Welcome to another Thursday UNFILTERED blog post, the only blog that thinks if you care as much about church as you do about football, dump Gatorade on your pastor at the end of the next sermon.
Quick update before today’s article.
Nothing quite humbles you like seminary graduates—people who just dropped the GDP of a small island nation on their education—telling you they learned more about the New Testament from your new book than from three years of lectures about ancient Greek verb tenses.
Look, I’m not saying seminaries are useless. I’m just saying when someone who can conjugate “love” in Koine Greek admits they finally get what the New Testament was actually talking about after reading something you wrote in your pajamas, it makes you question a few things about how we’ve been doing education for the past few centuries.
We don’t have a marketing budget because, frankly, we spent all our money on coffee and existential crises during the three years it took to write this thing. So we’re doing this the old-fashioned way: hoping you’ll tell your friends, your parents, your children, and that one person at church who always has opinions about everything.
The responses have been incredible (thank you for sending them). After three years of daily self-doubt—questioning whether I was losing my mind or wasting my time completely—knowing that the effort wasn’t in vain feels pretty good.
Sometimes the best things come from the most uncomfortable places—like actually learning The Story instead of what we’ve been told the New Testament says by those who can only see it through the prism of chapters and verses.
New Testament 3.0 is finally here! (If you haven’t read that article, check it out. It brings the receipts, so to speak.)
Now for today’s feature.
What Kind of Christian Leader Are You (or Do You Follow)?
Some years ago, I wrote an article entitled Two Kinds of Christian Leaders, which focused on specific character traits.
Today’s article is completely different.
I’m looking at leadership through the lens of systems.
When viewed this way, there are two main types of leaders.
One type are those who are part of the Industrial Religious Complex, as I call it. The other are those who are NOT part of that complex.
Now before you jump to conclusions, I am NOT talking about “organic church” leaders vs. “institutional church” leaders. I’m speaking about something entirely different.
The truth is, MANY people who are part of what they dub “organic churches” as well as leaders who are part of “house churches” are very much a part of the Industrial Religious Complex.
By the same token, there are pastors and teachers who are part of institutional/traditional churches who are NOT part of the Industrial Religious Complex.
I know some of them personally, having visited their congregations.
So for the sake of simplicity, we’ll call these two leaders:
IRC Leaders (which stands for “Industrial Religious Complex leaders”)
and
Non-IRC Leaders (those who are not part of the Industrial Religious Complex)
Here’s one of the biggest ways to tell the difference.
IRC Leaders will rarely if ever invite someone to speak to their church or at their conference if the speaker isn’t also part of the Industrial Religious Complex.
Spiritual gifting, maturity, insight, depth in Christ doesn’t mean a hill of beans to IRC Leaders. Neither does the size of their following or their readership (if they happen to be authors).
What matters to them is if you’re part of the club.
If you’re not, you don’t exist.
As a result, IRC Leaders will only platform people who have celebrity status in the Industrial Religious Complex, regardless of whether their message is shallow, vapid, and has been repeated more times than a Hulu commercial. (The exceptions to this are rarer than a politician who keeps all their campaign promises.)
Non-IRC Leaders are genuinely interested in spiritual depth. Growth in Christ is far more important to them than attendance, budgets, and capital. It’s also more important to them than clicks, likes, and followers on social media.
Consequently, Non-IRC Leaders will platform people whose ministries are marked by spiritual power and that unveil Christ in fresh and creative ways – even if their ministries are completely outside the Industrial Religious Complex.
The tragedy of our times is that most Christians today will never hear from such firebrands. And that’s one of the reasons why the body of Christ is so weak, shallow, and anemic today. (In my humble, but accurate opinion.)
When believers hear gifted people outside the Industrial Religious Complex speak — if they happen to come by their work — their response is, “Why didn’t I hear this before? Where has it been!? I’ve never heard anything like this before!”
And genuine transformation takes place.
Until next Thursday.
fv
Christians Are Still Behind the Ball