Leadership Requires Maturity in Christian Leadership
We are in desperate need of leaders who are maturing. We are in desperate need of leaders who are even more fruitful. But what does being fruitful as a leader mean?
Leadership Requires Maturity Beyond Church Growth Metrics
. . . It would serve us well, both leaders and congregation, to reexamine what we put at the center of the center. Our expectation for fruitfulness should be connected to our faithfulness in how we live out self-giving love with one another and those in our city, community, and neighborhood. Instead of putting a requirement on pastors to be the most insightful orators who aspire to an unattainable metric of attendance growth, we should instead seek leaders who will help the congregation focus on the center of the center—who will model self-giving love in the ways of Jesus. Church growth then results not from sermons but through the church’s demonstration of self-sacrificial communal life.
The congregation’s second impossible pressure on the church leader is that of establishing an ideal community. While the sense of belonging is a deeply foundational piece of communal life in the church, we must be aware that our Western twenty-first-century interpretation of belonging is littered with individualism, materialism, and racism. Our desire for belonging is an individualistic one. Our desire for spiritual growth is a personal consumeristic one. And our desire for community is a homogeneous one, wishing to maintain a community made up of people like us.
Mature Leaders Are Disciples First in Community
. . . The unattainable expectation placed on church leaders by the congregation to provide and sustain an ideal community that ultimately serves and meets the individual’s personal, consumeristic, and homogeneous needs is also ultimately devoid of the characteristics that make up a Jesus community. A deep communal life moves away from an individualistic, materialistic, and racist focus and is transformed by Christ to radically love and serve one another and the surrounding community in a self-giving way that makes the world turn to Jesus.
Mature Leaders Are Disciples First Before They Lead Others
Even with renewed clarity regarding the communal self-sacrificial focus required of mature church leaders and their congregations, and away from impossible power pressures on the pastor, an approach to change may not be clear. We are in desperate need of maturity markers of leadership in the church. Maturity markers do several things: they help to determine what we value, anticipate progression, and identify who to emulate. They also provide a process for examining the tension of personal felt needs and idealized expectations.
In defining the maturity markers of church leadership, I expect that leaders, as imitators of Jesus, should be pursuing discipleship. Mature leaders are disciples first. Imitator of Jesus, not leader, is the core of their identity. Therefore, the maturing leader is engaging in Christlike character, Christlike theology, Christlike wisdom, and Christlike missional living (Strawser 2023, 36-38).
Every disciple is maturing in both spiritual confidence (identity) and social competence (praxis) within a community on mission together for the sake of their city, community, and neighborhood. If the leader is not a disciple of Jesus, then the leader has chosen someone or something else as a pattern. Our praxis is determined by our identity and vice versa; only a Christlike leader can lead a congregation to be Christlike. If Christianity without discipleship is Christianity without Christ (Bonhoeffer 1995, 59), then Christian leadership without discipleship is also leadership without Christ.
Why Mature Leaders Are Disciples First
When the leader is a disciple first, then daily practice of living like Jesus naturally spills over into leading like Jesus. As a disciple already contends with the powers and principalities of this world (Rom 8:38-39), the leader is poised to contend against the underlying negative desires. The disciple who is already living a missional lifestyle becomes a leader who teaches the congregation to value the larger community. And finally, the leader who is imitating Jesus invites the congregation to have closer proximity to Jesus, not to himself or herself.
How Mature Leaders Are Disciples First in Practice
On the other hand, when leaders are not disciples first, their character, thought, decision-making, and lifestyle are being formed by something or someone else. Then they will be pressured by church growth and ideal community, perpetually moving the church inward and orienting the congregation around themselves.
Discipleship is crucial to Christian leaders. Its centrality allows them to lead the church to center discipleship, which connects the congregation to the community it exists in and for. Discipleship anchors the leader to imitate Jesus’ way of doing leadership. Discipleship also sheds light on how the leader contends with power. And finally, maturing in Christlikeness allows the church to imitate Jesus and not desire proximity just to the leader.
Adapted from You Were Never Meant to Lead Alone by E. K. Strawser. Copyright (c) 2025 by Eun Kyong Strawser. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press.
