The Issue of Authority–My Own Journey

In the informal blog-circle in which I’ve found myself–many of whom, like myself, are going through different stages of re-thinking institutional Christianity–recently the issue of authority/leadership has come up. Because so many have been wounded through abusive leadership (or even well-intended leadership operating in a broken system), there are some understandable questions being raised about whether we’ve got the authority issue right. Does Jesus intend us to submit to human spiritual authority, or is He alone our Shepherd and leader?

I have a lot of thoughts on this myself, and right now they are all kind of jumbled. In other words, if I put them down here now, they’d probably look like this:

slkda;oiu2nklakjs;au seorhjwm slkmleiirh earg5fse. (ad infinitum, ad nausem)

So I think for now, the best thing I can do is to share some of my own experiences concerning authority (and abuse), and what I’ve learned from that experience.

A brief caveat: I know there are occasionally people from my past who come by here, and may recognize some references to my ChurchLeftBehind (CLB). I keep these references as neutral as possible because it is not my purpose to slam any organization or leader. However, these experiences are part of my history, and if they can serve the purpose of being a teacher to us all, I feel it is necessary to share some of them.

Growing up in church, my musical gifts manifested at an early age, so I regularly found myself in or near the “inner circle” of church and ministry leadership. Then I became a church leader, taking a worship pastor position at a church–my “ChurchLeftBehind” (CLB), where I served for six years. I will spare the details, but during our time there The Wild One and I sustained a lot of emotional wounds, many coming from the leadership. But the irony is that we also did a lot of wounding to others–because for better or worse, we learned and adopted the leadership style.

When we left the CLB, as I’ve said in previous posts, we didn’t leave institutional church; we left to start a new church. This resulted in a major falling out with the leadership–not so much because we were leaving, but because we asked to be “sent out” rather than “planted”–thus making it plain that we were not going to come under this leadership to cover us after we left. We saw a lot of the problems, but we stayed in that bad situation for six years because we felt that God had called us there, and we determined not to leave until we felt Him calling us elsewhere. When He did…we felt we had to make a clean break.

During this transition, we spent a little time with a pastor in Arkansas whom we respected. Despite the abuses we’d seen, we still believed in authority and covering–we just felt we needed a healthier example of it. So we asked this man if he would consider “covering” us while we made this transition, since we were basically going to start from scratch. His wise response has stuck with us for many years. I paraphrase here: he told us, “Don’t be in a hurry to set yourself under covering just because you think it is expected of you. Be patient, and let Jesus identify to you what that should be and what it should look like. You guys are accountable in your hearts because you desire to be accountable. Trust God to show you the way.” That set our hearts at peace.

When we started the church in Tulsa, unfortunately, we continued some of the bad leadership habits we learned, and so despite our best intentions, we ended up continuing to wound people along the way–even after we became a house church. It took awhile for God to get hold of us and begin to show us a better way to lead. I can hear the question being raised: How could you treat others that way when you saw how it affected you? And all I can say to that is that we all have blind spots. We just didn’t put it together. We saw some of the things that were wrong in our CLB, and we tried to correct those in our own church; but we didn’t see all of it. What I can say is that when you have a leadership position in an institutional church, quite often you feel a need to protect your position–at all costs. This will cause one to justify certain actions they wouldn’t normally take. For me, it translated to different forms of manipulation, control, even gossip; and I simply blinded myself to the wrongness of those actions because I thought they were serving an important goal. I would tell myself it was in that person’s best interests, that it was my responsibility, etc; but over time when I looked at my heart, I realize now a lot of it was really serving my own interests, protecting my own position. The show must go on. That kind of thing. This is not something I am proud of.

Meanwhile, while we were deconstructing all this, we continued to seek God about proper covering and authority–but we couldn’t get peaceful about submitting ourselves to any particular organization. In every one we looked at, we could see the glint in their eyes as they looked our gifts, and we knew they were thinking of ways our gifts could serve their purposes, rather than building a platform of success under us. We saw the agendas, and we shuddered at them; we felt those agendas would only lead to more hurt and heartache. So we chose instead to look to certain mature individuals we trusted, whenever we needed counsel, advice, or oversight–to find accountability in a loose-knit grid of relationships.

And one day I realized something that troubled me greatly. I don’t know how I failed to see it, but…virtually all of the people we were looking to for guidance were not committed to a local fellowship. They weren’t in church!!! WHAT THE…???” I did not like the look of this at all. And yet…these people had wisdom, maturity, and humility that I easily recongized and highly valued. They gave good advice, and they did NOT have an agenda to use us. I got the feeling that God was trying to show us something by these relationships.

As we’ve continued on this path of de-constructing and re-thinking, here’s where I am now. I see that bad leadership is more than just broken people trying to lead (although that’s certainly part of it). I believe the whole un-Scriptural clergy-laity separation creates an environment in which it becomes very difficult for people not to get hurt. Clergy are set on pedestals with a set of nearly impossible expectations, then expected to behave perfectly. There is always an element of the laity that will be jealous of the prestige given to the clergy, and that complicates things. And clergy feel a need to protect themselves from the laity. Is it any wonder so many people are hurt by this setup? In our personal history as leaders, we have lost our best friends on three different occasions; and while there were certainly other issues involved in those lost relationships, I truly believe the clergy-laity issue played a huge part in all three. It is an un-Biblical and broken system.

And yet…despite all the wounds I’ve sustained and dished out under this system, I still see that the Bible supports human leadership. I have always believed that what we needed was not to get rid of all human authority, but simply to find a better way. Re-defining, not rejecting. The clergy-laity system is based on the Gentile “lord-it-over” style of leadership, which Jesus specifically warned us not to do. He modeled for us a servant-leadership style. He is LORD, yet He washes our feet, and commands us to do the same for one another.

And this is the lesson I’m learning from my “un-churched” advisors. I’m learning that true Biblical authority and leadership is relational and functional, not positional. We didn’t submit ourselves to these folks because they said they were apostles and prophets, and we were supposed to submit, or else. We submitted to them because their example of love, humility and wisdom made us want to follow along. If you think about it, this natural process of mentorship sort of eliminates the need to protect one’s position and act selfishly, doesn’t it? Not all authority has to look exactly like this; but it certainly looks like a better way to me.