Leaders today

In every generation there has been a popular movement to take a single characteristic of Christ and wrongly characterize him. The Gnostic church had this problem by making everything immaterial, the Roman Catholic church has this problem by making God overly concerned with service. Today we are by far to concerned with leadership. Is this true that Christ was a leader? Yes, of course that is true, the shepherding quality of Christ makes this extremely evident but that is not all that he does. Christ is not primarily focused on what makes a good leader; Christ doesn't demand us to go make leaders in the church. Instead we make disciples; does this require leadership? Yes but our role is not to focus on leadership.

Often times when we make this our focus we are taking qualities of leadership from secular leadership models and applying them to Jesus, the same way that most "Christian counselors" today use Freudian psychology with a bunch of proof texts tagged on. The church in America continues to measure our internal success by leadership seminars and numbers in the pews. This is not the success of Christ, at least not the way we ought to concern ourselves with spiritual maturity as taught by the Scriptures.  Christ the Savior died on a cross and rose again from the grave, that is success. What isn't successful is people who use Christian language, make worship erotic and can not articulate why the trinity is important in an "applicable" way.

The leadership movement is having a poor effect on the church for multiple reasons. The biggest problem I see, aside from wrongly characterizing Christ, is that everyone is a leader. That is not true, if everyone becomes a leader in the church, there is no longer any reason for the church to assume authority over anyone. We call people "leaders" because of an inventory they took in their undergraduate studies and placed them in roles as leaders, but not only do they lack the intrinsic desire but they are not capable. This will drown out the leaders already in the church, hurt and burn them and force them out because someone else is using gifts they don't have to fulfill a leadership role they don't belong in.

Was Jesus a leader? Yes, He was a leader but He was also a Servant and a Judge. The church needs to stop focusing so much on a single characteristic of God; especially this way. God is not sitting on a throne with a clip board and whistle as our spiritual coach, He isn't walking around carrying a brief case with numbers of who is and is not in the church, and He definitely is not raising up a church of elite leaders to just "live life together." He is calling us to make disciples despite of our leadership abilities, this is kingdom work, not being extreme or radical in your Christian walk.