The Root of All Problems with Church Leadership

Paul the apostle had a unique revelation about the Church. It was that it was a “Body” with the same processes of functioning as a human body.

The human body is a physical image of the spiritual reality of the Body of Christ. And the head of that body is Christ.

This serves as a critical starting point for understanding the root of all the problems with church leadership.

Body Life is mutual service

Parts of the human body all get their signal from the head.  Messages aren’t sent from one part to another in a chain of command. Each part gets direction from the head and it does its thing.  The head is responsible for orchestrating the parts to work together perfectly.

Now the Scriptures do talk about some parts of the body being first, second and third (1 Cor. 12:28). But that’s a chronological order and not a hierarchy. Some of the members of the body are considered “first” because they are the first to work. 

The heart and lungs have to provide blood with oxygen to the hand for it to do its work.  They serve the other parts by doing what it takes to enable them to do their jobs.  But then the parts like the hand actually carry out the task of picking something up.

It’s not that apostles are most important and then importance deteriorates as you work down the list. It’s that if apostles don’t function in their gifting to lay the foundation of Christ in a group of people, then all the other parts aren’t supplied what they need to do their thing.

So all the parts are serving each other.  To pick something up after getting direction from the head, the lungs and heart have to work to supply the blood and the hand has to work to supply the grasp of the object. 

So both parts are supplying something in carrying out the task. It’s just what they’re supplying is different. Neither commands the other to do their job.  They both receive direction from the head and mutually serve one another.

No body parts are heads

Humans tend to struggle with this idea a lot. When it comes to the orchestrating of the members of the Body of Christ to get them to work together, it’s commonly believed that we have to have humans as substitute heads or mini representative heads; meaning somebody has to decide on what needs to be done and then tell the parts what to do.

But this is not the way a human body works. It’s also not the way the Body of Christ works either.

A lot of Christians in our day would say no part of the Body of Christ is more important than the other. But they’d also say that some parts need to be in charge.

The problem is if a part or parts of your body were in charge, you’d be in trouble. None of those parts are the head, so they aren’t made to give direction. Only the head is made to do that.

All the parts of a body are built to be receptors of direction and then perform specific functions in collaboration with other parts to carry out tasks.

Paul called this revelation of how the Body of Christ was designed to work a “mystery.” (Eph. 5:30-32)

When you look at how we function in every area of life in the world, that’s not how it works. We don’t operate like the parts of a body at work, school, etc. This makes it super hard for humans. When you say Christ is the head and therefore should be making the decisions in a church without humans as mediators between Him and the other members, this is very abstract.

The idea that we can lay hold of the Head’s direction in the body together without one or a few specially-selected humans doesn’t even come across the radar of most Christians as a possibility.

So how do all the parts work together if there’s no individual or group of humans making plans and then directing people on what to do like in a business or government?

The Head will always be synchronized and send messages to each part of the Body that line up with what the Head wants to accomplish.  So a group of people would listen together as they put the group first.  When they do this, the individual parts see how they can function on their own in service to the bigger movement of the Body.

Togetherness transforms

The unity within the Godhead is based on the concept of togetherness. They operate in lockstep with one another. Their unity is not based on agreement. That’s not really togetherness. People can agree to things they don’t actually agree with. They might not want to rock the boat. They might just be complacent. They might have a passive personality.

Togetherness is walking in step with one another. This is harder to cultivate.

But this is what a human body images. When the head sends a signal, the parts align themselves with that signal. If your left leg is getting the signal of going left and your right leg is getting the signal of going right, you’ll do the splits and your body will be injured.

This is part of the struggle and reward of authentic Christian community. But this is the habitat in which people are transformed and become more like Christ.

True Body Life raises healthy leadership

So the first layer of the root of all problems with church leadership is the lack of understanding this mystery of how a church is designed to function. Without this understanding, a church shouldn’t even address the topic of leadership because they’re already starting off on the wrong foot.

The second layer is that it’s one thing to mentally understand this mystery.  It’s another to experience it and have it form you more into Christ. A group of people has to have enough experience to actually understand in practice what it means to mutually serve one another in this “body life.”

Any talk of or concept of leadership has to be built on this foundation first.  That’s why Paul wrote things like…

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 3:11)

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. (Eph. 2:19-22)

The first human created was actually a many-membered person. Every human to ever live was inside that first human. And there is now a new human that’s also a many-membered person. And that person functions just like the human body you’re currently living in.

So Christ is a Head and a Body. So to be built on the foundation of Christ is to function in this kind of Body Life.

So the crux of the leadership problem is that it gets established outside the context of proper Body Life. People become leaders without ever being raised by Body Life. We get raised and formed by all sorts of contexts and environments and philosophies.

If true Body Life is not what is raising us, then church leadership is going to be an issue.

If leadership in a church is being a servant and slave, and you didn’t grow up in the context of a group of people that were doing this mutually with each other in order to be formed by it, it’s going to be extremely difficult to exhibit true Kingdom leadership.

How Christ Leads His Body

When you think about it, there are pretty silly processes built into the modern church regarding leadership. People get slotted into positions of leadership without having been raised by this type of Body Life. Nor do people typically REALLY know the person at a deep level.

Leadership is just influence. When leadership is viewed through the lens of proper body life, it becomes the ways in which the parts of the body influence each other. Now Christ is truly the Head and Leader of the Body because He is influencing all of His parts as they mutually serve one another.

This is something the world would identify as different. They would see the Life of the Head being made visible through the Body. They would see a group of people living out what many call the “one-anothers.”

In his book 58:0 – How Christ Leads Through the One Anothers, Jon Zens says…

According to the New Testament, true “body-life” consists of a community of believers who are daily experiencing the life of the Head, and then sharing that life with one another and the world. All of the one-anothers found in the New Testament can be summed up within that one statement. All true leadership, gifts, and ministry come out from within the life of the Body. It can never happen the other way around…

Why don’t we try a bold experiment? Why don’t we all make an attempt at experiencing and living this kind of “body life” first? And then, let that body life teach us what it means to be leaders and ministers.

Christ is leading, but He’s doing it through one-anothering. He’s not doing it through one or a few humans leading a bigger group of humans.

Body Life is the foundation

It’s healthy for a church to cultivate proper body life and stop worrying about leadership before that happens. Worrying about leadership before establishing proper body life is getting it backwards.

We’re not saying the influence of Christ-like examples (the proper definition of Christian leadership) isn’t important. You have to have that. But when leadership is the focus and foundation a church is built on, the cart is before the horse. The leaders were not raised in body life, and so they can’t cultivate it. They attempt to program it.

True Christian leadership makes body life the focus and foundation of a church.