Contemporary Church Leaders

Writing is a strange thing. There are some days when I can sit at the computer for hours and end up writing one sentence. That would be called writer's block. Then there are other days where I sit at the computer and can't stop writing (by the way, I prefer those kind of days). It is a blessing to write when it seems like there are resources upon resources to cite from, and I love especially when I already have those resources. I spent an hour today looking for a book I thought I had only to check my seller account on amazon after all the searching around the house, to find that I sold that book a year ago.

Today I spent my time writing about contemporary church leaders. What is it that makes someone a leader in the church today? Is it a title? Is it their level of education? In past centuries the leader was the one man who spoke from the pulpit on Sundays. He was the guy in charge. This is not so today. The model of leadership most churches are adapting today recognize that anyone in the church is a leader. What makes people leaders? There are essentially 3 things that make a person a leader in their church. They have a particular giftedness, some talent that God gave them which allows them to excel in a particular area, even without training. Second, they have a desire to lead and go through the proper training in order to be allowed to lead a particular ministry. Third, they lead a particular ministry. This does not mean they need to be in charge of 30 or 40 people to be considered a leader. A person is a leader even if they have one follower.

What this means for that leader is that they are in a position of great responsibility to lead people in a good way. The problem is that many of these leaders, though they are in a position to know better, end up leading people astray because they have become corrupt in some way. Many of the negative labels Christians receive today like "judgmental," "critical," or "hypocritical" come from these kinds of leaders who misrepresent the gospel.

For those of us who are leaders in our churches, we have a responsibility to hold ourselves accountable and make sure we are portraying the message of Jesus accurately and honestly. We need to think of way we can continue our own education to make sure we ourselves have not gone astray. And we need to find ways of staying accountable such as getting people to be our accountability partners.

God Bless.
-Brandon