The tragedy of leadership as self-performance

A package from Intervarsity UK just arrived in the mail with three books, including the hard-to-get Total Church. Looking forward to reading this one.

Flipping through it, I found this quote that touches on our models of leadership within the church that are performance based:

The real tragedy of leadership-as-performance is that it devalues the work of Christ. Our identity is not rooted in grace, but in the success of our ministry. And so we feel good when we have performed well and we feel down when things are not going well. We become enslaved to other people’s approval. We are concerned to prove ourselves and that is just another way of talking about self-justification. We preach justification by faith on the day of judgment, but do not practice justification by faith in the daily routine of our lives. Our practical theology has become disconnected from our confessional theology. Our song becomes:

My hope is built on something less
than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
I trust my skills, I trust my fame,
and maybe sometimes Jesus’ name.

But we cannot keep it up. Self-justification is always beyond us. The chorus of Edward Mote’s hymn which I have taken the liberty of inverting actually goes: ‘On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.’ Leadership-as-performance is sinking sand.

This book looks really good. Looking forward to getting into it.