“When a person’s sense of self-worth is
blunted, he will deflect towards power to find fulfilment… That person will look
to power over people to lift his own self-worth.”
—
Viktor Frankl
(1905–1997)
ABUSE
is not always the outcome of a leader’s power, but that is how many of us have
come to experience leadership. (That is
not to say that that type of leadership is leadership — it is dead opposite to
true leadership, which is first servant-hearted.)
There
are many inwardly weak people who present themselves before others parading a
curated image (a term I’ve only just come to appreciate) in order to win favour
for election into positions of power.
They use their apparent personal charm to win their way into power, and
only then resort to positional and coercive powers once they’re established.
The
desire for power is the desire for control over people, and churches will be
rife with that type of leader, because churches are full of people who wish to
be healed of their past abuses. The
tragedy is many people fall foul of an unsafe or an unhealthy leader.
***
Leadership Serves
The
irony of leadership, for my mind, is that the best leaders don’t want the
power, but they’re prepared to accept responsibility for the authority placed
into their hands to serve people. All leadership is service — whether it’s in
the church, parachurch, or in secular life.
The
best training I ever did on leadership was over twenty years ago, and that was a systems model for team leadership and
team membership. The leader was not the
boss who lorded it over their subordinates.
They just had a different role, central of which was to gather data,
make information out of it, and then decide out of the gathered consensuses of
the team what form of action was required.
It’s
dichotomous that leadership would seek or crave power. Leaders just don’t do that.
A
leader is likely to feel called to lead because they have long considered and
prayed over their preparedness to take responsibility and accountability, to
encourage, equip and empower people, and to be least whilst others can have a
turn at being most.
***
The best thing
to do in the presence of unsafe and unhealthy leadership is to work on a viable
exit strategy. A sure sign of an unsafe
leader is their avoidance of accountability, and an unhealthy leader will not have
the capacity for true leadership responsibility.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.
Acknowledgement: Blue, K. Healing
Spiritual Abuse: How to Break Free From Bad Church Experiences. Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993. pp. 102-116.
Image: Mike
Myatt.
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