Leadership Should Be Honest, Transparent

“America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether” - from a survey published March 9, 2009 on CNN.com.

The above statement is exactly why we need pastors who are not afraid of leading churches toward the genuinely tough questions in our day. Church-goers need to seriously wrestle with the Christian faith, and to do so they need to begin by addressing the significant questions with honesty and transparency.

The decline of Christianity in this country is in fact directly related to (though not limited to) church leadership’s petrifying fear of honest and often doubt-producing questions. This decline also has something to do with church leadership’s fondness for silly, clichéd, and sometimes completely ridiculous answers (i.e. All you need to do is be in the pew on Sunday and pray more earnestly. Join a small group or teach Sunday school – get more involved. Be sure to turn in that stewardship card. Just accept God’s will for your life.) for the careful handful of semi-difficult questions it is posed. In return we often toss partial answers in the misused name of belief. Instead of playing it so harmlessly safe, and looking uncaring, aloof and often un-Christ-like to sensible onlookers everywhere, we should chuck our current image of church we have in our piously-fragile little minds and start to focus all of our energies upon the immediate and two-fold task at hand: Honesty and Authenticity.

Let’s for example, start right here, with this issue: Pastors who reduce the faith to some sort of "congregational comfort zone” just to make Sunday morning a pleasant experience for everyone do no one any favors and the church no good. This sort of “leadership” neither results in an engaging, genuine, and authentic faith experience, nor does it produce healthy or mature Christians. It’ll keep a large group of nominal individuals really happy, but that’s about it. The only thing this “leadership” approach really accomplishes is numerical growth for the hollow sake of attendance results and the accompanying tithe (and in our economic situation the money may just dry-up sooner rather than later). It doesn’t create and/or nurture a people who can authentically and productively engage a world who are already forced to deal with the issues we pretend to face via ignorance and neglect. What does the church honestly have to offer a people who have already journeyed further than we, ourselves, want to go?

Today, the Church needs courageous leaders who are willing to step into the day’s fray and actually lead. And for those who will step into the fray and actually lead, I’ll simply suggest the following: The current rejection of faith will not be reversed with cool music, fancy meeting spaces with flat screen TVs, or making people feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable on Sunday mornings via “congregational comfort zone” living, rigid doctrine, and/or the promise of a program-filled Christianity. There are no answers or solutions in any of these things. A focus upon such useless things may fill a very big building, but overall the larger Church will continue to fail because these are at best trivial and under-whelming and irrelevant issues. And these things are clearly trivial and under-whelming when put beside the bigger questions people wrestle with everyday (i.e. Where is my next pay check coming from now that I lost my job? Where was God when I was abused? How do I respond in love to my homosexual child?). I believe people want the truth!

We would do well to turn our attention away from all those things the “church growth experts” of last 10-20 years said we should be doing and honestly begin wrestling with the big questions and issues that those who reject the faith or sit in the pews on Sunday are wrestling with right now. We have to wrestle with one another, the world, and God. We have to become uncomfortable with all of our easy and canned answers, and once again become comfortable with theological tension.

National Business Hall of Famer, Max Depree summed up these thoughts this way in his book “Leadership is an Art.”

To lose sight of the beauty of ideas and of the hope and opportunity, and to frustrate the right to be needed, is to be on the dying edge.

To be part of a throwaway mentality that discards goods and ideas, that discards principles and law, that discards persons and families, is to be at the dying edge.

To be at the leading edge of consumption, affluence and instant gratification is to be at the dying edge.

To ignore the dignity of work and the elegance of simplicity, and the essential responsibility of serving each other, is to be at the dying edge.

Are you ready to move away from that “dying edge,” ready to stop putting our trust in technology or numbers, and begin to wrestle with the Christian faith? It may not be comfortable or easy, but neither was dying on a cross.

First appeared in the April 2009 issue of the Fort Wayne Lutheran (Vol. 10 Issue 4)