Anti-leadership

There is a lot of work to be done on our understanding of leadership. This may also include a healthy revision of an ‘anti-leadership’ view that prevails in some places, and also a healthy revision of an extremely ‘authoritarian’ type of leadership that prevails in some other places. Either of these polarities seems to miss the boat of what New Testament leadership is all about. Both are as ‘fundamentalist’ and narrow-minded as the other. The anti-leadership view operates within some kind of lowest-common-denominator social democracy (sometimes given a theological rationale based around our movement’s ‘flat structure’: mutual ministry, the priesthood of all believers etc), while the other view borders on a dictatorship (which can be given a theological name too: ‘apostolic’ leadership, giving the word apostolic bad press). Neither of these polarities is healthy. Neither helps deliver health and growth in a congregation. The only ‘future direction’ for those who operate in either polarity will be pain and loss and marginalisation and a diminishment of missional imagination.

In Acts 2, we are challenged by the words of the first part of verse 14: “But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them…”.

This piece from Acts 2 describes a balanced, healthy, apostolic leadership. It is from neither the anti-leadership or authoritarian polarities as described above. Peter provides ‘authoritative’ leadership, but he does so operating in a plurality of leadership (‘standing with the eleven’) that is by nature consultative and collaborative (thus the ‘council’ meetings that emerge later in Acts). Healthy and growing churches have healthy and growing leaders, providing this kind of leadership.

We hope all church leaders are encouraging your churches to be engaging the Affinity 3.0 conversation. Find out more about the process here.