“We need to choose a leader!”
You or I have said that and heard it said countless times. Independent of whether you agree with it or take it seriously, it’s completely true. If you look around, you’ll see how true it is. Whenever you’re in a team project, your team quickly picks a leader. Just like every country elects a head, whether a president or king, or like every business chooses a chief, whether board CEO or solo director, or how every social movement rallies around a frontrunner. If you look at yourself, you’ll see how true it is too. In the past and present, from the moment you meet someone admirable, you impulsively select them as someone to imitate. You’ll notice yourself regarding their words as weighty and their thoughts as worthy influences. You’ll note yourself thinking, “Well if they said so, if they did so, it’s probably good”.
But is it possible for a community to exist without some head leader? If you look at the Bible, you’ll get an answer. After Joshua’s death, the book of Judges recounts the era when Israel was king-less. It records Israel descending, one generation after another, into chaos and Sodom-and-Gomora-type atrocities. As the unchecked evil of each generation crescendos, the book repeats this line until the story ends: “In those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in their own eyes”1. However, the Bible points out elsewhere2 that God himself was Israel’s king. The Bible is making a more remarkable point here. Even with God as their king, Israel was stuck in this chaotic state without a human leader. Like the Israelites, we collectively need a human, in addition to God, to be our leader. There needs to be a living model for everyone to imitate, a guide for making wise decisions, and someone to hold everyone accountable.
Where We Are.
If the Scriptures and our instincts shout that a head leader is good and necessary, it’s unreasonable to expect communities not to have one. It’s equally unreasonable for followers of Jesus to not have one. And that’s why we see what we see when we turn the movie reel of history. The recurring image of each era is head leaders of churches in some form. In some traditions, the image is an elected chief, leading a rigid hierarchy. In others, it’s informal chiefs, given their title implicitly by their influence, even influence beyond the grave. And for others, it's something in between. This is broadly how we should expect Christians to act, because, like all humans, we know our churches or movements will be much better off if we have some kind of leader of leaders. So of course, when these crucial chiefs begin causing the problems they’re meant to solve and become the moral failures we assumed they opposed, their failures devastate us and our hope collapses. But we don’t need to be told this, we’ve been shown it in recent years.
It was shoved in my face at least. I’ve been shocked by leaders I knew personally as they transformed into the symbols of compromise they regularly warned me not to become; Who I would have insisted to you that the grass would turn purple before they would choose evil. My experience seems to be common outside my circle. Stories similar to mine seem to be increasing when I speak to friends. And it looks like our local communities are part of a much broader phenomenon in recent times. Influential leaders in the anglophone world have also had things they’ve hidden in the shadows dragged into the light. Highly-regarded apologist Ravi Zacharias, had his double life as a sexual predator exposed3. Mike Pilavatchy, revered frontman of Soul Survivor UK, was found to have been abusing those he mentored for over four decades4. Carl Lentz confessing his infidelity in 2020 was just the first reveal of the shallowness of the entire megachurch machine5. Most recently, and highest on my list of “no, not them”, Mike Bickle and other IHOPKC leaders could no longer conceal their decades-long, abject sin6. And from the increasing commonality of these stories, we should suspect more are to follow - locally and globally.
But, don't think this is only an anomaly of our crazy time. Great leaders of the past with global influence were the same. It was confirmed in the last decade or so that Dr MLK Jr, the otherwise incredible civil rights leader of the 1960s, committed adultery multiple times, with his close friends covering it up7. But MLK’s evil is mild compared to the worst case of his namesake Martin Luther, the chief reformer in the Protestant Hall of Fame. Luther began his public life speaking against the mistreatment of Jews in his day, but ended his public life with a descent into a type of antisemitism so vile and violent8 only the Nazis could supersede - which they did. The sin-saturated words Luther published in his old age became a major contributor to Germany’s Jew-hatred, with the Nazis quoting them as they inaugurated the Holocaust9.
Martin Luther is an extremely sombre example, but he proves the point the strongest. When the Bible told us of Aron’s and Saul’s and David’s and Hezekiah’s failures, it was warning us. Inspiring leaders of our families, churches or movements, whether in the past or present, will too likely become moral villains at worst, or hypocrites at best. So this is the root of the never-ending crisis, which has intensified in our day: We will choose leaders for the rest of time, but, for the rest of time, there will be a significant risk they will lead us to do evil at worst or do evil alone at best. To end the endless crisis we need leaders, and their successors, to be people we know will remain faithful for a lifetime. But who could meet that standard except for God himself? And God is not a candidate since, as the Bible and our instincts insist, we must have a human.
So, What Do We Do?
You may have come across the ancient saying, “Jesus is fully God and fully Man”. The saying is so solid it has lasted for over a millennium since our Christian ancestors crafted it. When you were introduced to it, someone was probably teaching you that Jesus is not only a man but also God. But drop that silly ‘only’ for a moment and notice, “Jesus is … fully Man”. Jesus is a full human - lacking no humanness. If that’s the case, he is completely like us. Like us, Jesus would cry for his food as a baby, be a loud toddler, and have older brothers who picked on him. He used ‘the toilet’, would have had backache from a bad night’s sleep, was exhausted after long journies10, and, most human of all, was tempted to do evil11. Jesus was and is completely human.
The single difference the Bible points out between Jesus and the rest of us is his refusal to choose evil. Jesus is then exactly like us but different in only one thing: He doesn’t do what we all wish people would stop doing. And Jesus never gave in to evil far above our highest standards. Not committing adultery, not being consumed by resentment, or resisting other heinous evils are the tests we find the hardest. Jesus resists evils of this type before his public life even begins12. Rather, Jesus’ hardest test comes at the end of his life, when, in the olive garden, he resists the temptation to hold on to his life and not freely give it up13. What we all would consider an unfair, even impossible, request – to be willfully executed on behalf of criminals - Jesus agrees to, as faithfully as he passes his easiest tests. Jesus is fully human, and the only faithful human.
It makes perfect sense then, why the Father resurrected him to be “the head of all things”14. And of course, after passing this extreme test, Jesus would return to his disciples and say things like, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”15. Of course, Paul would say “God exalted him and gave him the name above every name so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow”16. If such a remarkable man exists, a man who will be faithful to the highest standards and faithful to the point of death, of course God would make him, and him alone, the head of the church. God has already provided the kind of person the Bible and our instincts have been aching for.
So, what if Jesus truly is the solution we Christians insist he is? Since the Father made Jesus the church’s head and he’s the only person who will remain faithful, should he not be our only head leader? Not just in theory anymore, but finally in practice. From the global church to our local churches, should we stop longing for that new leader to arrive over the horizon and instead let our leader be the one we’ve been claiming to follow this whole time? Should he not be the one making the final decisions, and his spirit be the chief person guiding us? Should it not be him whom everyone chooses as the living human we imitate? Perhaps when we do, we might start leading and following each other faithfully. And when we start practically accepting Jesus as our only head human, we might find ourselves standing in stable communities with stable leaders.
But what would this look like exactly, and how would the way churches currently follow Jesus change precisely? Those are fair and crucial questions. Stay tuned for their answers in part 2…
Judges 21:25
Exodus 15:18
Lindquist, David H., Luther’s Antisemitism in Historical Context: A Necessary Discussion for Christian Educators https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10656219.2013.768173?scroll=top&needAccess=true
John 4:5-6
Hebrews 4:15
Matthew 4:1-11
Matthew 26:36-46
Ephesians 1:22
Matthew 28:18
Philippians 2:9-10
Absolutely brilliant and well argued. Looking forward to reading on the follow up and seeing how you tackle it.
Very inspiring.
Well said dearest of Sirs, looking forward to Part II and all the other series you follow up with!