A Different Perspective

One of the key issues in the established church is the huge disparity between leadership and laity. For men in particular, it’s difficult to feel like you’re doing anything of substance for the Kingdom of God if you are not involved in church leadership in some way.

From what I’ve seen, the situation is not much different in the majority of emerging churches. The structure still is such that in order to be “active” in the Church, you must step into some sort of leadership role. Otherwise you’re just an attender of meetings, maybe considerd a “seeker,” though we wouldn’t dare use that term for fear of being confused with another movement.

Todd Hunter ( www.toddhunter.org ) blogs almost exclusively as late, on leadership. His thoughts are a good start, I believe. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a church structure where everyone in the church followed the type of leadership Todd so often writes about.

I would take it a step further and push the conversation about leadership into serious discussion about what it means to not be a leader.

Since we serve a King who said not to call ourselves leaders, for one is our leader, and that’s him, we should at least take seriously that the calling for most followers of Jesus is not to assume leadership roles in the church. The path to growth in the Kingdom of God does not have leadership on it.

By that, I mean that leadership is something individuals on the path take on to help others on the journey, but it’s not a point in the journey itself. We mustn’t forget that, or our churches on the other side won’t look much different than the churches on this side.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 10:13 am and is filed under Faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.