Alleviating Problems in Church Leadership

One of the truths of life is that any organization generally reflects the character, mentality, and motivations of its leadership. This is true in governments, businesses, and churches. Why this is the case is uncertain and the subject of debate amongst psychologists, theologians, and those who study organizational leadership, but practical experience nevertheless bears this truth out.

Obviously, there are both positives and negatives in this. If you have a dynamically creative and humble leader with good character, a great mind, and interests in evangelism and studying the Scriptures, then there will be a trickle-down effect and a permeation of this throughout the organization. Obviously, this is a boon. However, if you have a leader with poor character and temperament, a disorganized mind, and who is selfishly motivated, then you can expect a disorganized organization exhibiting poor character, poor choices detrimental to all those who come into its purview. This can create a toxic culture and work environment. And even with the best leaders, the character foibles and practical idiosyncrasies and deficiencies which exist in each of us can manifest themselves in an organization. This is particularly true of churches. And this situation is ultimately unavoidable. There must always be leadership in a church. However, there are ways in which problems can be lessened to the benefit of the church’s mission. Here are a few recommendations:

1)      Make Christ the leader of the church. This is about making a conscious effort to establish Christ as the leader of the church in a very real and practical way. Part of this is about modeling the church’s organization on Christ’s character and practice (Philippians 2:5-11). Most of this is about seeking God’s direction through prayer and pursuing what God wants us to do, not what we want or what someone else is doing. This is vision by mission. This is ministry by need. You pursue ministry by the needs of your community. You create ministries because there is a need; you don’t create a ministry and hope there is a need.

2)      Practice Servant Leadership (Luke 22:25-26; Ephesians 4:11-12; Matthew 20:16; Philippians 2:5-11).

3)      Checks and Balances. Power and authority should be spread amongst a large number of people and not centralized and consolidated with one person or one family. There should be a plurality of Elders or Pastors who all have equal authority to make decisions. Church ministries need to be team-based. Most importantly, senior pastors should not pick those who theoretically oversee them and who supposedly insure accountability.

4)      Allow for Disagreements. Create a ministry culture where people are free to discuss ideas openly and offer concerns and disagreements without fear of retribution. We should not cluster ourselves in self-affirming groups or create echo chambers for our own desires.

5)      Pastoral character. As started above, human leadership is unavoidable, but the inherent problems can be lessened by sound practices. A church needs to insure its pastor has good character, a decent temperament, and integrity. The Pastoral Letters are a good place to start. A church needs to make sure its pastor is above reproach (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6-7), temperate and prudent (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 2:2), gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money (1 Timothy 3:3; 6:10), keeping his children under control (1 Timothy 3:4, 12), not showing partiality (1 Timothy 5:21), has a good reputation outside of the church (1 Timothy 3:7), not double-tongued (1 Timothy 3:8), not self-willed or quick-tempered or pugnacious (Titus 1:6), and sensible and self-controlled (Titus 1:8; 2:5).

Adopting these practices will help alleviate problems in church leadership.