Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Take Me To Your Leader

This is a good post about the spate of "Jesus and Corporate Leadership Tips and Tricks" literature out there in the evangelical world: Jesus is not a CEO.

To add to what the author said, I think one of the fundamental errors most pastoral leadership litertature makes is beginning with an assumption akin to philosophical pragmatism.

Pragmatism is a distinctly American philosophy, "who can argue with success?" It is a view that sees success and numerical results as more important than abstract concepts like "truth" or "morality." The most recent philosophical pragmatist, Richard Rorty, famously wrote, "truth is what your peers let you get away with."

Though very few evangelical pastors are hard-core pragmatists, they are primarily concerned with measurable results nonetheless. And that makes them vulnerable to bad philosophy.

Enter the concept of Jesus as corportate leader. If successful corporations are our measure of accomplishment, and we want to be successful leaders following Christ, we are tempted (deeply tempted) to view Jesus as a successful corportat CEO.

Ultimately, it is a deep corruption of the life of Christ and the Kingdom of God here on earth.