[We continue “Forward to the Basics,” a look at best practices in church wellness. This week: Leadership Development: Part One.]

Like any organization, churches tend to depend on effective leadership. Without effective leaders, churches are unable to make necessary decisions, to deal with changing situations, to hire effective staff, to allocate resources, to deal with conflict, and to prevent bullies from hurting constituents.

This is the first of two parts on Leadership Development.

I want to start with the negatives, because they tend to overrun the positives. We rarely talk about the negatives, because they hit close to home. It’s time we saw how our flawed fundamentals make effective leadership difficult to attain.

By “negative,” I don’t mean morally corrupt or necessarily destructive. I mean factors that tend to undermine congregations because they present challenges that rarely get addressed.

The negatives:

  Church leaders are mostly volunteers and therefore largely beyond accountability. They function when they feel like it. They aren’t driven to excellence. They can’t be motivated, except in the cajoling and manipulative ways that a child can be motivated. The parent-child dynamic is unnatural, and it tends to breed resentment on all sides.

  Other than the pastor and music minister, church leaders are usually untrained in church leadership. They might be leaders in their day jobs. But hardly any occupations prepare a layperson for the unique challenges of leading a religious institution. The closest analogy might be a high school principal, where complexity, ambiguity, change and demanding constituents are facts of life. Sales and marketing professionals tend to comprehend church dynamics, especially the need to take risks and to learn from failure. Not-for-profit leaders often grasp church dynamics, though not completely, because a not-for-profit’s constituents often are more committed to the organization’s singular cause than a church’s members are committed to what the church does. The least promising lay leaders are lawyers and CEOs, who tend to assume an orderly universe and, like military leaders, live in a command-and-control structure that rarely pertains in a faith community. Also unpromising are retirees, whose life stage argues against risk and change, the very elements that a church needs.

  Constituents rarely understand how a church works, and yet they possess strong feelings about the church and want to have a say in its functioning. Clergy have done a poor job of training laity to handle the many complex, self-sacrificial and unrewarding tasks that make up church leadership.

  Conflict is the default behavior. One reason, of course, is that people just don’t get along. A larger reason, in the religious context, is that constituents want to keep the church from intruding on their lives. They want its benefits — fellowship, spirituality, mission opportunities — but they often don’t want to do what God actually wants doing, starting with repentance and transformation. Church members devote considerable energy to preventing the clergy from getting too powerful and God from getting too large. It can feel safer to keep the clergy off-balance, if not living in constant stress and dread, and to keep God small. The consequence: unending conflict.

  Wealth gets in the way. Board members worry about facilities and budgets. The easiest path is contributions by the wealthy. Problem is: wealthy members don’t necessarily want what is best for the church. They want what is best for themselves — comfortable facilities, risk-avoidance, and exemption from prophetic challenge.

These negatives usually prevail. Moving forward requires church leaders to put aside what they think they know, to stop thinking their day-job skills are transferable, to stop reining in the clergy, to stop catering to the wealthy, and to develop a strong appetite for risk, change, growth and ambiguity. That’s a lot to ask of the men and women who tend to be available for church leadership work.

Next week we will turn the lens and look at best practices for Leadership Development. But it isn’t a zero-sum game, in which every leadership group can start afresh. Years of negatives get in the way, and when those negatives aren’t acknowledged and corrected, the same dysfunctional habits happen again and again.

About the Author

Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media