The Church Has no Leadership Shortage

When I entered the academic world recently, I noticed changes in Christian education I had not been aware of. I had not realized education had become so focused on leadership development. Across Canada’s Christian colleges there are now whole academic degrees in leadership, reams of Christian books teaching leadership and faculty whose sole role is to teach leadership development.

We have not always taught “leadership development”. Peter Drucker, who died in 2005 was sometimes called the “Father of Modern Management”. He is sometimes credited with developing the idea that leadership itself is a science governed by laws. He believed leadership could be researched, systematized, and taught like, say, biology.

He's called the “father” because in some sense that was new; neither Mother Teresa, Winston Churchill, Diedrich Bonhoeffer, Amy Carmichael, D.L. Moody, Abraham Lincoln, John Wesley, Menno Simons, Augustine, Paul, or Jesus ever took a course on “leadership”.

This does not mean their education didn’t prepare them for leadership. In medieval schools for example, students preparing to be clergy or civil rulers would have learned grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry. Leaders needed to know these, but these were not courses on “leadership”.

John Wesley, the English revival leader, was an Anglican priest in the 18th century who wrote one of the most widely read books on medicine in England called Primitive Physick. He wrote grammars of the English, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages. He spent years at Oxford studying. Thus, when the Spirit poured out revival on all flesh in the Great Awakening of England, God had a well-formed Christian on hand to direct and shape this renewal for the benefit of the church. His education prepared him to lead, but little of it was “leadership development”.

It is often said that the church faces a “leadership” crisis. Who will lead our churches after the looming swell of burnouts and retirements? I often hear that the answer to this is to create more opportunities for “leadership development”. But never in history have we focused more on “leadership development” than in the recent generation. The solution will certainly involve education, it always has. But we don’t have this crisis because we have lacked “leadership development” in the last generation.

May I speak bluntly? The church does not need more “leaders”; the church needs more Christians. Christians who have first been baptized. Christians whose minds have been smelted down and forged to the shape of Scripture. Christians who can connect creation, exodus, law, history, exile, worship, incarnation, atonement, Pentecost and sanctification. Christians who have drunk deeply from the wells of the church’s historic tradition, who know the “cloud of witnesses” watching from the 11th century. Christians who have undergone a detox from idolatrous, pornographic, consumerist, violent and narcissistic poisons of the soul. Christians who are practiced in the virtues—courage, prudence, temperance, humility, and justice. Christians who are baptized by the Holy Spirit, firing all this with a radiant love compelling the world to look, and follow.

When the church has educated Christians of this kind, the church will have leaders.

About “leadership development” then: Christians like this will benefit enormously from being taught “leadership”. Much has been learned in the last generation about the “science” of leadership. Especially when this involves coaching and apprenticeship under great leaders, “leadership development” is crucial. But its the easy part. The task that will take much more money and time than we think we can afford, will be educating people to be Christians.