9 aberrant forms of church leadership

Christian leadership can go wrong in so many different ways – moral failure, destructive relationships, bad theology, etc. But, many people fail at leadership because they started out with a bad model of leadership in the first place.

Michael Jensen addresses this problem and offers 9 forms of aberrant church leadership that we need to avoid. You’ll need to read his post to see what he thinks about each of these, but here are the 9 forms of leadership he addresses.

1. The Narcissist. The easiest way to spot a narcissist is when they are confronted by criticism.
2. The Control Freak. The control freak will always want to live in a world in which they are able to be omniscient and omnipotent.
3. The Wimp. The weak and indecisive leader is often imprisoned by the awareness of their own weakness and so becomes the opposite: authoritarian.
4. The ‘I don’t do windows’ leader. This leader has isolated their leadership role to one particular gift and doesn’t stray much from it.
5. The Macho. This leader has a reading of complementarianism that anchors it in a particular reading of maleness and femaleness, and is unaware how culturally bound it is.
6. The Member of the Guild. The aim of this Christian leader is to match it with his or her peers from college (or wherever).
7. The Self-legislator. The self-legislator is a child of the revolution.
8. The Change-averter. The change-averter is deeply conservative and will put the breaks on any change whatsoever as a point of principle.
9. The Pragmatist. Whatever works is the bottom line here.

What do you think? Which of these nine do you think is the greatest problem of Christian leadership today? Or, do you think Jensen’s missed something and you would argue for a different problem as even more fundamental?

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