Poor leaders with too much time and too much money on their hands who have no idea how to reach a current lost generation, and no idea how to train their people to live in the Babylon of our big cities, and disciple them beyond an events-based ministry, won’t last. Not that they see it yet themselves. Or if they do they may be thinking like King Hezekiah, that at least it will be peace in their time. These are not leaders who are prepared for wartime. They are peacetime leaders.

The Need For Futureproof Leaders
In my new book Futureproof: How to Live for Jesus in a Culture That Keeps on Changing, I outline the manner in which the seismic shifts in the West are putting pressure on the church as well as the wider culture. And I point out how the church is equipped to deal with these pressures and changes in a way that the world is not. It is Jesus’ church after all.
But there’s a missing component in it, or at least something that I did not emphasise in the book, and that’s the topic of futureproof leadership – the types of leaders that the church is going to need as it goes forward.
Now that’s not to say that my book isn’t applicable to leaders in the church, as I run plenty of seminars for church leaders on the topic. However, it seems to me that the type of leader that the church will need going forward into the “away game” era of Christianity in the West is going to have to be different than in the “home game” era.
Futureproof Leaders Will Know Themselves
The biggest problem facing leadership in my theological tribe is the sheer lack of insight many current leaders have about their poor behaviour and problematic personalities. Too many leaders have low IQs, are insecure, insensitive and unwilling to think that they might need to change. They haven’t done the hard yards of personal self-examination.
But if you get to year fifteen of your ministry and you grumble about the fact that you can’t find good staff who stay for any length of time, then the problem might be you!
I say that off the back of some fairly unhelpful – and downright ungodly – examples of leadership within my own theological orb and experience over the past few years. Indeed the worst leadership examples I have seen, the most insecure and those displaying ungodly attitudes and behaviour, have been within my own tribe. At times it’s been shocking to hear the sheer self-interest and desperate deception being undertaken by terrible leaders whose main agenda is to self-justify and save their own position.
And as someone who has blown the whistle in a very public way in one such case, I have ended up being a person to whom many others who have fallen victim to such ungodly leaders, wend their weary way with equally familiar tales of woe. There’s nothing new or surprising about bad leadership stories. Nothing original.
Of course that’s not to say that such bad leadership is not to be found elsewhere and in other theological structures, and that I just haven’t seen or experienced it because I’m not familiar with other tribes. But it is to say this: the theologically reformed tribe to which I belong can often pride itself on its theological acumen, and not only on the acumen of their theology, but the safety that such acumen brings.
There’s often an implicit – sometimes explicit – understanding and it goes like this:
Now of course there’s some truth to that. Theology shapes practice. And it shapes your heart. But don’t underestimate your hard heart. And don’t underestimate your determination to use your good theology to justify your poor practise. I’ve heard the word “gospel” put in front of so many other words in order to shut down argument, reject correction, and control communities, that I’ve become suspicious of it being used. It’s become the tip of an iceberg that has sunk many a church community ship.
It’s simply not the case that once the North Star of theological orthodoxy is lined up, then the rest will pretty much sort itself out.
So you think your latent psychology, your upbringing, your unspoken expectations, your sinful assumptions, your subterranean drives, the types of people you can work with; all of that will follow in the train of your theological orthodoxy? Not true!
As I have experienced, and as I have heard from dozens of leaders and ex-leaders who have fallen under the wheels of the most theologically orthodox and ardent leaders they have ever known, yet who were at the same time, graceless, insecure, self-interested, greedy and vain, good theology is not enough.
Clearly it’s not enough. Character is so central. And two of the best preachers I have ever heard on an ongoing basis were completely lacking on godly character. Yet somehow their preaching gave them a hall-pass – for a time at least – among those who considered that the good (the public platform) somehow outweighed the bad (the private personality).
How we could ever come to that conclusion given how the God of the Bible constantly warns that he knows the heart, and that he will expose what is done in secret, is kinda beyond me. Yet we have done. And we continue to do.
The sheer shock people express at the huge gap between how they have been treated by a leader, and the leader’s platform or public ministry which ticks all of the theological boxes, is all too common. The questions are always the same: How did this person get into this senior leadership role? How did his or her peers turn a blind eye to allow this to happen? Why, if this person is supposed to be so godly and servant-oriented, are they so ungodly and so greedy for gain?
Now of course this has always been a risk for the church since Diatrophes in 3 John, who “likes to be first”. But from where I am sitting, it’s become an increasing problem. And at a time that the church can hardly afford it.
Futureproof Leaders Will Be Junkyard Dogs
But here’s the good news, I’m starting to meet a generation of leaderships – futureproof leaders – who won’t put up with these flabby vestiges of late Western Christianity. They’re realising that they’re going to have to be braver than many Christian leaders in the recent past.
Futureproof leaders in the churches that flourish will be more junkyard dog than thoroughbred. They won’t be waiting for the conditions to be right to go into leadership.
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For Southern Baptists, adopting a revised and expanded version of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith was not an act of division but a means of ensuring unity. As Mullins explained, he believed it would “clarify the atmosphere and remove the causes of misunderstanding, friction, and apprehension.” The differences between Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions over the past 100 years can be explained many ways—but they cannot be explained apart from the question of confessionalism and the need for doctrinal fidelity. 

One hundred years ago, the nation was gripped by an antagonizing struggle over whether or not a Baptist convention had the authority to disfellowship a church for doctrinal drift. The church in question was the most famous in America—home to the Rockefeller family—and pastored by one of America’s most influential pastors: the brilliant and eloquent Harry Emerson Fosdick. How the Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions responded differently to questions of confessionalism and dissent determined their trajectory for the next century.
The question is, have we learned from their mistakes, or are we doomed to repeat them?
In 1925, the famous Park Avenue Baptist Church of New York City called Harry Emerson Fosdick to succeed the liberal Cornelius Woelfkin as pastor. Though ordained a Baptist, Fosdick had previously been preaching minister at New York’s First Presbyterian Church, until coming under investigation by the local presbytery for his liberal doctrinal views. Fosdick hoped that the autonomous nature of Baptist churches would provide greater freedom for advocating modernist positions.
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Homeschooled children are certainly not immune from depression or other forms of mental illness, but their situation allows for greater social stability and positive interaction in the face of COVID-19. Their social circle is founded not on a massive faceless institution, but on the more intimate confines of the home and family. The greater degree of control that responsible parents have over the social circle of their homeschooled children both expands the number and types of people they interact with while limiting negative socialization.

After more than a year of remote learning, students in New York City finally went back to school. Sadly, the city’s Department of Education fear of COVID-19 and servitude to teachers’ unions means that these schools will more closely resemble Siberian gulags than places of learning.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Post details the ridiculous lengths that many of Gotham’s schools are going to in order to defeat the virus, including “masked and distanced” recess, health concerns over many sports and other extracurricular activities that require “increased exhalation,” and the cancellation of field trips, group projects, and class parties. Despite returning to school, New York City kids are still forbidden from connecting meaningfully with their peers.
Ask any homeschooling parent to discuss the pushback that he’s received from friends and family over the years and he’ll tell you that the need for his children to be “properly socialized” has topped the list of concerns. “How will your kids learn to interact with different kinds of people if they don’t go to school?” these mostly well-meaning people ask, implying that learning at home will doom your children to a life of misanthropic isolation.
The long-standing myth that homeschooled children grow up to be socially awkward is easily debunked because it proceeds from the false (indeed, patently absurd) premise that, prior to the advent of mass public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century, children did not learn to get along with either their peers or other social groups.  This myth persists despite multiple studies that reveal that a majority of homeschooled children are just as well-socialized (or even better socialized) than their public school peers.  The socialization process is somewhat different for homeschooling parents, but these differences (largely in parental supervision and diversity of age range in social groups) are key benefits of homeschooling, not flaws.
For decades, members of the educational establishment have used the need for socialization to argue that kids are better off in government-run schools than being taught at home. Recent developments in American education during the Age of COVID, however, reveal that this argument is not just fundamentally flawed, but officially dead.
Newsflash: Masks and Social Distancing Make Socialization Difficult
Claims about the social benefits of modern K-12 education never made much sense to begin with. In this model, instead of organically meeting and interacting with others through a variety of community institutions (neighborhoods, churches, etc.), children spend most of their social time being forced to engage with a very small subset of individuals: those who were born within a few months of them.
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