By Chip Brogden
All around us, institutions are failing and losing influence. Governments are in turmoil. Our schools are a mess. The Institutional Church is compromised and has lost its moral and spiritual authority. Our communities are in crisis. Marriage is being re-defined and the Biblical idea of “family” is becoming more and more of a rarity.
As people lose faith in these institutions and the people who lead them they are tempted to dismiss the idea of leadership altogether – particularly when the only leadership they have ever experienced has been an autocratic, dictatorial kind of leadership. When it comes to spiritual leadership, this causes many believers to say, “Who needs leaders? We all have the Holy Spirit. Let’s just be led of the Lord!”
This sounds perfectly acceptable in theory; but in actual practice, we see that God still raises up and uses spiritual leadership to bring His people where He wants them to be. He certainly could have just led everyone directly by His Spirit. But the fact of the matter is: only the spiritual can be led by the Spirit. Having the Spirit does not automatically mean we are governed by that Spirit and able to be led by that Spirit. The Corinthians are a good example of Spirit-filled people who were still carnal, who were gifted and knowledgeable enough to teach others, but needed someone to teach them again.
God does not command newborn babies to behave as spiritually mature adults. He recognizes our weaknesses and accommodates them. Jesus appointed twelve apostles: first to be with Him as disciples, and later to provide spiritual leadership in the Early Ekklesia. These apostles in turn were led by the Holy Spirit to appoint elders in each place, and these elders (“older ones”) provided spiritual leadership to each community of believers.
Spiritual leadership (as God intended) is Christ-centered, Spirit-led, and Scripturally-based. It serves the Body of Christ and leads people into a spiritually mature walk with God. When leadership gets its power from the organization or institution instead of the Holy Spirit, and when it lords over other people instead of serving them, then the Body of Christ suffers and people rightly question the role of leadership in the Body of Christ. The kind of leadership that brings people into bondage through fear is not the kind of leadership that Jesus intended and must be repudiated.
Keeping that in mind, the solution to the problem of bad leadership is not to remove the idea of leadership altogether. Let us remove (or refuse to follow) bad leadership, but let us not imagine that we have outgrown the need for spiritual leadership altogether. Both sacred and secular history teaches us that having no leadership is just as bad, and in some ways worse, than having bad leadership.
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