The Holy Spirit does two things: inspires the writing of Scripture and indwells the people of God. As a corollary of both, he carries the divine writings into the hands of his people and guides them, as a people, in their interpretation. Scripture and Church, therefore, stand in harmony. 

Early on in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in its completed 1559 edition), he discusses the authority of Scripture. After describing humanity’s natural sense of divinity (sensus divinitatis), Calvin turns to the necessity of the Word of God for saving revelation due to humanity’s clouded judgment. In order to establish Scripture’s authority, he first attempts to rebut the claim of the Roman Church that the authority of the Bible depends upon “the consent of the church.”[1] In seeking to secure the tyrannical claim that “the church has authority in all things,” his opponents trust more in the judgment of men than in the truth of God.[2]
Scripture, for Calvin, bears witness to its own authority. Since its source is divine, it exhibits the marks of divinity. Indeed, Scripture, he claims, is “self-authenticated” (autopiston).[3] “It is not right,” therefore, “to subject it to proof and reasoning,” or, more basically, to any judgment of men.[4] To ask for external verification for the truth and validity of the Bible is like asking, “Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?”[5] As Calvin puts it plainly, “Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.”[6] Insofar as Scripture is concerned—putting to the side for a moment the question of individual apprehension—its authority is unquestionable. It is an obvious fact. Just as one could not describe the color black—“…it just is!”—so he cannot attempt to “prove” Scripture’s veracity.
What are we to make of disagreements among men concerning the truth (or lack thereof) of Holy Scripture? The answer lies in the internal testimony of the Spirit. According to Calvin, “the same Spirit . . . who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.”[7] In other words, the authority of Scripture, since it is self-validated, cannot depend upon human judgments for its vindication. “We ought to seek our conviction,” rather, “in a higher place than human reasons, judgments, or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.”[8] Thus, those who do not acknowledge what is plainly true about the authority of Scripture have simply not received the illumination of the Holy Spirit. But on the other hand, “those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly taught truly rest upon Scripture.”[9] The reception of the Spirit’s internal witness is the dividing line between those who recognize Scripture’s authority and those who do not.
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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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It speaks to us as members of Christ’s body in local congregations. It’s not about how I as an individual can have my own pastoral care ministry as a lone ranger helping our most deeply troubled people, but about how whole church fellowships can work together. This is real love in action in true community in a way that nothing else matches. Anywhere.

There are at least three reasons it’s worth reading this new book on helping people with mental health struggles.
1. Mental Health and Your Church is written for ‘ordinary church members.’ It contextualises the intensely practical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. It takes seriously the biblical teaching on mutual care for each other in all sorts of challenging life circumstances, applying it wisely to the complexities of 21st century churches. These complexities include an apparent increase in mental health disorders and the relatively recent rise of a growing, predominately secular, mental health system that operates in areas that overlap the traditional concerns of Christian growth and ministry. And there are historical weaknesses in training pastors to equip themselves and their people in all that biblical pastoral care entails. We do need to know how to do more than listening, prayer, and referral—as important as those things are![1]
2. Authors Helen Thorne and Steve Midgley write from a UK context. It seems to me that Brits and Aussies have some things in common that we don’t always share with the various American sub-cultures that influence our pastoral care models. So, it’s just nice to see some different ways to do things that resonate with my feel for what church life is like in Australia—or what it could be.
3. Before going into pastoral ministry, ending up as rector of Christ Church, Midgley was a Cambridge-educated medical doctor who trained in psychiatry. He clearly retains a good appreciation of the value of his former profession—along with some of its limitations. This ‘insiders’ view is so important. As such, this is not a book aiming to take over or replace psychiatry. It is positively written to help equip our churches do all they can do to help in addition to what professional mental health services can offer.
What’s in it?
It’s a small book of around 180 pages divided roughly equally into three main sections:
Section 1 on understanding mental illness carefully explains what mental illnesses are. It considers mental health issues, talking therapies, and medications from a Christian worldview perspective that I found, as a Christian counsellor and medical practitioner, to be balanced.
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