O.N.E. Opinion:

The Christian Meaning of Leadership

by Nicholas Dujmovic'

(Delivered at a conference on Leadership in the Church sponsored by St. Mark Orthodox Church in Bethesda, MD on June 19, 1999.)

My priest asked me to do this. I really didn't want to, but I obeyed. That, in a nutshell, is "Christian leadership." The reasons for my misgivings about coming here is that what I have to say - only one idea, really - should be so basic and so obvious that I am almost embarrassed to say it. At the same time, I can only speak from my experience. I have no formal theological training. I read, and I try to pay attention to sermons.

What I have to offer is that I'm a trained observer, and I've seen a lot of leaders at work, in the Church and in the world at large. With what I've observed of leaders and how they act in the military, in academia, in the private sector, in charitable foundations, and in government agencies, as compared with leaders in the Church and how they act, I have to conclude that our Church leaders are as good as - and as bad as - leaders elsewhere.

This should not surprise us, that Church leaders are neither wholly inferior to nor wholly superior to leaders at school, at work, in the community. It's the same fallen humanity at work. At the same time, being the Body of Christ, one would think we would be more successful than we are, that we'd have more people, more money, more programs.
I think it an unassailable presumption that we have leadership problems in the Church, but the problem, as I see it, is not with the leaders - it's with the followers.

What we lack, brothers and sisters, is "followership." It's not so much that our leaders need improving, it's that we've forgotten what leadership is in the Church. Of all the nutty ideas that currently pervade the Church, surely one of the most damaging is that we can consider "leadership" in the Chuch in the same way we do leadership in secular life. True leadership is not, as the world teaches, getting the parade to go your way. It's not organizing efforts and drawing up lists and involving everyone to accomplish a set of goals.

Rather, as Christ teaches, leadership is service performed in love, it is obedience, it is deference, and it is humility. It's very un-American. Here in America we value democracy, pragmatism, niceness, and self-fulfillment so much that the truth about Christian leadership unsettles us. We don't want to hear about obedience and humility; we'd rather self-actualize and make sure each of us has a ministry of some sort. Our libraries are full of books on leadership. Even our Christian bookstores have them. But there are not many on "followership."

We cannot deny that the essence of true leadership is service because our Lord Himself says so. On a recent Sunday the Gospel was of Christ calling his first disciples. "Come, follow Me," he said, not "Come, and I'll show you how to set up a ministry to achieve your goals effectively." No, "Come, follow Me." Jesus, of course, gave the Apostles authority - "to bind and to loose" - but more often He contrasted what the Apostles were to do with what worldly authority is about. The icon of leadership in the Church is Christ Himself-the Eternal Logos; the Alpha and the Omega; the Way, the Truth, and the Life -washing the dirty feet of his disciples. It is a paradox: service and submission by the Lord and Teacher. He remains Lord and Teacher even though he performs this service in perfect humility, and it remains service even though He is the Lord and Teacher.

This is the paradox of Christian leadership, and it's why it can never be thought of in the same way that we think about leadership in the world. This paradox is manifested in the Church by the fact that the Church, following the Master's instructions, ordains men to authority in the church - the clergy - who yet serve us, sacramentally, liturgically, pastorally. And we, the people, are to allow them to serve us even as we submit and obey them.

Even the early Church had problems with this concept. Why else would the early Fathers continually hammer on this theme? In case you think I'm making this up, read what Saint Polycarp writes in the early second century: "Our duty is to be as obedient to our clergy as we should be to God and Christ." Not: "Our duty is to make sure the priest doesn't
get in the way of what we want to do in this parish."

St. Ignatius, on the road to his martyrdom, wrote to the various churches in Asia Minor, and in almost every letter he sounds the same theme: "Be as submissive to the bishop and to one another as Jesus Christ was to His Father, and as the Apostles were to Christ." Anything else is just the ego at work. It's pride. Ignatius did not say, "Be as submissive to the bishop as you wanna be." No, he said to maintain unity with the bishop absolutely, as an example to others and so that we do not become corrupt. And last: "Obey your clergy with undivided minds and share in the one common breaking of the bread - the medicine of immortality."

As an aside, in a few of our parishes the Eucharist has been overshadowed in importance by the fruits of worldly leadership. In other words, rather than to partake and be nourished for good works by the Bread of Life, I'm afraid that too many of us go to Church to run things, whether it's the church school, the choir, the bookstore, or the priest. That's absolutely backwards.

Let me mention St. Clement, writing to the Corinthians at the end of the first century. "Submit to the clergy," he says, "and learn subordination, for it is far better to be lowly members of Christ than to have apparent eminence and be cast out from Him."

C.S. Lewis speaks of this paradox of Christian, that is true, leadership: "Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live...Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality." And these are the things must suffuse our Christian leadership, or it isn't Christian: obedience, humility, and unity.

Why is it even necessary to say these things? The exercise of leadership divorced from the Christian reality of obedience and service leads to trouble, and there is trouble, as I see it, in our Orthodox Churches in this country. We are afflicted with the very democratic idea that the legitimacy of authority is derived from the consent of the governed. Rather than "authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight," we have what our Lord warned against, the lording over of others. We have parishes abusing priests, factionalism within parishes, clergy gone crazy as a result, and we wonder why people don't come to the Orthodox Church. I'm very concerned by this situation.

I have personal experience of two parishes - and we've all heard of many more - in which, rather than acknowledge the authority of the priest, rather than exercise deference and obedience and love, so-called "leaders" in those parishes exercised their leadership by compelling the priest to leave because they did not like him. It was a triumph of leadership, done effectively. The mission was accomplished, the goal was achieved, and I think the devil rejoiced.
Both priests took very seriously their sacramental and pastoral duties but were considered insufficiently nice, inadequately pastoral, and didn't do the liturgy the way certain people wanted it done. We're not speaking about doctrinal differences or the preaching of heresy; there were no mistresses; they signed no document of union with non-Orthodox; they married no one save a man to a woman. They were ousted because they were disliked, and this sort of thing happens too often in our American church.

As a practical matter, then, would I put the priest in charge of everything? Or would I make the priest an absolute monarch, with the parish his theocratic kingdom? Out of the question. Don't misunderstand me. It cannot be said that we should do away with leadership in the more conventional sense.

We need people to run church schools, to direct choirs, to plan retreats and seminars on Saturdays, to buy the candles, bake the church bread, organize fundraisers and the like. But we can't put the cart before the horse; we cannot confuse the means with the ends. All this, as C.S. Lewis said, is medicine, not food. We need these things and we need all this talk about leadership only inasmuch as they help us get to Christ; they are not substitutes for the sacramental, for that which saves us.

At the dread judgment seat of Christ, we will not be asked about our leadership styles or how well we run meetings. We may well be asked how we treated the priest. We will be asked how well we followed Christ and labored to build up His Body.

(Nicholas Dujmovic is a former member of the Diocese of New England.)