How we tackled McLeadership in our church

Aged 26, I accidentally found myself leading LifeGiving Church in West London. I’d been a city lawyer when a group of us planted a gathering for people that didn’t do church. At first, we were mentored by our founding leader. But suddenly he stepped away altogether, leaving us to figure out church leadership alone. 

The leadership model we’d inherited made numbers important. Bigger was better: we wanted more of the ABCs: Attendance, Buildings and Cash. Growing meant making more converts for Jesus. And more converts meant our reach for Jesus – in terms of bodies and finances – would increase. Then we could make even more converts. 

The wrong metrics

Like much of evangelicalism, we talked about following Jesus and having a flourishing church – “loving God, loving people and loving the world” was our tag line – but we never got specific about anything we couldn’t quantify. We could tell you our growth targets for the next five years, but we’d gloss over the details of how we intended to form disciples of Jesus or build a flourishing Christian community – because they weren’t easily measurable. 

Theologically speaking, we allowed a wider cultural story to take hold. We lost sight of how the gospel might shape our leadership story. Instead, a story called managerialism or, more colloquially, McLeadership took hold.

McLeadership isn’t leadership with burgers and fries on the side. It’s a term inspired by George Ritzer describing how the principles of the fast-food businesses now dominate Western understandings of success. McLeadership assumes that quality, or success, equals quantity and/or speed of delivery. That works in the fast-food business, but not so well with people.

When McLeadership makes numbers our be-all and end-all, we risk missing the priorities God actually has for our churches. High attendance figures may be good – but only if there’s also deepening discipleship among all these people. Healthy cashflow may be good. Every church wants enough money to function, after all. 

But the Church must not settle for just this. Our goal isn’t to accumulate finance but to use it in service of something greater. Theology has an important story to tell about what that ultimate leadership goal might be. But we won’t hear it while the McDonald’s story is clogging our ears.

Leaders seek the good of their followers

At LifeGiving Church we found another way. Scripture shows us that Jesus’ life is the pattern for ours; in its glorified form, the Church will look like Him, sharing in His life and ministry of love for God and humanity. And if that’s the reality God is calling us towards, that’s also the direction in which Church leaders need to be leading us. Success is not numbers, but a deepening reality of love.

When we love others, we make God’s love present to them. This gives them the opportunity to respond in love for God by loving the people around them. Put simply, the gospel story of leadership says that, in the Church, we lead to love in love. The ABCs aren’t the be-all and end-all; love is. 

Leading into love

But what does this kind of love-leadership look like? Scripture recognises love in many forms. Agape, a self-sacrificial love, is the one Christians tend to talk about most. But for this kind of leadership – which depends on followers not only receiving love but responding in love for those around them – it’s friendship love that’s crucial. 

Friendship in the Bible is, at its best, agape love returned; it’s mutual love expressed in relationship. Jesus values this kind of friendship highly. In John 10:17-18, Jesus is clear that He lays down His life (self-sacrificial agape) in order to take it up again. Self-sacrifice is valuable because it’s the necessary precursor to mutual loving relationship (friendship) between God and humanity. 

In John 15:12-17, Jesus calls His disciples friends. John 5:20 uses friendship language to express the Father’s love for the Son, showing that (contrary to mistaken expositions of John 21) friendship love is not less than agape. 

So, what does leadership shaped by friendship look like? In part, it means using power not only for others but also with them. Leaders seek the good of their followers and do so out of genuine knowledge of and relationship with them. 

Friendship-leadership calls us to get close enough to one another that we know each other’s needs and hopes. It requires liking (or learning to like) each other enough to share our power. And it means becoming vulnerable, so we don’t only share our power but also our weaknesses. 

That can be hard for leaders who are used to being self-sufficient; humbling, even. Being the heroic leader who needs nothing and gives everything isn’t possible in friendship-leadership. For us at LifeGiving, friendship-leadership meant being with people – among them as one of them. We had to share enough of ourselves that followers would know how to start expressing love to us in ways that were personally meaningful.

Friendship-leadership is challenging. But real friendship always is. Honestly, leading that way was hard. I tell more of that in The Glorious Risk (IVP). But I’d now tell my 26-year-old self that those difficulties were also places of grace – where we discovered that daring to lead to love in love really is a glorious risk.