The heart of the book describes the “slippery slope” from the accountability, transparency, plurality and embodiment that characterizes legitimate leadership to the murky world of dysfunctional, illegitimate leadership. Honeysett describes the slide as the replacement of transparency with secrecy and concealment, the cutting off of any meaningful collegiality, leading to leadership isolation, power imbalances from “on-high” and the corruption of accountability through concealment and cover up.

Powerful Leaders?: When Church Leadership Goes Wrong and How to Prevent It. Marcus Honeysett. London: IVP, 2022.
Books about Christian leadership are commonplace. Marcus Honeysett’s Powerful Leaders? provides an instant contrast to the legion of these I have read. He summarizes the common approach that describes leadership as “influence.” The popular guide to business negotiation, Getting to “Yes” comes to mind. According to that book, the purpose of negotiation is “getting what you want.” Like so many Christian leadership treatments, the point revolves around accumulating sufficient influence to get Christian churches or parachurches to do what a leader or leaders want. In the popular understanding of leadership, skills and competence prevail.
Honeysett fires his first shot over that bow quoting Mark 9:35: “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all” (NASB). Citing Jesus’ rebuking the apostles’ ambition in James and John, Honeysett says bluntly that Christian leaders are not “Jesus’ top generals”. Rather, Christians in leadership positions are led by the Holy Spirit to create bodies of “Christ-besotted worshippers.” Leaders are servants fundamentally, under-shepherds to bring the flock to feed on God. Skills and competence lack the moral leverage to produce the kind of deep, spiritual Christ-followers that are needed.
The popular focus on influence rather than spiritual embodiment in leaders creates people who develop churches that do not reflect their creator, but rather look like their leaders. In Honeysett’s words, the wolves in sheep’s clothing we are aware of are far less dangerous than the wolves in shepherd’s clothing. False sheep do less damage than false shepherds.
The Bible’s treatment of leadership is clear but complex. Leadership, under God’s direction, can be a blessing, but the Bible has just as many examples of ungodly leaders and false shepherds as it has good ones. Leadership, therefore, can be a blessing or a curse.
The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.
“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: As I live, declares the Lord GOD, surely because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild beasts, since there was no shepherd, and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep, therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: Thus says the Lord GOD, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep. No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them (Ezekiel 34:1-10).
Regardless of the apparent risks, God desires and appoints leaders who can indeed represent his will faithfully to his people. In other words, good leaders represent and reflect God to them.
Jesus himself is described as leader and savior by Stephen (Acts 5:30-31). He is the leader who leads by serving however (LK 22: 26-27). Other leaders may be like David, a commander of his people (Isa. 55:3-4), whose flawed hearts belong to God and, in the presence of sin and personal failure, they model lives of repentance for us. Hezekiah modeled repentance and humility so that God saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians. His brilliant leadership had nothing to do with the rescue. God merely heard the prayer of a heartbroken king and rescued his people (2 Kgs 2:1-6). The Book of Judges is filled with leaders, both good and bad (but mostly bad).
The Bible also distinguishes between leaders and elders. Neither were primarily administrators. Churches today blur the clear distinctions between scribal or administrative oversight functions from the core descriptions and responsibilities of elders and leaders, but elders in particular. It seems to me that lumping the categories of leader (especially understood as influencer), elder, and administrator, we create serious risks for cross-contamination.
Honeysett notes that biblical leaders in the church today are those who nourish and equip the flock. Implicit in this is the requirement of leaders such as elders to actually know their own people well enough to encourage and equip them. Equipping itself is an active term. Those who equip are actively equipping. This level of interaction takes time and trust. If either are not present, the leadership enterprise fails. There are no substitutes for shepherds for time and trust.
The author introduces us to four features in the church that safeguard the godly integrity of leadership and protect the body from leadership misuse. These are (1) accountability, (2) plurality, (3) transparency, and (4) embodiment.
Leaders’ lives must be open books lived in the midst of the congregation (2 Tim. 3:10). Their leadership is not characterized by decisions made offsite behind closed doors in secret. In other words, leadership is fundamentally formal and it is not easy. The point Honeysett makes is that creating leadership that is primarily informal and relational tempts leaders to make expedient decisions that bypass normal channels of checks, balances, and oversight. Appropriate leadership is a difficult balance and in need of constant maintenance. It also places leaders under pressure because distance from the battlefield is harder to come by. The good news, however, is that it drives leaders into deeper relationships with Christ through prayer, genuine friendships (rather than tactical ones), and the Word. As a pastor, I know that a frequent, though unnecessary, casualty of ministry is an active and vibrant spiritual life. In order to achieve appropriate accountability, leaders need to be transparent and the only way to achieve this is by guarding and building up the heart.
Honeysett separates accountability from transparency in his list, but they logically interrelate. The difference, he explains later in his book, is seen in accountability being linked primarily to formal structures that ensure it. Visibility and transparency are virtues, but adequate means must be implemented to ensure the integrity of the exercise of leadership. Who oversees the leadership? In our case, we have a Book of Church Order that augments the Westminster Standards and, underneath that as a foundation, the Bible itself. In other words, there are three tiers of formal, directive oversight. But these are all self-reporting. In other words, leaders are responsible primarily to themselves and each other for conformity to the rules. If the inner circle of leaders is functioning well, the leaders hold each other to account.
As a Presbyterian teaching elder, plurality just makes sense. It distributes the load better. It ensures that every conflict in a church is not Bill contra mundum. In other words, every difference of opinion is not personal. It also creates a greater opportunity for wisdom through a plurality of wise counselors. That is the theory at least. Part of Honeysett’s purpose is to also describe what happens when pluralities become ineffective or even harmful. For the moment, it is important to grasp that plural leadership was intended to bless not curse. It can be a beautiful thing.
A potential complication results when the small group of leaders/elders is geographically separated from accountability to the wider sphere of leaders. Isolated churches easily develop dysfunctional social, cultural, and leadership patterns. When all you know is who you are, you become the new normal. In these cases, it is incumbent on local leadership to reach out and create wider webs of effective accountability. In other words, if you are ineffectively overseen, though, on paper, it seems that you are, go the extra mile to erect formal, visible procedures with the authorities over you. The absence of these leads to breakdowns in leadership and that means ineffective shepherding.
Embodiment means that leadership is actively on display in the church community. You can see it exercised in the midst of the people. People see decisions being made publicly. Shepherds shepherd visibly. People know exactly what kinds of things their shepherds do. As a missionary, I became acquainted with what sociologists and anthropologists term ‘power distance.” It describes the gap between leaders and followers in terms of power or influence. In a Presbyterian church, there is a difference between elders and members but not an extreme one. The elders are, after all, representatives to God from among the people themselves. Elders are representatives of the people to God and from God to their people.
The heart of the book describes the “slippery slope” from the accountability, transparency, plurality and embodiment that characterizes legitimate leadership to the murky world of dysfunctional, illegitimate leadership. Honeysett describes the slide as the replacement of transparency with secrecy and concealment, the cutting off of any meaningful collegiality, leading to leadership isolation, power imbalances from “on-high” and the corruption of accountability through concealment and cover up.
So much of this is familiar to me. I am an old man. My wife and I have pastored churches, and been pastored in many others. We have seen the good and the bad. I have trained church planters on five continents for over 20 years. In a way, I did not need too many illustrations to understand Honeysett’s argument. What makes the book special, I would add, indispensable, however, is it’s careful description of the transitions from legitimate  to illegitimate, from godly shepherding to abuse. The identification of the slippery slope is the book’s greatest value.
The slide from transparent legitimate authority to leadership characterized by personal power, insecurity and self-protection takes a number of forms. Honeysett describes “regulatory capture” for example that takes place when the leader and the men who oversee him become too closely and relationally intertwined. In this case, the leader and those holding him accountable become so close that accountability becomes meaningless. Analogously, when the leader becomes too closely aligned with the dominant culture of the church and its “priests”, honest critique becomes impossible.
The first step in the slippery slope is often the “non-transparent use of relational authority”. Honeysett quotes Chuck DeGroat’s description of “fauxnerability.” In this case, a leader calculatedly showcases vulnerability and “messiness” in order to gain sympathy with people. It is designed to increase personal influence by showing people how human and vulnerable one is, even though the calculated nature of its use demonstrates an intelligent intention to deceive. The author juxtaposes this performance with 2 Corinthians 4:2 which condemns such displays of deception. Why do it though? Why mischaracterize yourself?
It is motivated by a desire to manipulate people to get what you want. Leaders corrupt their offices and the structures of the church when they attempt to informally and non-visibly take control of the life of the church, its procedures and policies. I think Honeysett’s general point is that it does not make much difference whether that manipulation is a tendency baked into the personalities of individual leaders or it emerges as an expedient in order to be more efficient. In other words, leaders with extreme issues such as personality disorder and “normal” men who mean well, will stoop to unwise methods that result in dysfunctional leadership. It is a slippery slope. Anyone can get out of control and crash when sufficient care is not exercised.
Eventually, the systems of oversight in the church or organization shift subtly from protecting “gospel integrity” to protecting the underlying organizational culture and its leaders. It becomes an ecosystem of dysfunction and deceit. It’s participants, members and leaders alike, may not recognize what has happened to them. It becomes, in that sense, truly lost. It turns in on itself. Maintaining the system replaces shepherding God’s people. Honeysett’s work has the virtue of describing two sets of circumstances. One is an extreme example with leaders who are, in effect, predators. They can correspond to the high-profile cases that litter the news. The other example is of good people who make bad decisions that develop dysfunctional momentum as things race to the bottom. This, I believe, is far more common and far more tragic in the sense that it is so preventable.
Men become wolves who speed the decline of their ministries and their churches by looking and sounding just like godly sheep. Honeysett cites Jude of those that say good things and look good but only show their genuine selves when they are challenged or cornered. Winsomeness becomes coercion if the leaders’ control is challenged. The need to maintain control leads to even greater isolation and secrecy. Challenging the status quo becomes dangerous and an arsenal of tactics can be unleashed in order to smother dissent. Social isolation becomes a potent weapon in intimidating any potential whistleblowers. Critics become invisible to both the leaders and, by design, to everyone else. The author uses a psychological acronym to describe the approach to silencing dissent. DARVO: denying that anything is wrong, attacking the challenger, and reversing the roles of the victim with the offender are practiced to maintain control.
The author describes church cultures (tribes) as “echo chambers” who become more concerned with maintaining the social order than they are with the people that inhabit them. They become analogous to bodies whose aggressive, over-stimulated immune systems kill them rather than the disease they try to defend themselves from. The church devolves into group think that challenges critical examination or internal reformation.
The final part of the book contains a series of questions that can easily become checklists for leaders and members to diagnose the health of their churches. These are useful in facing who you are or have become. Implicit in them are also approaches that can be undertaken to repent and rebuild. Honeysett has given the church an incredible gift in helping each church see itself as a particular, and in some ways, unique, culture. There are patterns of relationships and structures of influence that not only created it but serve as control mechanisms over it. The title Powerful Leaders? itself becomes a somewhat ambiguous statement. Do distorted leaders distort the church or does the church distort them? Do these coercive, manipulative men own the systems that oversee or are they owned by them?
Honeysett describes healthy churches as analogous to healthy biological cells that are semi-permeable. They filter out harmful elements but are open to outside influences that promote their health. The lack of dynamic exchange between the inside and outside  leads to “fossilization”. These churches fail to change and therefore cannot grow. As Honeysett says, “willful blindness becomes genuine blindness.” Churches are frozen in time, having chosen to maintain a fictional view of themselves. He does not, however, think that things have to end up in that sorry state. They can thrive if they reject the impulse to perpetuate the cultural “pecking orders,” “repenting often, forgiving often and delighting themselves in the Lord.”
That is, in effect, the bottom line. Healthy churches know the Lord. Prayer and repentance drive them. They are clear about their mission and their beliefs. They have relatively little cross-contamination. They live in the world but they are not intimidated or attracted by it. Powerful Leaders make a spectacularly useful contribution toward reminding churches of their priorities and the pitfalls associated with forgetting them. I highly recommend it.
Bill Nikides is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as a church planting strategist with Reformed Evangelistic Fellowship.
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Evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. 

Two Questions on Authority
Over the last several years, American evangelicalism has become increasingly divided. And while that claim is certainly nothing new—particularly for readers of American Reformer—what’s particularly striking about this rift is how ambiguously defined the core concern still seems to be. Political commentators, to be sure, have been keen to lay the blame at President Donald Trump’s feet, arguing that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were crucial litmus tests.1 But that causal story does little to explain why these disagreements have lingered into 2022, with Trump no longer on the ballot. Whatever is driving this cleavage within the evangelical movement, it is something larger than electoral politics.
The obvious answer to this question, for many, would be the rise of “wokeness” or “cultural Marxism” or “progressivism” or something similar—a novel “successor ideology”2 diametrically opposed to Christianity in critical ways, and now spreading like a virus through congregations and other institutions. This ideology, for its part, is understood in terms of the distinctive complex of political beliefs and values dominant within secular white-collar environments in contemporary America: a strong emphasis on the salience of race, valorization of marginalized or “subaltern” groups on the basis of the fact that they are the subaltern, an embrace of “intersectionality,” and so forth.
There have been many efforts in recent years to nail down a workable definition of this thing called “wokeness.” And those efforts are entirely understandable. After all, to define a thing is to wield power over it. (A familiar trope of horror literature is that a demon can’t be exorcised until its name is known.) Defining “wokeness”—and in particular, defining it against Christian orthodoxy—allows a clear line in the sand to be drawn between Christians and the “woke.”
But it is time to confront an important fact: these efforts have largely failed, because no one actually agrees on what counts as “wokeness.” There is no catch-all definition of the term that can do the work that many evangelicals want it to do. Indeed, the quest for such a definition—at least within a Christian context—may be futile in principle.
Now, that observation certainly isn’t meant to suggest that the concerns of many evangelicals about the trajectory of their denominations and institutions are misguided. They are not. Rather, ongoing efforts to distill a fixed “essence of wokeness,” which can then be used as a criterion for categorizing individuals as either “woke” or “Christian,” are probably destined to fail, for reasons that are distinctive to the Christian tradition.
Without a better understanding of what is actually meant by “wokeness,” evangelicals concerned about the disintegration of their institutions risk stumbling into the dynamic that writer Samuel James has called “the hamster wheel of anti-wokeness,” in which “[m]istakes and misjudgments by major evangelical institutions galvanize the anti-woke into periodic mobility, which lead them into their own overstatements and exaggerations, which in turn give credibility back to mainstream evangelical leaders.”3 No progress in understanding is made, relationships are damaged, and the Church suffers for it.
Accordingly, evangelicals require a new strategy for understanding whether a theological “meeting of the minds”—that is, fellowship in the truest and deepest sense—can be possible between those who disagree about political and cultural issues. This strategy must be one that takes the how of theological reasoning every bit as seriously as the conclusions reached through that reasoning. And it is a strategy that relies on just two very simple questions.
But first, some groundwork must be laid.
In his popular recent volume Christianity and Wokeness, Owen Strachan defines “wokeness” as “[t]he state of being consciously aware of and ‘awake’ to the hidden, race-based injustices that pervade all of American society; this term has also been expanded to refer to the state of being ‘awake’ to injustices that are gender-based, class-based, etc.”4 For present purposes, this definition will suffice as a reasonably representative one.
Arguments against this “wokeness” tend to rely heavily on origin stories, which often look something like this: First, there was Western civilization, in all its strength and glory. Then came an evil influence from outside, an intellectual poison that ensnared the minds of the unwary. And it was a one-way train from there to the toxic, cancellation-happy culture that predominates today.
But there are at least two different historical stories, or genealogies, of “wokeness.” And assuming there are certain elements of truth in each, one is left with a messy intellectual account that does not make for effective polemics, and left without a stable criterion for maintaining doctrinal boundaries in practice.
The first narrative—the “discontinuity narrative”—lays the blame at the feet of 1960s-era academics, many of whom were disillusioned Marxists, who are accused of introducing a disruptive poison into the West.5 According to some versions of this narrative, Marx’s account of economic oppression was transposed into a “cultural” key, honed and refined by the Frankfurt School, and mainstreamed in Western universities.6 Where this narrative controls, those opposed to “wokeness” tend to think of it as a kind of heathenism, an anti-Christian rival faith. (The best-known version of a narrative like this one is probably Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories.)
The second narrative—the “continuity narrative”—locates the seeds of “wokeness” within the Christian tradition itself. Friedrich Nietzsche was keen to point out that Christianity has always been particularly concerned for the oppressed—and indeed, the faith’s care for the vulnerable and downtrodden was one of the key factors that distinguished early Christianity from its Roman pagan surroundings. As Joshua Mitchell argues in American Awakening, it is not difficult to see echoes of this concern for justice—for a final eschatological reckoning and the casting down of the mighty from their high places, one might say—in contemporary political discourse that often gets characterized as “woke.”7 Where this narrative dominates, critics of “wokeness” see their target less as heathenism—a rival faith—than as heresy, a “sub-Christian” deviation ultimately springing from a common root.
The difference between these two narratives can be summarized simply: Is “wokeness” a self-conscious subversion of the Christian tradition, or a conscious extension of it?
And here the definitional problem comes into view. For one thing, whenever “wokeness” is formally defined, that definition inevitably tends to be overinclusive, implying opposition to efforts to become aware of, and to fight, injustice in general. Was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s really “woke” in the modern sense? Intuitively, it feels anachronistic and wrong to project this definition backwards into the past.
More importantly, the Christianity/wokeness dichotomy that underpins Strachan’s book—and others like it—is a dichotomy that depends on the premise that “wokeness” is, in its essence, something anti-Christian. But identifying and fighting injustice is clearly a significant element of the Christian tradition, historically speaking. Indeed, those Christians who would advance “woke” arguments—who would allege, for instance, that the deconstruction of oppressive power relations lies at the heart of the faith—simply reject Strachan’s dichotomy on the basis of the continuity narrative (they would, of course, also reject any characterization of their views as “heresy”).
In short, because there are two dueling narratives about the origins and nature of “wokeness”—one of which happens to be a plausible account of “wokeness” as an extension of Christian ideas about justice and inherent equality—it simply doesn’t work to label some cluster of concepts and priorities as “woke,” and assume that this can self-evidently mean “anti-Christian.” Or, put differently, it is hard to question the influence of “wokeness” on theology in a context where both parties self-identify as Christians, because all one needs to do is label themselves as such. And given the continuity narrative, there’s at least a plausible “hook” for both parties to do so.
The crucial flashpoint is what it means to address an alleged injustice Christianly. And this question is a “how-question”—a matter of the way in which a Christian makes his or her case for a revision of existing teaching or practice, rather than being about any single teaching or practice as such.
When conservative federal judges interview applicants for law clerk jobs—one-year positions, in which young lawyers serve as research and drafting assistants for sitting judges—one of the most important considerations is whether the applicant is an “originalist.” Originalism, generally speaking, is the judicial philosophy that the original public meaning of the Constitution—in all its historical particularity—ought to govern how present-day judges interpret the text.
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How we live, and the way we live, is not insignificant. We ARE being watched, be it by the world, or those who have gone before, or even spiritual beings. While Jesus gets all the praise and honour for what He does through His people, we are a part of it. We are trophies of His grace. We are being put on display, and our witness matters.

You and I are under constant scrutiny
We are being watched. No, I am not here talking about the growing surveillance state in the West, doing its best to keep up with Communist China in keeping tabs on our every movement. Instead, I want to speak of a spiritual and biblical truth, and I begin by recalling two things from last century.
Back in my hippy and radical left days in the late 60s — early 70s, there were a lot of protests, marches and the like. Sometimes these were met with over-the-top police and military responses. Clubbing, tear gas, and sometimes even death occurred. Because of this, we would often loudly chant, “The whole world is watching!” We wanted the media to capture what was happening. The world had to know.
The second thing has to do with a movie I often make use of when teaching at Bible colleges and the like. I refer to the 1998 Jim Carrey film, The Trueman Show. You likely know about it: Carrey plays a guy who from birth has been the topic of a massive reality TV show. His whole life is being watched by millions of viewers, unbeknown to him.
So what do hippies and Hollywood have to do with a biblical devotional piece? Well, that is how my mind tends to work. I read a passage of Scripture, and immediately I think of all sorts of applications or illustrations and sermon material.
The Church and the World
Reading this morning again in Ephesians, I found two texts that have to do with a global display — of us believers. The first is Eph. 2:7. It is in the context of verses 1-10:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
The second is Eph. 3:10, and the context is verses 7-13:
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, Who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that He has realised in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in Him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.
In both texts, the church is on display to the rest of the world. In Eph. 2 it speaks more of a future display, while Eph. 3 speaks more of a present display. And we can assume that it is the church as a whole, as well as individual believers, that is in view here. So there is a personal and a collective message being emphasised in these passages.
The main point of course is this: how we live, and the way we live, is not insignificant. We ARE being watched, be it by the world, or those who have gone before, or even spiritual beings. While Jesus gets all the praise and honour for what He does through His people, we are a part of it. We are trophies of His grace. We are being put on display, and our witness matters.
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