Christian leadership failures: what’s the cause?

Ed Shaw

What are some of the root causes of the failure of Christian leadership?

Here are three I see:

1. Self-righteousness

Contemporary evangelicals too easily demonstrate ourselves to be the Pharisees when it comes to sex and sexuality. We are often hypocrites – publicly calling others not to do the things we ourselves are doing in private. We set up countless extra-Biblical rules that do nothing but create an atmosphere of fear when it comes to living as the sexual beings God has graciously made us to be. We don’t encourage healthy conversations and confession when it comes to the sexual struggles that we all experience, preferring to keep up the appearance that we have got it all right.

The reality is that we too have got it wrong. All human beings are sinful and sexually broken and that includes us evangelicals as well as ‘liberal homosexuals’. We haven’t been heard to make this basic theological point enough and have created a world in which we are deemed to look down on others from a high vantage point of sexual purity even as our leaders keep tumbling down from that hill of hypocrisy.

2. Biblical illiteracy

If that were not embarrassing enough, we have failed to read and teach the Bible properly. Ironically, a movement that is meant to be all about what the Bible says has not been listening enough to it. When it comes to sex and sexuality we have often only taught what encourages men and women to get married to each other and have shared few of the Bible’s rich resources for living a contented single life. God’s gift of sexuality has become all about finding completion in your ‘other half’, enjoying yourself sexually with them and producing children. Gone has been any sense that sex and sexuality are most of all about advertising God and His love for us and trailing where this world is heading – the ultimate union in difference of God’s Son Jesus to God’s people the church.

This has left anyone unable to marry (or no longer married) as a second-class citizen in many evangelical contexts. It has made them feel trapped with a sexuality that brings nothing but shame into their lives rather than seeing it as a beautiful spiritual resource for them and others. We have left too many people scared of powerful emotions that can and should be used in purposeful ways in the life of every follower of Jesus.

3. Christ-unlikeness

Most of all we have forgotten that the Jesus we follow is a human being and so a sexual being Himself. In Him we have the model of a contented single life, of someone using, limiting, their sexuality to serve others. Just think of how Jesus broke so many of the extra-Biblical rules of evangelicalism whilst remaining the unique human example of sexual purity. We need to become more and more like him in being at ease in our bodies, not just running away from situations that could lead to sin, but instead showing how, with care taken, they can be contexts for good to be done.

It should deeply trouble us that so many of our evangelical churches:

‘…tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.’ (Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.15).

Our biggest problem is that we are not yet enough like Jesus.

Purposeful Sexuality

All of this is why I have recently penned a new book entitled Purposeful Sexuality: A Short Christian Introduction. I write as an evangelical fully persuaded of the beauty of our historic tradition and its Biblical understanding of sexual ethics, but deeply troubled by recent distortions of it. In its 60 or so pages I seek to expose our sexual self-righteousness, our Biblical illiteracy when it comes to the purpose of sex and sexuality, and the need for us all to look to Jesus as the one who both models a healthy sexuality and helps us develop our own.

Turns out that it is just the right time to be an evangelical writing about sex and sexuality – recent events have convinced me how much we all need to hear and act on these much-needed Biblical correctives.