In fact, the Montreal Canadiens, who are the defending Stanley Cup champions, didn’t have a single player in the top ten of any of the individual offensive statistical categories last year. But they won the Stanley Cup anyway because hockey is a team sport.

Now what does all this have to do with leadership in the local church? I am suggesting that the cultural forces which have made America great as a nation, have tended to predispose us toward a view of church leadership that is primarily individualistic, not team-oriented.

We project our cultural understanding of leadership onto our concept of what a pastor is supposed to be. We read the NT passages on leadership through cultural glasses.

Most evangelical church-goers expect their pastor to be all things to all people; an omni-competent “man for all seasons”, a magnificent, lonely figure standing at the head of the church because that’s the style of leadership that our culture glorifies.

But is that the style of leadership that the NT teaches? In the words of Al Borland on Home Improvement, “I don’t think so, Tim.”

The NT presents a model of local church leadership that is team-oriented. It is collective and group-based.

The words “presbuteros” and “episkopos” when they occur in the NT describing church leaders, are almost always plural. The only time that the word elder, or overseer, appears in the singular is…

1. where Paul describes the qualifications for an elder in 1 Tim. 3 and Titus 1, and it’s logical for it to be in the singular there.

2. where Paul says in 1 Tim. 5:19 that you shouldn’t entertain an accusation against an elder (singular) unless it is brought by two or three witnesses.

3. where Peter and John use the term “elder” of themselves in their epistles.

1 Peter 5:1 To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder

2JO 1 = The elder, To the chosen lady and her children

3JO 1 = The elder, To my dear friend Gaius

Every other occurrence of “presbuteros” or “episkopos” is plural. There are 16 such occurrences in Acts and the Epistles. And you have another 12 occurrences in the book of Revelation describing the elders around the throne of God in heaven. All of them are plural. You kind of get the impression that elders come in groups.

But we have somehow come away from those passages with the idea that there is just one elder in the local church, and that’s the pastor. And we have vested all of the leadership authority in that one man. And that has been toxic, not only to the church, but to the pastor. That’s what’s killing our leaders. It’s an unbiblical view of leadership.

I have in my files a 16-page paper called the “Elder Study Committee Report”. It was put together back in 1976 by a committee which was appointed by the CBA of Oregon. The paper is a study of the NT passages on eldership, but you don’t have to read too far to realize that that’s not really the issue that’s being dealt with.

The underlying issue is the matter of congregational church government. You see, it appears that the CBA of Oregon was afraid that any move toward a plurality of elders in the local church would lead to an “elder-governed” church. Baptists would turn into Presbyterians overnight. What a horrifying thought!

Let me quote to you from the paper: “The NT appears to teach a plurality of elders in the local church, and this seems to be the NT ideal. However, this does not mean a Board of Elders with governing power or authority over the church. This would be contrary to the nature of the local church’s authority.”

What are they saying? They are saying that the NT teaches multiple elders, but those elders can’t meet together as a Board, or have any spiritual power or authority in the church, otherwise the congregation’s authority would be jeopardized.

Later in the paper, they went as far as to say that , if a church had to have multiple elders, those elders would actually have to be members of the pastoral staff. Professionals, in other words. Hired clergy.

Can you see what’s happened here? This paper ends up virtually dismissing the NT teaching on elders in favor of maintaining the status quo. And it ends up sanctioning an artificial and unbiblical distinction between clergy and laity - a distinction that has hobbled the church for centuries.

We’ve taken the Biblical passages on church leadership and filtered them through a grid of Baptist tradition, instead of taking our Baptist tradition and submitting it to the teaching of the Scriptures.

But having said that, the really amazing thing is that we still can’t get away from the fact that we need shared spiritual leadership in the local church. We kind of instinctively realize that the pastor can’t do it all.

So we try to sneak elders in the back door by calling them deacons. And then we give what the deacons are supposed to be doing to a group we call the Trustees. And so it goes.

If the church is going to advance in the 90’s, we’ve got to re-define the way we do leadership. We’ve got to get away from practicing what is primarily a cultural model of individual, autocratic, one-man leadership centered on the pastor. We’ve got to start practicing a biblical model of collective leadership centered on a team of elders.

We’ve got to re-educate our people. There are so many misconceptions of what a pastor is and what a pastor does. Most Baptists are used to thinking of their pastor as a strong, exceptional individual - multi-gifted, multi-talented.

He can make house calls like an old country doctor. He can shake hands like a politician. He can prepare lessons like a professor. He can counsel like a psychologist. He can back-slap and promote like a used-car salesman.

He has to be as skilled an executive as the president of a major corporation. He has to be as shrewd with finances as a banker. And above all, he has to be so good a diplomat that he could umpire a baseball game between the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan.

You’ve all heard what kind of pastor a typical Baptist church is looking for…

The average church is looking for a pastor who is 32 years old and has 27 years of experience. He must be tall and short, thin and heavyset, and good-looking. He must have one brown eye and one blue, hair parted down the middle, left side dark and straight, the right side blond and curly. He must have a burning desire to work with youth, and spend all his time visiting the older folks.

He must be willing to work 6 days a week from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. doing everything from preparing sermons to unplugging the backed up toilet in the church nursery, but he must be a devoted family man with an adoring wife and model kids.

And if the church doesn’t grow under his ministry, he gonna get fired. But if the church does grow, and all that growth causes too many changes, they’re going to ask him to leave.

Well that’s kind of funny, but it hurts to laugh. Being a pastor can be a lot like doing a high wire act without a net. Your first mistake can often be your last.

And yet the amazing thing is that a lot of guys are still willing to take a shot at it. But what kind of men are we attracting to this style of leadership? I have a feeling that this model of leadership - this cultural model of lone ranger leadership - may attract the very sort of person who should not become a leader in the local church.

You see, when we put the pastor up on a pedestal, we open up a Pandora’s Box. You open the door to all sorts of “leadership pathologies” to develop within his life - pathologies that, if left untreated, will ultimately kill his ministry and, quite possibly, kill him too.

One of the “pathologies of the pedestal” is the abuse of power. Listen to this honest confession by a veteran pastor…

Few people know the rhetoric of servanthood better than the clergy. And yet so many of them, even unconsciously, are on power trips. It may be that some were attracted to the ministry because they saw in the role of minister the opportunity to exercise power. Clergymen of this type have learned to play their power games with a cleverness that keeps most people from ever suspecting what they are really about.

One way for the pastor to gain and maintain power is to do all the work of the church himself. As a young pastor I was very guilty of this tactic. I called on all the church members, ran the youth groups, and the Vacation Bible School, supervised the Sunday School, mimeographed the church bulletin, organized the church choir, unofficially chaired every committee, and did half of the janitorial work.

For the most part, the church people stood back in amazement at my boundless energy and seeming dedication. Yet what I was really doing was keeping church members out of positions of power by occupying them all myself. I controlled the church and my power was everywhere evident.

Pastors who try to do everything themselves often complain about the lack of adequate lay leadership in the church. In reality, they are keeping lay workers out of leadership roles because of their own need for power.

Sometimes a power-oriented pastor will con his congregation into hiring an assistant pastor whom he can control; then the two of them are able to do all the church work, and it becomes unnecessary for the church members to do anything. The pastor is more powerful than ever, the church program grinds on, and the laity remain unchallenged and dormant.

The lust for power is a “pedestal pathology”. A closely-related disease is the independent spirit. One of the unfortunate by-products of the church growth movement is that it tends to place an emphasis on entrepreneurial leadership.

The church growth movement places the spotlight on churches that are highly innovative; churches that are pioneering new methods and strategies for reaching people. And those churches are invariably led by pastors who are highly-innovative, visionary, risk-takers.

George Barna, the high priest of the church growth movement, wrote a book called “The Power of Vision” which I’m sure you are familiar with. In that book, Barna placed a heavy weight on the shoulders of us pastors. That weight was the responsibility of coming up with “God’s vision for the church”.

Without that vision, Barna said, a church would never grow. “Without a vision the people will perish.” And the senior pastor’s the guy who has to come up with it. If he doesn’t come up with it, it must not be God’s vision.

Now on one page, Barna says that you’ve gotta have the vision. But on another page, he says that having it isn’t nearly as important as the fact that you are out there looking for it. He kind of lost me at that point.

But here’s the rub: management studies have shown that the entrepreneurial visionary leader does not make a good corporate leader. The entrepreneurial leader, the visionary who is out in front of everybody else, is fine when you’re trying to get something off the ground.

But he actually becomes a detriment to the organization once it gets going and builds up some momentum. Once it begins to develop people of competence and leadership ability from within.

The reason? The entrepreneurial leader is too independent. He can’t work with people who might have a different agenda than he has. He has tunnel vision. His idea of compromise is when you do it his way.

A good example of this is what happened at Apple Computer. Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple back in the early 1980’s. Under his visionary leadership, Apple developed the Macintosh computer.

Jobs assembled a small, tight-knit, almost secretive team of software and hardware whiz-kids who were fanatical in their allegiance to his vision for what a personal computer ought to be. And they worked night and day to bring the Mac to birth.

But once it was born, Apple didn’t need Steve Jobs anymore. They needed somebody who could figure out how to market this revolutionary new machine. They needed someone who would be able to sit down with the heads of Fortune 500 companies and listen to their needs. And the Mac almost didn’t survive until they kicked out Jobs and brought in John Sculley.

A lot of pastors have bought into this visionary leadership model. Maybe its because they are already that way inclined in terms of their personality. Or maybe its because they’ve read one too many church growth books.

Whatever the reason, they have become so enamored of capturing visions, and dreaming dreams, that they have lost the ability to work with other gifted leaders in the give and take of church life. They’ve lost sight of the fact that God can speak through other leaders in the church than just the pastor.

I believe that that’s one of the reasons why we have so many para-church ministries on the evangelical landscape. Many of those ministries are being led by men who just can’t work with anyone else; they have to be the President and Founder of their own ministry. (Beware when somebody hands you his business card and it says “President and Founder” on it!)

Another pathology of the pedestal is unaccountability. When you elevate the pastor to a position of magnificent isolation, you place him beyond the reach of any meaningful accountability relationships with peers within the local church.

I’m not talking about accountability relationships with other pastors in other local churches; I’m talking about being able to bare your soul before fellow elders in your own local church.

I often talk to an older pastor who has been something of a mentor to me. He took his ministry training back in the 1950’s. That was a time when these cultural assumptions about church leadership were pretty much accepted without question. Pastors back then were expected to be strong, individual leaders.

The seminary training they received reflected that. This pastor has told me how, back in his pastoral theology classes, he was taught that the pastor had to be the chairman of the board of the church. It was a non-negotiable. After all, he was told, how could you have one of the sheep up there leading a business meeting while the shepherd sat down and listened?

And he was also taught that the pastor and his wife should never get too close with any of the members of the congregation in a friendship-type relationship. That would lead to too many problems. There were things about the ministry that you just couldn’t discuss with lay-people. A pastor needed to maintain a certain professional distance.

Last year, I told this pastor that I was moving to First Baptist Allentown. In the course of our conversation, it came up that the church already had a youth pastor. So he immediately said, “You’re going to ask for his resignation, aren’t you?”

You see, under the autocratic model of pastoral leadership that this man was trained in, the senior pastor gets to hand-pick his own staff. Kind of like when Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson arrived in Dallas five years ago, they swept out the old regime.

But think about this: if a new pastor has the right to ask for the resignation of the present staff, why doesn’t he also ask for the resignation of all the Board members? Why doesn’t he ask for the resignations of all the Sunday School teachers? All the Deaconesses. All the Trustees. All the leaders in the church from top to bottom.

That sounds absurd doesn’t it? But I know many pastors who would probably like to do it that way!

Sooner or later a pastor is going to have to learn to work with the human resources that are already there. And the best proof of whether a pastor is really a team-builder is if he can begin to build a team out of the people that God has already placed in that church - staff members, and board members included.

Anybody can work with a staff of his own choosing. But can a pastor learn to work with people that God chooses for him? That’s when you find out if a pastor’s really worth his salt.

We’ve got to re-orient our thinking to the fact that Jesus Christ is the head of the church, not the senior pastor.

Incidentally, you see what happened with Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones? They found out that Dallas wasn’t big enough for both of them. That’s what usually happens when you put two of those kind of leaders together.

Back in the 1980’s, we all lived through a series of embarrassing public scandals in the evangelical church. Each one of those scandals really boiled down to the fact that leaders were not accountable to others for the way they were conducting themselves. They were living a double life.

Up front, there was a carefully constructed facade of righteousness, of spirituality. But behind the facade, there was lust, and greed, and hypocrisy. And the scary thing is: Jim Bakker may be doing the time, but we’ve all - in one way or another - committed the crime.

Put a leader on a pedestal and pretty soon you have him believing that he’s not only above the crowd, he’s above the rules.

Howard Hendricks said “If a Christian leader is not in an accountability relationship, he’s systematically kidding himself.” Chuck Swindoll and his staff have a series of six accountability questions they ask each other. The last question is “Have you just lied to me?”

As pastors, we’ve got to open ourselves up to the loving scrutiny of other mature brothers in the local church - brothers who are elders, and who have met those qualifications for eldership. Those are men we can trust. We’ve got to learn to be vulnerable for our own good.

One of the hazards of being a pastor is that you are open to a lot of criticism. And it usually comes from immature believers. But that doesn’t make it sting any the less!

But the real danger is that you become so gun-shy of that kind of criticism that you close your life off to all criticism. Then there’s no way for you to be accountable to a fellow elder who wants to confront you about something because he has your good in mind.

I think it’s interesting that when Jesus chose his 12 apostles, he didn’t appoint one of them to be the Chief Apostle. The President. The Chairman. In spite of what the Catholic Church says about Peter, Jesus didn’t appoint any of those apostles to be First Among Equals.

And that had definite advantages when it came time for accountability, because we all remember what happened at Antioch. Peter got himself into a bind trying to please the legalists, and he ended up coming off as a hypocrite. Who confronted him? It was Paul, who calls himself the “least of the apostles”, and who was certainly the last of the apostles by appointment.

Yet he acted in that situation as Peter’s equal; his colleague; his friend.

It is to Peter’s everlasting credit that he not only listened to Paul, but he later referred to Paul as “my dear brother” (2 Peter 3:15), and commended Paul’s writings to others.

This is the kind of accountability relationship that pastors desperately need. We need mature Christian men in our own local fellowships, who see us from day to day, who know us well, to come alongside us. To encourage us when we need encouraging, and to challenge us when we need challenging.

To ask us the questions that we’re so used to asking others: How’s it going with you and your wife? How’s your quiet time? Where are you struggling these days?

But that can never happen as long as we keep practicing a Lone Ranger culturally-defined model of leadership. We’ve got to get back to the biblical model.

Lucy and Linus are sitting at the window, looking out at a torrential downpour. Lucy says “Boy, look at that rain. What if it floods the whole world?”

Linus replies, “It will never do that. In the ninth chapter of Genesis, God promised Noah that that would never happen again, and the sign of the promise is the rainbow.”

With a sigh of relief, Lucy says “Thanks, you’ve taken a great load off my mind.” To which Linus replies, “Sound theology has a way of doing that.”

We need to get back to a sound theology of local church leadership. The NT model is one in which the pastor is just one of a team of elders. The overall function of that team is the shepherding of the flock.

We’ve become so accustomed to talking about the pastorate as though it were a church office. It is not a church office; it is a church function. The only church offices are deacon and elder, and pastoring is a function of the elders of the church. Peter said to the elders (plural) of the church “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care.”

If we’re ever going to recover this biblical model of local church leadership, we’re going to have to start de-emphasizing the individualistic, entrepreneurial, omni-competent, independent, talent-based leadership that is such a part of our American culture, and start building the corporate, co-operative, interdependent, consensus-building, character-based leadership that is patterned for us in the NT church.

Any other model of leadership is going to be toxic, both to our churches, and to us.