Models of church leadership

I was struck yesterday as I re-read N.T. Wright’s The Last Word on the importance of something that’s in danger of being lost in today’s models of church leadership:

The Western church has for some generations allowed a dangerous “separation of powers,” according to which scripture is taught by professional academics while the church is run by clergy who, with noble exceptions, rely  on secondhand and increasingly outdated understandings of scripture itself…The result is not only a deep impoverishment, but a creeping or even galloping bureaucratization, as church leaders engage in displacement activities, hoping to do through committees, filing cabinets and legal constraints what they should be doing through prayerful, powerful biblical preaching, teaching and pastoral work…

The church of the first three centuries would hardly have recognized the models of Christian leadership into which we, at least in the modern western churches, seem to have slipped without noticing…The various crises in the Western church of our day – decline in numbers and resources, moral dilemmas, internal division, failure to present the gospel coherently to a new generation – all these and more should drive us to pray for scripture to be given its head once more; for teachers and preachers who can open the Bible in the power of the Spirit, to give the church the energy and direction it needs for its mission and to renew in it its love for God; and, above all, for God’s word to do it’s work in the world…