The Downwardly Mobile Christian Leader

“Powerlessness and humility in the spiritual life do not refer to people who have no spine and who let everyone else make decisions for them. They refer to people who are so deeply in love with Jesus that they are ready to follow him wherever he guides them, always trusting that, with him, they will find life and find it abundantly.”

- Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

I have been thinking about what it means to be a good and distinctly Christian leader, a leader after the example of Christ. I first read Henri Nouwen’s book, In the Name of Jesus, over ten years ago. I was in the midst of a great spiritual struggle and growing frustrated with my current church and felling like I was at a dead end in my Christian walk.

The great challenge of this book for me it the idea that the true Christian leader is not to consider his place at the head of the table, at the place of honor, but, rather, at the place of servitude. He is to consider himself last and the lowest priority. He exists only for the purposes of serving and equipping the Christians under his care for living the Christian life. He is to be the humble servant of all.

But he must also remember that humility and meekness does not equal weakness and deference. The Christian leader is to lead Christians and to do so with the confidence and passion that Christ modeled for us. The Christian leader is to be fearless before men and absolute in his convictions (in so much as they have their source in Scripture). Acts 4 gives us a good model of the bold Christian Leader. Peter and John answer the Jewish rulers boldly having put themselves in harms way for the sake of a lame beggar.

The Continuum of Church Purity

In my Church History class last Friday, my professor, Dr. Sean Lucas, gave us a description of how church history has been viewed with in terms of the purity of the church. He drew a simple line graph on the chalk board. The horizontal variable was a simple time line starting with the apostles and the early church. The vertical variable was supposed to be a measurement of the purity of the church. So when he started drawing this graph the level of purity was very high during the apostolic early church period, and the level of purity dropped off during the age of Constantine. It went in the tank during medieval Catholicism and rocketed upward as Luther and Calvin appeared…and so on.

The PCA and many other Presbyterian denominations we formed because of a concern for the purity of the Church. They saw the main line Presbyterian Church being compromised by a view that rejected fundamental Christian doctrines, things like: the deity of Christ and his resurrection, and the inerrancy of Scripture. The line was in the tank again or at least very quickly headed that direction. There are those who are concerned that the PCA’s line is once again headed downward and they are publicly decrying what they perceive as a compromise of the sanctity of scripture and the purity of Christ’s Church as it is manifested in the PCA.

I do not believe that my brothers are wrong for expressing their concerns. I believe that they do so out of a love for the Church and as Pastors of God’s people. They are protecting their flocks as any good pastor should. God bless them.

The specific issue that is fueling the debate recently is egalitarian feminism. There are those who believe that Covenant Seminary (where I am currently a student) and her President Dr. Bryan Chapell (and others in the PCA) have taken a position that is contrary to scripture regarding a woman’s role in the church. To further clarify, the question is not, “should women be ordained as teaching or ruling elders?” But the question is better stated, “Can a non-ordained woman participate in the life of the church in every way that a non-ordained man can?” Can a woman read scripture during a worship service or pray aloud during a worship service? Can a woman sit on or even chair a committee in the church? To my knowledge, no one is arguing for the ordination of women as teaching or ruling elders in the PCA.

What concerns me is that there is little or no charity being given by those who fear the church is under attack from what they view as a “feminist” position. It seems as if there is no room for debate on an issue that is totally debatable! We are making an essential out of a non-essential. What is worse, the debate is becoming shrill and unbecoming of the Bride of Christ.

Converting to the Ministry

There is a conversion taking place in my heart in and in my mind; which is strange because there hasn’t been too many of those over the years. I don’t remember when I actually converted to Christianity probably because, being very young, I never actually had anything to convert from. I do remember a moment of revelation about God’s grace and my sin that I had many years ago, but even that wasn’t a true conversion from anything. That experience didn’t so much as change my thinking as it gave the things I already thought more substance and weight. It took my theology from the compartment I kept it tucked away in and turned it loose in the ugliness of the mess I made for myself. But none of that addresses the true conversion I am in the midst of right here and now. My thinking is being challenged, and deepened. If this were an article in a Business Management magazine I would use phrases like, “paradigm shift” to describe what is going on.

I spent four summers of my (rather lengthy) undergraduate career working at a youth service project camp in East Tennessee. We recruited most of our new staff from our past campers, and often the fist year staffers would have a hard time adjusting because they wanted to revert back to being a camper again rather than take on the responsibility of a leader. We were constantly on the lookout for symptoms of a “camper mentality” in our first year staff. I think a lot of this current conversion is my own moving away from a sort of “camper mentality” to a “ministry mentality.” By mentality I mean not just my thinking but also the doing that is a result of my thinking. Preparation for ministry has been a process of refocusing my energies on becoming a servant in God’s Church; thinking about others first and putting others first. My time in seminary has not been just about learning things about the Lord, but letting those things shape me in a way that affects how I view the Lord’s people.

Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” This process of converting to a ministry mentality is fundamentally about the Gospel. I am discovering my place “in Christ” for the work of the ministry of his Gospel.