Now THIS is Leadership
It’s easy to find Christian leaders who think too highly of themselves (Eddie Long, comes to mind). The media loves covering these folks, especially when they fall (in part because the media loves outing hypocrites). But we all should wonder: if Christians are supposed to be humble, and love one another — even their enemies — then why is it so easy to find counter examples?
Well, here’s an example of Christian humility squared. You have probably seen Jefferson Bethke’s provocative video, “Why I love Jesus, but hate religion.” It’s garnered 18 million hits on YouTube. I won’t go into the details of Jeff’s claims except to say that it does a wonderful job of provoking one to think. Whether you agree or not with the video, that is a mark of great art.
Instead, I want to briefly share a story of humility and leadership. Recently Pastor Kevin DeYoung, of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan posted a long exegesis of Jeff’s spoken word poem. The post was incredibly thorough, examining Jeff’s work verse by verse, and critiquing pretty much every statement. Pastor Kevin wanted to right the misconceptions that Jeff’s poem creates, and he did a good job as the post has been shared on Facebook nearly 40,000 times. But even while Pastor Kevin critiqued, pushed, and prodded at every point of Jeff’s poem, he kept an open-minded, kind, and gentle tone. He modeled how to critique in love.
Well, through the magic of the internet, Jeff somehow found Kevin’s post. Jeff read it. Took it in. And corresponded via phone and email with Pastor Kevin. Jeff did not excoriate the pastor on Facebook, or immediately delete his email. Instead, Jeff carefully considered Kevin’s points, and he re-evaluated his own position. Remember, this is Jeff who just posted a video that received 18 million hits. But, even so, between interviews and morning show appearances, Jeff gave time, thought, and careful reflection to a pastor’s blog post, a pastor who lives thousands of miles away, who he’s never met.
Pastor Kevin, with permission, posted some of Jeff’s initial response via email. I’ll paste it below. Whenever I hear Christians rushing to judgement, or spouting-off anger before they think through a response, I hope I’ll think of this exchange. Thank you, Jeff and Kevin, for modeling humble, open-minded, kind-hearted leadership.
I just wanted to say I really appreciate your article man. It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100%. God has been working with me in the last 6 months on loving Jesus AND loving his church. For the first few years of walking with Jesus (started in ’08) I had a warped/poor paradigm of the church and it didn’t build up, unify, or glorify His wife (the Bride). If I can be brutally honest I didn’t think this video would get much over a couple thousand views maybe, and because of that, my points/theology wasn’t as air-tight as I would’ve liked. If I redid the video tomorrow, I’d keep the overall message, but would articulate, elaborate, and expand on the parts where my words and delivery were chosen poorly… My prayer is my generation would represent Christ faithfully and not swing to the other spectrum….thankful for your words and more importantly thankful for your tone and fatherly like grace on me as my elder. Humbled. Blessed. Thankful for painful growth. Blessings.
Grace and Peace,
Jeff
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Adam – I’ve read your blog for a long time and felt moved to comment by this post!
I agree with DeYoung’s central point that you can’t be a follower of Jesus without the Church. The Church is Christians working together to be the people of God. It provides the context for our ethical life. If you don’t like it, work to make it better. (Full disclosure: I am in my twenties and a member of a Mainline Protestant denomination.)
But, still, having examined (thanks to your post) both sides of this exchange, I think my sympathies remain with the message of Bethke’s original video. First of all, DeYoung’s blog is filled with attacks on Planned Parenthood, exhortations to pastors to tell those “struggling with same-sex attractions” to stick to “Biblical truth,” etc. The tone of these posts is not humble. I don’t mean to impose an ideological litmus test, but in my view, DeYoung is not a good leader for the Church.
More importantly, I don’t see the message of Bethke’s video as being excessively individualist or isolating or solipsistic. I took him to be attacking the visible church, the church as he sees it around him – as people like DeYoung illustrate (to my mind), I think this critique is fair. Bethke never suggests that the Christian life isn’t inherently oriented outwards, towards other people – which to me is the basic ecclesiological axiom.
Finally, as much as I value the institutional church, when people undertake to explicitly defend it (as DeYoung does), it always somehow leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Christians should always be tough, prophetic critics of their own organization. It’s true that the Church hasn’t been catastrophic for the human race, as some, e.g. the New Atheists, claim. It’s also true that lots of bad things have happened because of non-Christians. But this doesn’t yet to me constitute a defense of the Church, except maybe in the context of low-level polemic. To me it makes sense that we should hold the Church to a *much higher* moral standard than all other human institutions. After all, it’s the only one founded by God!