“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you…” (Mark 10:42-43)
This familiar passage has been proclaimed in just about every leadership course in every seminary in the United States. It is a foundational text in the field of “servant leadership.” Pastors across the world know this verse and know how different our calling is to lead than the calling of the gentiles. So many of us desire to live out the “not so with you” by which Jesus shapes his followers’ vision of what it means for us to be pastors in His Church. Any yet, so often, it is so with us. Christian leadership is like the Gentiles, becoming a lording-over leadership that leaves a trail of pain and trauma in its wake.
Over the past few years, we have seen a flood of accusations, resignations, and church collapses rooted in the exercise of abusive, lording-over leadership. It is undeniable that there is a deep-seated problem in the church, a problem of lording-over leadership that enables pastors to create lording-over authority structures in churches, structures that lead to trauma and abuse in congregations. This isn’t true in every church, and it isn’t the case that every pastor leads with lording-over authority. But we have seen enough evidence of ecclesial structures becoming unhealthy and abusive that it is critical that we take time as shepherds of Christ’s church to explore the dynamics of power that lead to trauma and abuse, and to reflect on our own calling as shepherds of God’s flock.
Over the next couple of months, the CPT will be exploring the theological dynamics of power and abuse in the church. We will do this from a variety of angles, through podcast interviews, to essays and sermons, reflecting on what the current revelations about pastoral leadership and the all-too-common stories of abusive leadership tell us about the character of the church in the early 21st Century. What in our vision of leadership has gone wrong? Where are the disconnects? What false commitments have made their way into our vision of the pastor? How has our vision of pastoral authority mutated into lording-over power? There is no simple, silver bullet answer to the question of abusive leadership. But we must give the time and energy to come to understand why so many stories of sexually predatory, egoistic, and controlling leadership are emerging from a community that is to be marked out by the “not so with you” of Jesus’s call to shepherd.
This resource is part of the series Not So With You: Reflections on Power, the Pastorate, and Life in the Church. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Joel Lawrence is the Executive Director of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He previously served as the Senior Pastor of Central Baptist Church in St. Paul, MN and as a Professor of Theology at Bethel Seminary. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
