As we watch the Western world burn down around itself with leader after leader who demands obedience, refuses to heed wise counsel that refutes their shibboleths, and who punishes those who call out the problems early, we need a church leadership that lives differently. A church leadership whose vision of Jesus is so big and so all encompassing, that the baubles of approval from bad leadership are not enticing enough to take it off track. 

Untrustworthy Leaders

We’ve been around long enough now to know that bad leadership is everywhere. Untrustworthy leadership.  The church, it seems, is often – sadly – just as culpable as the world.  In fact more culpable. Equipped with the very tools to deal with toxicity, bullying, private ungodliness masked with public piety, we pull our punches.

We are proving to be just as untrustworthy as the world when it comes to calling out bad leadership.

And with the very person of Jesus – who time and time again had to call out his disciples for having a worldly view of leadership – we seem stuck in the rut of bad, untrustworthy leadership. Or at least we seem unable to call it out early .

And the church is getting sick of it. And more to the point, getting sick of having to open an email or read a Christian journal that calls it out for the church. My own experience is that it isn’t until the sheep are bleating loud enough to the point of embarrassment that anything is ever done.

And even then. Even then. I’ve spent a lot of hours recently on Zoom with a group that is looking at taking on a leader who has been publicly shown to be unqualified to lead God’s people time and time again. Three hours to be exact on Zoom. Three hours across the world at a time of the morning I’d rather be chilling in the early quiet with a hot brew.

And no matter what evidence I presented, I’ve been implored for more. Several times. I’ve been asked to show evidence from other people’s private emails (which I won’t do). At the end I simply said “Even if someone were to rise from the dead, you wouldn’t believe.” Cheeky I know, but come on people!

How Bad Leadership Thrives

Journalist Bari Weiss, – once of The New York Times, but who left due to its had leadership that failed to call out the personal abuse and anti-Semitism she was experiencing from other staff -, nails it in an article republished in The Times.

Speaking about how she was hounded at a dinner party earlier this year when she mentioned that Joe Biden might be losing it and not fit for the role of president, she states that she was publicly called out for it. But privately? That was a different matter.

Privately everyone was acknowledging what they could not – would not – acknowledge publicly. Why? She states:

A Democratic insider put it more bluntly when I asked him what had taken so long: “Proximity to power, privilege, prestige. That’s the currency. And people fiercely protect their access. They put self-preservation over principle.”

That’s it right there. And sadly I’ve seen it in church leadership way too often. Which seems incredible, yes? Here we are as the people of God with the absolutely mind-blowing privilege of proximity everyday to the most powerful person – the Lord Jesus – access to the throne of grace as Hebrews reminds us

Clear that tells us that we don’t believe our own theology as much as we say we do. When God is big in our eyes other people are not too big, nor are they too small. They are human-sized. And that means for their sake and the sake of others you should tell the truth.

In two significant occasions in which I have called out poor leadership – and it cost me my job on one of those occasions – the leadership found every way they could to excuse the sinful behaviour of the person at the top, and in both cases the story was “But he gets things done”, and “We need to show that person more grace”.

So there’s a pattern to these conversations and an armoury of theological reasons that the world is not equipped with. Which means – ironically – the church can keep hold of poor leaders longer than the world can! And – sadly – so often does.

What does this leave us like? It leaves us craven and submitting to poor leadership for the sake of a few glittering baubles of approval. Approval from someone who we actually fear would step all over us if we were to demur.

We can say from the stage all we like about grace-renewal leadership, but if behind the scenes we are formed by fear and insecurities, then no amount of public declarations will atone for it.

And why do followers of such leaders allow this to happen? Knowingly? Because after you have watched him (and it’s most often a him), do over the people you once worked with who called it out, why would he not do it to you?

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