There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it.  The latter was a major component of the Fall.  Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins.  A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17).  More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.

And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world.  Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006.  To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.  Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic.  This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job.  To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership.  In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility.  In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job.  In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader.  Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility. 
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility.  And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority.  This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task.  To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement.  Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job?  The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures.  It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete.  But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”. 
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it?  To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility.  In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility.  In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it.  But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained.  The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done.  Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate.  Therefore, they both share responsibility.  So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities.  We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence.  We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions.  In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over.  Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders.  This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job.  When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers. 
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents.  In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence.  At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable.  Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions.  But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable.  Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well.  To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole).  Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for. 
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years.  Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well.  This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility. 
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Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Clearly there is a genuine spiritual risk for the younger generation growing up in this current crusade of make-believe and skepticism towards transcendent morality. It’s one thing for adults to deal with these assaults upon truth, but young children are not intellectually and emotionally developed enough to make a clear distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. Some people who are involved in early education have found this to be true in their professional experience.

Should we really be shocked about the declining health and welfare of many children influenced by America’s cultural preoccupation with all things make-believe? After all, why wouldn’t our little ones be in turmoil when the educational agenda of our time isn’t about the three Rs, but rather about teaching our youngsters to reject their God-given identity and live as some sort of magical being empowered by the incantation of their preferred pronouns and the medical wizardry of gender reassignment?
The truth is, if we allow children to be constantly exposed to academic malpractice, fantasy narratives, virtual-reality gaming and cosplay cultism, then we should not be surprised when they prefer to live their life predominately outside of reality and God’s truth.
These days, our poor kids have little hope of avoiding the insidious mindworms of our society’s fantasies and mad delusions. Just look at the present cultural landscape: the satanic pagan imagery of popular music performers, the woke indoctrination of Disney entertainment, and even the baffling sight of drag queen RuPaul on a box of Cheezits at the local grocery store. This widespread propaganda, produced by unprincipled adults who want to promote overt rebellion against parents and God, is a major reason why we are seeing a rise in the psychological distress and spiritual confusion of innocent children.
New studies on children’s wellness, in fact, are showing the incredible damage taking place. Recent data shows reading and math proficiency among our public school students are at 20 year lows, especially in Illinois where dozens of schools statewide had zero grade-level proficiency. And in case you were wondering, some of the numbers were only “slightly better” in pre-pandemic 2019.
Schools have also failed to protect our children from the fallout of America’s increasing social turmoil and anger. Despite massive educational campaigns to stop it, bullying is on the rise with 90% of students in grades 4-8 becoming victims of harassment that often includes cyber-bullying and physical assault. The NEA, in fact, reports that over 160,000 kids refuse to go to school each day for fear of being bullied.
Likewise, self-harm is a huge issue. Suicide rates have increased among U.S. adolescents and young adults (age 10-24) and now account for 14% of all suicides, which is indicative of the overall rise of cases over the last decade. According to the latest study by the CDC, nearly three in five teenage girls in America felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls considered attempting suicide. The findings also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth.
The Spiritual Risk of a Child Reared on Fantasy
Clearly there is a genuine spiritual risk for the younger generation growing up in this current crusade of make-believe and skepticism towards transcendent morality. It’s one thing for adults to deal with these assaults upon truth, but young children are not intellectually and emotionally developed enough to make a clear distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. Some people who are involved in early education have found this to be true in their professional experience:
“A child who spends too much time in a world of fantasy may find it difficult to relate to others, to interact in a group, to be in the here and now. It can also be scary for a child… When a child under 5 or 6 hears a fairy tale with a wicked witch, they then also imagine this witch to be real as a child of this age has a very concrete understanding of the world. They visualize it as if it is real as they are not yet able to clearly separate fantasy from reality.” — Pretend Play: A Complicated Question
Sadly, this childhood interaction between fact and fantasy can be even more complicated when you, as a Christian parent, begin to introduce your child to the real person of Jesus Christ. This should be an exciting and joyful truth to share with your little one as you begin the process of rearing your child under the instruction of God’s word, but it can oftentimes be a difficult education if Jesus has to compete with Santa Claus, Marvel superheroes, or Harry Potter as the object of your child’s fledgling hero-worship.
Recent research has proven this childhood confusion with fantasy to be a real issue. Case in point, a 2014 research study at Boston University where it was discovered that young children with a religious background were less able to distinguish between fantasy and reality compared with their secular counterparts:
In two studies, 66 kindergarten-age children were presented with three types of stories: realistic, religious and fantastical. The researchers then queried the children on whether they thought the main character in the story was real or fictional.
While nearly all children found the figures in the realistic narratives to be real, secular and religious children were split on religious stories. Children with a religious upbringing tended to view the protagonists in religious stories as real, whereas children from non-religious households saw them as fictional.
Although this might be unsurprising, secular and religious children also differed in their interpretation of fantasy narratives where there was a supernatural or magical storyline.
“Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional,” wrote the researchers. “The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.” — BBC News, Study: Religious Children Are Less Able To Distinguish Fantasy From Reality
The researchers concluded (as most college researchers are prone to do) that exposure to a religious education is probably the main culprit in a child’s difficulty in identifying fact from fiction. This conclusion, however, seems to indicate an anti-biblical bias that completely ignores the alternative possibility. Why is religious upbringing the problem? Isn’t it just as plausible that fictional stories involving magic are the real cause of confusion, especially when these tales of superheroes, witches and wizards are the ones mimicking God’s supernatural power in the Bible?
In light of Scripture, this alternative conclusion is clearly confirmed. For starters, God is not a God of confusion. God’s word will not return void, but will accomplish what He pleases and will prosper in that thing for which He sent it. Over and over again, the Bible confirms that scriptural instruction from the word of God is essential to a child’s proper upbringing.
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In 1983, John Scully was the President of Pepsi. He had poured his life into that company and built it into one of America’s most iconic brands. By all accounts, he was on top of the world. But, in 1983, his life would dramatically change with a few simple words. Insert Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was the genius upstart entrepreneur who founded Apple. He had a brand new company and visionary ideas. But, he was untested, unproven, and frankly a little unstable. Yet, in 1983, he delivered one of the most incredible sales pitches ever recorded. When courting John Scully to leave Pepsi and come to Apple, this is what Jobs said:

John, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?—Steve Jobs

That proposal pushed Scully over the edge. At that moment, John Scully left everything he had built to follow Jobs and change the world.
I appreciate this story because it perfectly articulates how frivolous it would be to build a life on sugar water. But I also don’t like this story because Steve’s alternative is no better. To build a life on gadgets and tech would be just as meaningless as an empire of liquid sugar. It most certainly has been.
Most recently, this has become all the more clear. Tech stocks are plummeting, tech-friendly banks are going insolvent, and the entire industry is gearing up for a massive recession. If that were not enough, Big Tech hasn’t delivered on any of its promises.
Case in point, Facebook’s mission statement is: “to give people the power to build community and to bring the world closer together.” That sounds great, except that it hasn’t. Instead, in the Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok world, people have become more divided, isolated, and less able to have meaningful dialog, conflict, or relationships than ever.
All you have to do is look at the world around us, and you can see it. No one seems happy. People are polarized and angry at one another. Activism is fracturing people into increasingly smaller and smaller victim classes. Law and order is eroding, and the fabric of our society is unraveling as we speak. We are no better in the Steve Jobs era than we were in the Pepsi era. Any person who is being objective can see this.
With that, it is time for a new pitch.
If you want to change the world, limit investing in the limited and maximize your investment in the infinite. How do we do that? First, invest in a faithful church. Invest in a community that believes the Gospel and preaches it as their lives depend on it. Invest in a church that understands the disease of sin and liberally offers Christ as the only cure. Invest in a church that does not bend its knee to the world and woke culture but stands on God’s eternal and immutable truth!
How can you invest in this? I offer you three ways and one reminder.
Invest Your Time
One of the best ways to change the world is to get married, have lots of children, raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and teach them to invest their time in a local and faithful church. To fight to be there when the doors open and to value participation in the community. To help that church accomplish its mission. Listen intently to the sermon and walk away chewing on the truth of the Gospel throughout the week.
It involves teaching them to be present and active in the community and to give their lives for the very thing Jesus died for; His bride. It also involves teaching them how to go to work to the glory of God, how not to place their hope in their career, and how to build Jesus’ Kingdom through God-glorifying labor in their vocation (1 Cor. 10:31).
Paul says in Colossians 3:23:
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