Looking for Leaders

I could tell that my friend Kent was deeply concerned by the way he leaned across the dinner table. With furrowed brow and in somber tones he said, “Our real problem in Canada is leadership. We just have too few good leaders.”

Yes, I thought to myself, you don’t have to convince me. It was such a concern of mine that in 1983 I proposed to Dr. Leighton Ford that we hold a worldwide conference on younger leadership and, as it happened, I ended up running it: Singapore ’87.

The problem is that there is so much blarney mixed in with our legitimate concern that the issue—the need for more good leaders—gets skewed. In the end, we lament the issue without dealing with the problem.

Here are two issues that need consideration.

First, the “Canadian” issue. Not much of a surprise, I suppose, but it’s usually ignored. Caught between the American fondness for charismatic leaders and the European proclivity for understatement, we end up not quite sure what we want in our leaders. While we have many Canadian models, we choose to emulate ideas flowing from the actual works of Americans. Not unlike the recent survey of Canadian youth regarding their heroes (who chose Michael Jordan over Wayne Gretzky and the American president over the Canadian prime minister), the power of American models overshadows the search for an indigenous Canadian model.

Also, some of our finest younger leaders end up in the U.S. Leaving to attend American colleges and seminaries, they get married, are offered positions and then stay. Others, having built a reputation for leadership in Canada, seem unable to resist the lucrative and challenging offers of the south, or they just plainly “hear from God.” In either case we are losing them.

So we not only lose some of our finest, but we end up being culturally swamped by the sheer power of Americana. Publishers, radio/television networks, colleges/seminaries and other organizations promote Americans. Not having a Canadian book publisher, how does a Canadian build a reputation so others will want to hear what he has to say? I know that to run a successful conference in Canada, a strong American speaker is most often needed in order to attract a crowd.

Then we have to ask, what kind of leader do we want? Church battles are fought out of confusion by not understanding our ecclesiology, our biblical vision of the church. The two opposites of church models for evangelicals are the episcopal (examples, Pentecostals and Christian & Missionary Alliance) and congregational (examples, Baptists and Mennonites).

For the Pentecostals and Christian & Missionary Alliance, although their ministers are voted on by the congregation, the pastor is held responsible for running the church, much like the priest in an Anglican or Catholic church, or the CEO in a business. In PAOC churches, for example, the bylaws state that the pastor chairs the board of elders or deacons.

On the opposite side are Baptists and Mennonites, who are congregational. In this model, it’s the congregation which runs the church ‘by committees’ and the pastor is the person hired to serve by way of preaching and pastoral care.

So what kind of leader do you want? Well, it all depends on your tradition and your expectations. One Sunday while preaching in a Christian & Missionary Alliance church, a member of the board took me aside and described the problem he was having with their current pastor, whom he saw as too dominant. I learned that this church member had been raised in a Mennonite church and from that experience had a clear vision in his mind of what a pastor/leader should be. “What we really need is a servant/leader,” he said. He wanted his minister to conform to the servant/leader model of his own past.

In surprising juxtaposition just weeks later, while speaking to a couple from a Baptist church, they described their disappointment in that their minister didn’t show “strong” leadership. “He waits for church committees to report, but he doesn’t tell us what he’s hearing from God. We need strong leadership,” one said to the nodding agreement of the other. They had been raised in a Pentecostal church and were used to the minister running the board and providing the church with strong direction.

Who is right? Of course, between these two polarities of episcopal and congregational models are many varieties. But caught in the middle is the pastor whose congregants come from backgrounds in which another model flourished. These members bring into their current church an acquired sense of what “godly leadership really is,” assuming that what they have learned and experienced is both right and best.

So before we protest the lack of leadership, we need to define both the terms and our expectations.

This matter is more than an issue of leadership in the church. We also decide on what we expect from leadership in the wider community. In my next column, I’ll explore what Preston Manning and Pierre Elliot Trudeau have in common.