Why Don’t Christian Leaders Call Out Untrustworthy Leadership? The Same Reasons Non-Christian Leaders Don’t.

Untrustworthy Leaders

We’ve been around long enough now to know that bad leadership is everywhere. Untrustworthy leadership.  The church, it seems, is often – sadly – just as culpable as the world.  In fact more culpable. Equipped with the very tools to deal with toxicity, bullying, private ungodliness masked with public piety, we pull our punches.

We are proving to be just as untrustworthy as the world when it comes to calling out bad leadership.

And with the very person of Jesus – who time and time again had to call out his disciples for having a worldly view of leadership – we seem stuck in the rut of bad, untrustworthy leadership. Or at least we seem unable to call it out early .

And the church is getting sick of it. And more to the point, getting sick of having to open an email or read a Christian journal that calls it out for the church. My own experience is that it isn’t until the sheep are bleating loud enough to the point of embarrassment that anything is ever done.

And even then. Even then. I’ve spent a lot of hours recently on Zoom with a group that is looking at taking on a leader who has been publicly shown to be unqualified to lead God’s people time and time again. Three hours to be exact on Zoom. Three hours across the world at a time of the morning I’d rather be chilling in the early quiet with a hot brew.

And no matter what evidence I presented, I’ve been implored for more. Several times. I’ve been asked to show evidence from other people’s private emails (which I won’t do). At the end I simply said “Even if someone were to rise from the dead, you wouldn’t believe.” Cheeky I know, but come on people!

How Bad Leadership Thrives

Journalist Bari Weiss, – once of The New York Times, but who left due to its had leadership that failed to call out the personal abuse and anti-Semitism she was experiencing from other staff -, nails it in an article republished in The Times.

Speaking about how she was hounded at a dinner party earlier this year when she mentioned that Joe Biden might be losing it and not fit for the role of president, she states that she was publicly called out for it. But privately? That was a different matter.

Privately everyone was acknowledging what they could not – would not – acknowledge publicly. Why? She states:

A Democratic insider put it more bluntly when I asked him what had taken so long: “Proximity to power, privilege, prestige. That’s the currency. And people fiercely protect their access. They put self-preservation over principle.”

That’s it right there. And sadly I’ve seen it in church leadership way too often. Which seems incredible, yes? Here we are as the people of God with the absolutely mind-blowing privilege of proximity everyday to the most powerful person – the Lord Jesus – access to the throne of grace as Hebrews reminds us

Clear that tells us that we don’t believe our own theology as much as we say we do. When God is big in our eyes other people are not too big, nor are they too small. They are human-sized. And that means for their sake and the sake of others you should tell the truth.

In two significant occasions in which I have called out poor leadership – and it cost me my job on one of those occasions – the leadership found every way they could to excuse the sinful behaviour of the person at the top, and in both cases the story was “But he gets things done”, and “We need to show that person more grace”.

So there’s a pattern to these conversations and an armoury of theological reasons that the world is not equipped with. Which means – ironically – the church can keep hold of poor leaders longer than the world can! And – sadly – so often does.

What does this leave us like? It leaves us craven and submitting to poor leadership for the sake of a few glittering baubles of approval. Approval from someone who we actually fear would step all over us if we were to demur.

We can say from the stage all we like about grace-renewal leadership, but if behind the scenes we are formed by fear and insecurities, then no amount of public declarations will atone for it.

And why do followers of such leaders allow this to happen? Knowingly? Because after you have watched him (and it’s most often a him), do over the people you once worked with who called it out, why would he not do it to you?

When it comes to those who left, you’re not sure how it all went down or why they left so quickly, but you’re allowing yourself to be convinced by the self-interested leaders who crave self-preservation that it was “for the best” and “they had issues”.

Let me tell you, by the time that leader has done over ten staff and keeps saying “Can’t get good leaders these days“, you might want to think about where the problem lies. But still we kid ourselves.

The Crisis of Trustworthiness

Bari Weiss nails the issue again, when she says that problem is not that we don’t trust our leaders. The problem is not that good leaders are always going to be misunderstood in a climate in which everyone lives in therapy land and can’t cope with a hard word about their performance.

I actually watched a leader who had been called out for poor leadership write those self-serving words in a serious of social media posts. It was almost as if he were trying to convince himself.

That’s a self-serving, and poor, smokescreen for the problem. The problem so often is not that people mistrust their leaders for no good reason, due, we are told, to the anti-authoritarian spirit of our age, but because they themselves are untrustworthy.

Weiss states:

The crisis of trust we are facing — a crisis gripping our most important institutions, from the legacy press, to our public health officials, to our universities and our government — is more accurately described as a crisis of trustworthiness.

She mentions this in the light of how many institutions have blatantly betrayed their vocations by hiding truths that later become revealed.

To me this refusal to speak truth is extremely short-sighted. And it winds organisations into tighter and tighter circles. It keeps them busy hiding the truth while they are, at the same time, supposed to be revealing the truth.

Or as Mark Twain purportedly said (and I implore you to check if he did):

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

But that’s true regardless of who said it. The busy task of covering tracks and burying bodies and rehearsing “reasons why this happened” takes time. Time and energy. Time and energy that could be used well going forward. And what happens? We get a “launder, rinse, repeat” scenario.  It’s a trustworthiness issue.

One organisation – after a huge number of staff left, once again in the light of the poor leadership that was left unattended by the board – declared in its end of year review emailed to all interested parties that it had had “growing pains”.

Dunno about you, but by the time you’re well into your teenage years as an organisation, the pains are probably less to do with growing, and more to do with cancer. But the solution for those who lie to themselves? Get rid of the truth tellers. And keep those who prefer self-preservation over principle. Untrustworthiness.

Untrustworthiness is Self-Limiting

This is clearly a self-defeating and self-limiting task. The task of being untrustworthiness.  And the person you are most fooling is yourself. Your own organisation.

It will stunt your long term health. It was interesting when the whole issue of the abuse within The Crowded House church network that I was involved in was exposed, that a friend of mine said he was surprised at just how small a group TCH was.

Here he was thinking it was a huge church given how much it was punching in terms of wider influence. But on the ground among those who actually were part of it? Who saw what was going on day to day? Not so much. It had 120 people in total attending its main church meeting. A different 120 to a few years ago. And a different 120 to ten years before that. You get the picture?

Here’s the the thing. It could have been huge. Should have been! It was at one and the same time the best and worst church experience of my life. And all for the reasons listed above – the craven desire for people to have access to power and privilege of a leader, and who would lie to themselves – and others – to have it.

It could have been a very crowded house indeed. All they needed to do was renovate the way they dealt with problems to make room for people who wanted to stay. Make a happy and holy place. But what did the leadership do?

It drove out anyone who called out the issues.  It made it the same as the Democrats post-Biden’s debate performance. Always turning their head away from the issue. Always finding a way to show that the issue – the obvious issue – wasn’t the issue. And always turning the blame on those calling it out.

So they were content to re-wallpaper the rooms, put in new lighting and change the soft furnishings. But a costly renovation? Bringing in someone to solve the structural issues that kept the house small and poisonous? Never gonna happen.

Until the house fell down. And when it fell it fell quickly, as the media reports indicate, and as I have written about elsewhere.

Futureproof Leadership Must Be Trustworthy

One of the features of leadership in the church in the future will have to be its trustworthiness. Surely we have reached the zenith – or perhaps it’s the nadir – of untrustworthy leadership in the church.

Now clearly there have always been untrustworthy leaders driven by self interest. That’s why we read this in 3John:

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us.  So when I come, I will call attention to what he is doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us. Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome other believers. He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.

The desire of Diotrephes to be first even led him to lie about the apostle John for his own sake. And that led to him bullying the sheep of God. It turns out that the cancer of rough sheep that the prophet Ezekiel calls out in chapter 34 of his prophesy is deeply embedded. So embedded that it finds its way into the new creation people of God.

Assuming that is, that Diotrephes was, in the end, a believer. Anyone who likes to be first needs to ask themselves the question whether they even know Jesus. If they do then the desire to be first will be something they will need to grapple with and repent of on an ongoing basis.

The last thing they need to do is gather those around themselves who prop up that sinful desire within them.

So as we watch the Western world burn down around itself with leader after leader who demands obedience, refuses to heed wise counsel that refutes their shibboleths, and who punishes those who call out the problems early, we need a church leadership that lives differently.

A church leadership whose vision of Jesus is so big and so all encompassing, that the baubles of approval from bad leadership are not enticing enough to take it off track. Next time I’m going to offer some strategies – from the foundation of this most basic of strategies – to ensure that in a world experiencing a lack of  leadership trust – the church will set itself apart, and offer something trustworthy.