How do you spot a fake in leadership?
Ian Coffey
The question came to me as I woke this morning and pulled back the curtains in my hotel.
I was looking across the sea to a monument on a small island which is said to be the location where the apostle Paul was swept ashore, together with his two travelling companions, Dr Luke and Aristarchus. In all 276 people were miraculously saved. The graphic account of the perilous sea journey is detailed in Acts 27, where Luke gives a first-person account of the voyage.
Leadership is not control, but love – John Benton
Male church leadership is under attack from several directions, particularly because of glaring examples of men whose leadership has been abusive. In churches that take a complementarian view of church leadership, how do we prevent these abuses? We need to think of male leadership in church as father-like, writes Jim Sayers.
John Benton from Aylesbury explored this theme in one of the key sessions at an overnight event for Grace Baptist pastors at High Leigh in March. Leadership should not be about control, he said, but about stimulating, loving, and extending the family. In a generation where young men are regularly failed by the education system, where automation is taking many of their jobs, do pastors understand them? Issues of race, misogyny and gang culture exacerbate the challenge. At the same time, churches need to be places where strong, gifted, and intelligent women are encouraged to flourish. Male leadership that ignores women is both harming them and stunting the growth of the entire church.
Here’s the truth: our prayers are being answered!
There are more people training for ministry in the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) than at any time in the last 30 years. Surprised? So were we, when we did the maths.
And the numbers we crunched need a few caveats: We don’t have absolutely concrete data going back 30 years, so we had to do some asking around. And because we’re independent churches we don’t keep tabs on everyone training for Christian work, so we had to do a little estimation.