Towards a theology of leadership: a response to Lost in Translation

I hope this isn't too shrill a comment.  I love Fitch's eager discussions and look forward to his posts about Missional misunderstandings.  My admittedly personal crisis is that I have yet to find a compelling explanation of what leadership is and how it relates to the Gospel.  My suspicion is that the concept of leadership is in the same category as "whiteness" in the way Cone and J.K.Carter discuss it, perhaps a part of it.  At the very least, it doesn't seem like the cultural nature is understood, which makes me think its just too much a part of the air we breathe.  I get it practically; stuff does need to get done, but the theology behind it has worn thin. Now I just talk about responsibility instead because I feel like I can get there more honestly in my conversations. 

So why leaders?  Especially, why then leaders in a country that idolizes leadership and believes in "git er done" at all costs?  I feel like our messianic desires blind us to Bonheoffer’s warning that "giving people hope, investing their lives with meaning, awakening their spiritual yearnings – it becomes a dangerous and potentially unlimited power, " even though what he describes here is exactly many people's experience of leadership.  It is revered by people studying churches, ignored by systematic theologians and in my scant reading, only really addressed by political philosophers who have no theology for it.  I have yet found a robust theology of leadership.

The 5 fold gifting that gets talked about is really not very satisfying.   How can we assert leadership is really structured this way?  What about the other gifts listed?  How are the 5 culturally bound?  Why are they assumed not commanded, and what does that imply?  Why do roles and gifts not consistently overlap in scripture?  Quite honestly, the 5 gifting roles feels more often like a publisher's invention and as far as I can tell, much of its weight comes from Bobby Clinton's leadership research, which would seem to beg the question.  Even the folks in my church are not sold there is anything definitive behind them as categories.

And what of the critique of leadership in scripture;,  from Pharaoh (or Lamech..?)  to Israel's Kings, Jesus’ refusal to be called Rabbi to the first communities’ upsetting  power dynamics; so why is it largely assumed in churches?  Jesus was a servant, not a servant leader.  Sometimes in the quiet, I begin wondering what our leadership ideas say about God (subordination, etc) and my head explodes.  (Scanners FTW!)   The short version is that our discussion and focus on leadership occupies more space in our modern conversations than it seems to in the Bible.

I propose we need a better theological consideration of leadership, one that can address what it is as a phenomenon or essence, one that can untangle how our assumptions about what needs to be done are wrapped up in our assumptions about our role in God’s salvific economy; one that makes sense theologically; one that is even Trinitarian.  And I guess I would just like to see leadership theory develop in a way that doesn’t just look like Christianized version of Barnes & Noble’s business section.

Or, it could all be semantics :P 

Thanks again, Mr. Fitch.



(edited for typos/clarity, etc   9/11)