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| FPC, Lowville, NY |
This is the fourth posting in a series working on what it means to be a church, based on eight criteria the Mars Hill Church uses to define its branch congregations as churches. The first posting in this series, which lists those criteria, is (here).
The second criterion used by the Mars Hill Church to define its branch congregations as "churches," is, "The church is organized under qualified and competent leadership."
One of the widely touted truisms of contemporary church life is that churches live or die by their leadership. If a church has capable, creative, effective, and faithful leadership—especially pastoral leadership—then the chances are the church will prosper. Poor leadership leads to weak churches. As a consequence, there is a huge literature on church leadership, just as in the business world there is a massive literature on management and leadership.
Leadership is important. Still, there are times when a pastor who did well in one church does less well in another church, and there are congregations where conflict is endemic. There are churches where one pastor is successful while another equally capable pastor is not. We speak about the importance of getting a good "fit" between a pastor and a church. In other words, there is more to church life than leadership. Followership (as one on line dictionary puts it "the capacity or willingness to follow a leader") is equally important—and much less often discussed or considered. There is a much smaller literature on church followership.
In American society, we have a fixation with the role of leadership, witness our long process for selecting a president during which the pundits provide us with endless daily analysis of the candidates and their latest doings. Yet it is interesting to note that after the debate over raising the debt ceiling a record 84% of Americans, according to a Gallup pole (here) disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job. Considering the historic election of 2010 when the public returned a seriously changed body of representatives to Congress, these figures are as much a measure of our ability to elect capable representatives as it is of Congress itself. In a fit of ire, we turned the Republicans out in 2006 and 2008, and then in another fit of ire we began the process of turning the Democrats out in 2010. These are acts by an irritated American followership that can't collectively decide which party it wants to run the nation. The point is that followership matters a lot, and we usually don't give it enough attention—either in national politics or in the lives of our local churches.
