I recently read Danny Webster’s response to the report into Mike Pilavachi’s abusive leadership. Pilavachi’s fall has rocked the charismatic evangelical world here in the UK. He was a strangely unifying figure who cut across streams and denominations. His abuse was longstanding and covered up by the charity’s trustees.
Like many I attended Soul Survivor as a teenager and benefited from it. I’ve not been close to that organisation (knowingly, anyway) for a few decades now. Even so, Pilavachi’s abuse is eerily similar to some of my own experiences in different settings. I was an elder in a church where we had to remove the ‘Senior Pastor’ who had planted the church for cause. Some of his behaviours echoed those we’re hearing about in the Pilavachi reports. We also acted too slowly.
Webster’s piece draws out an echo that struck close to home for me. He comments on his own experiences in the growing youth movement and the large level of leadership opportunity and responsibility he and his peers were given. Some of it—as is clear in his telling—ludicrously soon. It results in, as he puts it:
Young people who have been promised leadership development, given patronage and opportunities, find it suddenly vanishes, sometimes silently, sometimes harshly, sometimes both.
I’ve experienced both sides of this first hand in a few different settings. Being drawn into an inner circle and then pushed out again was a feature of my own leadership development, and a deliberate divide and rule tactic used by a bullying leader.
The thing is, that Pastor aside, you can see how others end up following the same pattern. If you think to yourself “leadership development is good” (it is) and “I’d like to develop some of my people in their gifts” (brilliant!) and then set about doing so without a plan I’ll take the bet that you end up doing this to someone.
Let’s assume, for example, you want to develop some elders. I’m guessing in most settings that you have space in your team for an additional elder but not more. However, you might have two or three guys who you think could make it. You invite them in, you give them some responsibilities, they run with stuff. Let’s say they all do well, no disqualifying behaviours come up as you learn their characters for a few years, but eventually you choose to appoint one of them. That’s great, but what happens to the other two?
Very often, back to earth with a disillusioning bump as they’re essentially dropped from everything they were doing and all the input, contact time with the eldership team, even potentially their friendships (thinking especially about how male friendships form around shared activity), disappear overnight. There’s even a faint sense in the church that they did something wrong because people notice that they’re doing less than before even if you haven’t explained what’s happened publicly.
I’ve painted in broad brushstrokes and real situations are full of nuances, but you can see how someone ends up there doing what they think is a series of good things. I’d like to suggest that my made-up scenario is, actually, the eldership team’s fault. They had other choices and could have acted differently.
I can think of two different scenarios that would be better and kinder to the people involved. There are probably others too. They are again painted broadly.
In the first one you give these three guys responsibilities because you want them to do those things. You don’t make any promises or overtures about Eldership. You might not even mention it. You give them all the space and time with the team you would have done otherwise because it’s required for these responsibilities, but you’re focused on helping them grow into the whatever-it-is you’ve given them. Then, when you decide to appoint one as an elder, everyone carries on with the responsibilities you’ve given them. No one is excluded, no one is dropped, instead everyone is built up and released into more.
In the second scenario you identify that you need to expand your team by one, and you notice you have three guys who could maybe do it. So, you go and talk to your partner churches and discover that they also have two teams that could do with someone. There are as many ‘vacancies’ as there are people, maybe even more. You pitch this all to them, not offering promises and explaining that only one could fit in the team in this church but that if they want to be an elder and are evaluated to be of the right character then you’ll do everything you can to facilitate them going to these other churches if they feel the Lord has called them. This is potentially complex and wouldn’t work in all scenarios, but the principle is that you’re training people for roles that exist.
That’s the principle really, train people for roles that exist.
We should probably also train people for roles that will exist, but that can only be at a pace with the church planting or institution founding in your church or network. If you want to plant a church you should send an eldership team (that’s not the received wisdom but I’m hoping to persuade my friend Matt to publish his work on this, it’s persuaded me) so you need to prep them as part of that process.
Even in these scenarios I’ve allowed an assumption that’s not right: if you judge someone unfit to become an elder then they can’t carry on with their responsibilities. Of course, in the real world, it depends. Character issues that mean you didn’t add them to the team may not preclude them carrying on with serving where they are—it depends on what we’re talking about. If it’s deep seated and secret sin that comes to light, maybe they can’t carry on, but if it’s that you didn’t think they were a great fit in the team (which we should ask more questions about, but let’s assume it’s all above board) then they should keep doing whatever it is they’re doing if they were doing it well.
In a sentence: don’t develop people if you don’t know what you’re developing them for. You need a direction, a telos for your development. You should be transparent about that with them, and only make promises you can keep.
I think this could put some people off developing anyone. It’s too much hard work, it’s too easy for it to go wrong, you’ve made too many mistakes in the past and your church is burned by it. Maybe. Yet, the Church needs more Apostles, more Prophets, more Pastors and Elders, more Teachers, more Evangelists, and most especially more disciples. You need to develop those amongst you to be all that the Lord has for them whether in your setting or elsewhere. In order to do that you need to do that.
Photo by David Jowanka on Unsplash
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