A Crisis of Leadership and the Elder Solution (Part 1): Theology Is Upstream
We don’t muddle through life trying to make the best of things without a robust dependence on the Word of God as it proclaims the lordship of Christ, only at the end to say, “Oh yes, and one more thing, this is how you can be saved.” The grand redemptive narrative of our Trinitarian God, as it is revealed in the Bible, is the primary way we are to make sense of all the world, whether it is currently occupied by pagan leaders or those who claim Christ. As that narrative clearly says, sin and the dominion of Satan are the problem, and Christ is the conquering solution. This means that leadership problems are ultimately spiritual problems that require theological solutions.
There is a crisis of leadership. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or alarmist. I’m not selling a grift course on how to solve all our leadership challenges. And I didn’t create a leadership assessment tool to unlock your potential. I don’t have a leadership degree from an Ivy League school plagued with leadership malfeasance (and I don’t want one). I am trying to be a realist. And we do actually have a significant global problem that bandies the word leadership around like being a leader is an essential human right. To highlight the problem, let’s say you’re going to have a conversation with a friend a few minutes after you read this essay. Your friend will start the conversation by saying, “I just read a news article about a well-known leader.” What do you think will follow that statement? The leader’s sordid financial dealings? A sexual scandal? A report on his gross incompetence? Accusations of plagiarism? A pattern of crude and abrasive language directed toward employees and colleagues? How far down the list do you need to go before you guess that your friend really wanted to tell you about the leader’s virtue, altruism, or skill at his profession? I’d guess it would be pretty far down the list. Even when we look at the leadership of clergy, men who used to be considered paragons of virtue in a culture, we find a similar problem.1 And to that, you might respond that it is only due to the media’s propensity to publish the salacious. To that, I’d say, “yes,” and “maybe.” But beyond media coverage, what is your personal experience of folks who go by the moniker “leader”? When we’re honest, we notice a strange tension. On the one hand, leaders have never had more access to leadership training, certificate accrual, books, or podcasts. Forbes reports that leadership development is a $366 billion industry. Someone is paying an NFL franchise-sized amount of money to grow as a leader. At the same time, leaders are struggling and not improving as leaders. In other words, in the face of enormous (faux) resources, leaders are actually getting worse and quitting in record numbers. Yes, there is a problem—in our culture and in the church.
Not the Problem You Thought
No, you did not make a mistake and visit the Drucker-Lencioni Weekly. This is a theological journal. And I’m not going to make the same argument that many make. The typical take on leadership issues (which also surface in the church) is that they are best sorted out at the corporation level and then applied piecemeal to the church. In this view, the church is downstream from where the real leadership work is being done—in very large secular institutions. In fact, the modern idea is that the church is so far downstream from secular leadership that it is a minor tributary tucked away in the reeds and marsh. The church is a kind of niché leadership environment, an oddity of low consequence to modern leadership concerns. So once the adults have figured out what plagues leaders, they’ll let the kids in on what might work for them in the church. I’d like to argue that this is entirely backward and has been for a very long time.2 This is why when most pastors want to study leadership, they read business books that are five years old or older.
I contend that the leadership crisis is a theological problem, that theological problems are always upstream from practical problems, that theological solutions are always primary, and that they tell us how to form and apply practical principles. The church (should be) is upstream from every form of instantiated secular leadership. That doesn’t mean that Microsoft would make a bazillion more dollars if the Bibles were on the desks of every VP, though I would be thrilled to find out that a Bible was on the desk of every VP at Microsoft. The Bible doesn’t work that way. But the Bible does reveal Jesus and the theology that describes his person and work. And that theology governs the world in which all of us live. It describes the world not as we’d like it to be but as it is. It describes the plight of every leader, no matter what his faith commitments are. It describes the general human condition, whether that human is a leader, CEO, VP, manager, colleague, or client. So, I believe one of the major reasons that leaders are struggling today isn’t just because of a post-COVID workplace filled with DEI-silliness, ESG regulations, and corporate greed. The problem is that we aren’t solving modern problems with correct solutions.
And I should add that upstream theology trumps any non-theologically based solution—conservative, liberal, left, or right. Many on the right want to return to the founding fathers, Classical literature, or the Great Books. These solutions aren’t necessarily bad3 but are incomplete and ultimately unable to solve what ails our leaders. They are giving out bandaids to treat cancer. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics are rather profound for a pagan and can make your immediate life and workplace a significantly better working environment compared to the morass that passes as wisdom today. Plato’s Republic is rather insightful as age-old wisdom for ordering loosely associated people. But even the (secular Greco-Roman) classics of Western Civilization are downstream from Christian theology. Christian theology takes precedence.
Returning Christian theology in general, and as it speaks to leaders and organizations specifically, to its rightful place as divinely revealed wisdom, centered on Christ, and able to equip the Christian for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16) has significant import for addressing what we’re currently facing in the crisis of leadership. This reorientation frees pastors from a schizophrenic mindset that attempts to reconcile Bavinck and Maxwell. It provides the watching world with wisdom and truth that are solely accessible through the church. It restores the church elder to the prominence in society that Jesus intended, if not in status, then definitely in influence. It guards against baptizing general leadership principles with biblical footnotes and calling it Christian. Ultimately, it recognizes that there is one great leader, one great king, and his name is Jesus. But before we get to solutions, we need to parse out this idea of revelation a bit more.
General and Special Revelation
To be more precise with my upstream-downstream analogy, the church has inverted general and special revelation when it comes to considering leadership. The world will always do this, as we’ll see, because all they have access to is general revelation and because special revelation looks foolish or weak to them (1 Cor. 1:20–25). That is expected. What is not expected is for the church to go along with this switcharoo, which we have. If you have turtled your boat and want to correct the problem, an essential thing to know is the deck from the hull. And yet, when considering issues around leadership—in society and in pastoral ministry—the church has been sailing along on a capsized ship, wondering why things aren’t going so well.
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Parsing Reverence with the Past
Our contemporary debate about expressions of reverence may not be a question of interchangeable external gestures between different “styles” of music and expression. It may be because, as secular writer John McWhorter suggests, our entire culture is discarding the formal for the colloquial, the reverent for the casual. We’ve become, as a people, irreverent.
Resolving the debate over expressions of reverence is difficult. More than one reason could account for a clash in expressions of reverence between ethnicities, or even between generations of people belonging to the same ethnicity or culture.
First, there can simply be ethnolinguistic differences. Gestures, like words, function as signs and symbols of deeper realities. Different words that point to the same reality are not contradictory. They merely require translation. One culture might see standing as respectful, while the other sees remaining seated as respectful. While it is impossible to do both at the same time, translation would enable the two cultures to see that respect was the goal of the differing gestures. This difference in expression for the same meaning is not fundamentally problematic for reverence. The next two reasons, however, are.
Second, there can ignorance over meaning. Children are often rude, not out of a desire to offend, but because of ignorance of the forms and conventions that characterise polite company. This ignorance often continues in adults and their sub-cultures, who grow older in total ignorance of the meaning of respect, reverence, and of the forms that express it. This ignorance does not constitute total innocence on their part, for the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and self-understanding is an obligation laid upon every thinking man.
Imagine, for a moment, a biker gang that greets one another with an obscene hand gesture. They understand the offensiveness of the gesture in biker sub-culture, and delight in the very coarseness of making an insult into a greeting. By some strange machination of pop culture and mass media, this greeting finds its way into mainstream life, and after a few years, polite adults are now using this hand gesture to greet one another. Question: are the polite adults guilty of disrespect and coarseness? The answer is that they are, and they do not realise it. Their ignorance of the meaning of the gesture does not change its meaning; it only makes them foolish for adopting what they do not understand. This is true of musical forms, poetic forms, word connotations, slang, dress, body piercings or markings, hair, tone of voice and many other media of meaning. Now, it may be true that after many decades of use, the gesture is so widespread that its original obscene meaning fades altogether (assuming there was nothing obviously and intrinsically obscene in it). At this point, the culpability for using what was originally rude is no longer present. Except where the meaning is intrinsic, meaning does change with time.
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Morning & Evening in the PCA
It is clear that the evening worship service is not widely known in the PCA. Introducing regular evening services will take patience and encouragement to teach members about the blessing of worshiping together morning and evening. Through our surveys of church websites, we were encouraged to see many churches offer a regular meeting on Sunday evenings if not a full service, including hymn sings, prayer meetings, or catechism classes.
Perhaps one of the greatest blessings of the Christian faith is the blessing of the Lord’s Day, setting aside one day in seven to gather with God’s people for His worship. The conviction that the Lord’s Day ought to be set aside for worship is why at one time it was the near-universal practice of Reformed churches to gather for both morning and evening worship on Sundays.Regrettably, the practice is no longer common in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). According to a recent project led by Justin Andrusk to collect comprehensive data on the prevalence of morning and evening worship in the PCA, only 238 of 1930 churches (12.3%) listed in the PCA directory report having both morning and evening worship services regularly.
The Case for Morning and Evening Worship
The Bible makes a strong case for gathering twice on the Lord’s Day. The Bible is bookended with the rhythms of morning-and-evening (Gen. 1; Ex. 20:11; Rev. 4:8, 7:15). Throughout the Old Testament, it was the practice of the Israelites to worship God morning and evening, as evidenced by morning and evening sacrifices (e.g., Ex. 29:39) and psalms for morning and evening worship (Pss. 92, 134). After the Resurrection, Christ appeared to His disciples on the first day of the week in the morning and in the evening (John 20). In connection with the Resurrection, the early church began to meet on the first day (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10; cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism 59).The historic practice of gathering for morning and evening worship continued with the Protestant Reformation. According to the Westminster Standards, the whole day is to be spent “in the public and private exercises of God’s worship” (WSC 60; Westminster Larger Catechism 117; Westminster Confession of Faith XXI.8). The Directory for the Public Worship of God of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church states that it is “highly advisable that a congregation assemble for public worship at the beginning and the ending of the Lord’s Day” (I.A.4.b). Similarly, the Directory of Public Worship of the Reformed Presbyterian Church North America records that “the session should carefully consider whether a second meeting should be held” (2.F-9).
Morning and Evening Worship in the PCA
While anecdotally, the view is held that morning and evening worship is not as common in the PCA as it is in other Reformed and Presbyterian denominations (such as the OPC or the RPCNA), data on the prevalence of morning and evening worship in the PCA has never before been recorded. To collect this data, we visited every church website in the church directory and counted by presbytery the number of websites mentioning both a morning and evening worship service.
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The Dispensational Interpretation of the Revelation, with Amillennarian Replies
Praiseworthy as they are for their strong commitment to an inspired and perspicuous Bible, our dispensational brothers have stumbled badly in their interpretation of (OTKP and) the Revelation. Given the widespread popularity of this interpretation, it will serve us well to summarize the reasons why. First, they have misunderstood the intended audience of the book, which is the Church, the whole Church, and nothing but the Church. The future of ethnic Israel is nowhere in view.
Note: This essay is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Gist of the Revelation: An Amillennial Overview of the Grand Finale of All Scripture (Redemption Press)
Here is a key to a few of the acronyms used in the book and the essay below:
DNT = The Didactic New Testament (i.e., the distinctly teaching portions of the gospels, Acts, and the epistles)
EOP = Era of (Gospel) Proclamation (i.e., the season of Christ’s heavenly mediatorial reign, stretching from Pentecost to the Consummation at his return in glory, during which the Church proclaims to gospel to the nations)
OTKP = Old Testament Kingdom Prophecy (i.e., OT prophecies fulfilled post-Pentecost, speaking typologically and figuratively of New Covenant realities, and needing to be interpreted accordingly)Why does Dispensationalism have such a powerful grip on the evangelical imagination?
One answer—and perhaps the most important—is the apparent harmony between the dispensational interpretation of Daniel 9:24–27 (i.e., the prophecy of the seventy sevens) and the structure and contents of the Revelation. In the eyes of the dispensationalist, these two texts seem so clearly to confirm each other that the truth of his theological system cannot possibly be in doubt, no matter what the DNT may have to say about the central themes of biblical eschatology: the nature and structure of the Kingdom of God, the nature and structure of the Consummation, and the proper NT method of interpreting OT Kingdom prophecies.
I reckon this perceived harmony to be an illusion, an illusion that compromises biblical truth and works positive harm to God’s people. In this essay I do what I can to dispel it, hoping to win my dispensational brothers back to the classic amillennial faith of our Protestant forefathers, and to the one true Blessed Hope of the Church.
The journey here will involve three steps. First, we’ll look briefly at the dispensational interpretation of Daniel 9:24-27. Next, we’ll discuss the dispensational interpretation of the Revelation, spotlighting its (alleged) connections with Daniel’s prophecy and offering amillennial correctives. Finally, we’ll inquire as to exactly why our dispensational brothers have so egregiously misunderstood the Grand Finale of all Scripture.
The Dispensational Interpretation of Daniel’s Seventy Sevens
Here, from the mouth an imaginary dispensationalist, is a short statement of the standard dispensational interpretation of Daniel 9:24–27:
The theme of the prophecy is not the future of spiritual Israel (i.e., the Church), but rather of ethnic Israel, the physical seed of Abraham. Daniel’s people and Daniel’s city are not spiritually circumcised Jews and Gentiles, but the Jewish race and their historic capital (9:24). Throughout OT times, God promised the latter a theocratic kingdom, to be mediated by his Messiah. But before ethnic Israel can enter the promised Kingdom Age, it must first traverse Daniel’s “seventy sevens.” These are weeks of calendar years, totaling 490. The sixty-nine weeks of verse 25 began with Artaxerxes’s decree to rebuild Jerusalem (445 BC); they ended at the birth (or triumphal entry) of Christ. Verse 26 gives us the events of the sixty-ninth week: the week in which Christ was rejected, and after which the Roman general Titus came and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. But just here, something unexpected happens: God (through Gabriel) suddenly leaps over the entire Church Age (now some two thousand years long), thereby keeping his dealings with his heavenly people (i.e., the Church) a mystery later to be unveiled by Christ. Accordingly, verse 27 gives us future events set to occur during the seventieth week: the week that follows the Secret Rapture of the Church. Once that occurs, “God’s prophetic time clock” will begin to tick again. That is, he will now resumes his dealings with the (physical) sons of Abraham.
This week of seven years is called the Tribulation. At the beginning of the Tribulation, the Antichrist will make a covenant with ethnic Israel. In the middle of the week he will break it, suppressing Jewish worship, and defiling the (restored) Jewish temple. This marks the beginning of the Great Tribulation, which will last a literal three and a half years. At their end, Christ will return in glory, destroy the Antichrist, and welcome the Jewish saints and gentile converts who have survived the Tribulation into the promised Kingdom Age. According to Revelation 20, it will last 1000 literal years.1
The Dispensational Interpretation of the Revelation, With Amillennarian Replies
We turn now to the dispensational interpretation of the Revelation. In the paragraphs ahead I will give the gist of the dispensational interpretation of each section of the Revelation. Then, in italics, I will offer an amillennarian reply. Along the way I will point out how the dispensationalist’s interpretation of Daniel 9:24-27 controls his thinking about the Revelation, and explain why I believe his conclusions are in error.
Dispensational Teaching
Chapter 1 of the Revelation gives us a vision of the exalted Christ, the One who will first bring to pass God’s purpose for the Church (chapters 2–5), and thereafter God’s purpose for ethnic Israel and the believing nations who survive the Tribulation (chapters 6–20).
Amillennarian Reply
Yes, chapter 1 gives us a revelation of the exalted Christ, the Lord of the remainder of Salvation History. But no, the book does not give us God’s twofold purpose and plan, first for the Church, and then for ethnic Israel. Rather, it gives us God’s singular purpose and plan for his one and only people: the Church, comprised of elect Jews and Gentiles of all times. Here, however, the emphasis falls upon God’s New Covenant people, whom the High King of heaven will empower to make their difficult spiritual pilgrimage through the Era of Gospel Proclamation.
Dispensational Teaching
Chapters 2–3 give us the Lord’s messages to the seven churches of Asia. Real as those churches were, they also symbolize the universal Church, and (for those of us who lean to an historicist interpretation of the Revelation) the historical stages through which she must pass over the course of the Church Age. This age is the “mystery parenthesis” that neither Daniel nor any of the other the OT prophets foresaw. It is the age that Christ unveiled when, in anticipation of his rejection by Israel, he said, “I will build my Church” (Matt. 16:18). Thus, in chapters 2–3, Christ is speaking to the Church, about the Church during the Church Age. Soon, however, he will be speaking to Israel, about Israel (and the nations) during the Tribulation, and on into the Millennium.
Amillennarian Reply
Yes, the true nature of the Church, as the spiritual Body of the Messiah, was a mystery hidden from the OT prophets (Eph. 3:1-13). However, the prophets did indeed foresee the Church, and were moved by the Spirit to speak about her, albeit under a veil of OT imagery (e.g., Isa. 60; Jer. 3:16-18; Ezek. 37-48). And this is true of the prophet Daniel himself, who was speaking about the Church in Daniel 9:25b–27! As for the Revelation, in chapters 2–3 the High Prophet of heaven speaks to the Church about the various strengths and weaknesses she will manifest during her pilgrimage to the World to Come. Then, in chapters 6–20 he speaks to her about the persons, powers, events, and institutions she will encounter along the way. In the Revelation, ethnic Israel is never in view, whereas Israel’s antitype, the true spiritual Church, is always and only in view.
Dispensational Teaching
In chapters 4–5 we have John’s vision of heaven, its occupants, and the worship with which they fill it. The apostle hears a voice, saying, “Come up here” (4:1).
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