On Monday, I mentioned some articles by Jay Guin that refer to an interview with Stanley Hauerwas. I included a quote from that interview which fit well with some things I’ve been thinking about. Hauerwas says in that interview:
So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.
Disciplined congregations. That’s definitely something we lack in Churches of Christ. In fact, we often rankle at the thought of submitting ourselves to the leadership of others. Because, as Hauerwas notes, we see our personal faith as more important than our community faith, we hold the community to our standards rather than the other way around. We want the kind of music that we feel is appropriate. We want a preacher who presents God’s Word in a way that suits us. We want our elders to make decisions that line up with our personal beliefs. If not… we’re gone. We’ll find another church that does things the way we want.
That’s not to say that leaders are never wrong or that we can’t have bad leadership in place. But there has to be a trust in the body to be able to deal with such. And we have to be an active part of that body for it to be able to function as it should. It’s only in a church that lacks an active membership that bad leadership can thrive.
I could be wrong. You could be wrong. Our leaders could be wrong. Previous generations could be wrong. God is right. His Word is right.
So we make leadership selection a spiritual process and not a series of business decisions. When choosing our shepherds, we look for just that… shepherds. We seek men who want to minister and serve, not men who want to rule. We seek men with a heart for God and a heart for the flock. Once chosen, we follow. We pray. We support. At times we offer suggestions and advice. But we have to trust.
And yes, that can lead to hardship. It can lead to mistakes. It can lead to discomfort. But it won’t lead to anything that we can’t deal with as a body. That is, we can deal with it if we are functioning together as a body. If we’re just a group of like-minded individuals, then there’s trouble ahead.
There’s been a bit of pushback in recent years to the concept of Christian leadership. Some have even gone so far as to deny that the church needs any leaders at all. That doesn’t fit with what I see in the Bible.
I think the church needs more ministers. I also think that the church needs fewer “ministers.”
At the National Preacher’s Conference in Cuba, I’ll also be speaking on this verse: “And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; with skillful hands he led them.” (Psalms 78:72) I’ll be talking about those two aspects of what church leaders need: skill and integrity.
Part of making leader selection a spiritual process is recognizing church leadership as a spiritual activity. It seems to me that we often overemphasize a couple of texts in 1 Timothy and Titus (texts which fortunately had no context and can be lifted from those books, edited and joined together to create a list of requirements).