Excellent Evangelicals

Ideas for facing the "leadership deficit" in American evangelicalism and beyond

A recent piece by Aaron Renn highlights the ramifications of America’s “growing leadership deficit.” Many are preparing for Boomers to exit strategic leadership roles in many of our leading institutions but identifying compelling, competent, and charismatic successors remains a challenge.

“America needs to both navigate through generational turnover, and start rebuilding its leadership capacity,” Renn argues.

Too true. How we do that well is the challenge.

For not a few reasons, the focus of this essay will be addressing the problem within evangelicalism generally and the expression of evangelicalism crystallized in the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement.

For one, it’s a context I’ve been involved with in one way or another for most of my adult life. My experience has led me to wonder if there are better ways to streamline leadership development so it feels more like a “pipeline” and less like a nebulous web of overlapping programs, initiatives, and credentialing organizations.

I’m also interested in this particular area of focus because evangelicals have a penchant for building institutions. Christianity Today and Wheaton College come immediately to mind, as do several publishing companies and church planting networks like Acts 29 and City to City. While many of them maintain a certain prestige within evangelicalism, few have accomplished the kind of cultural impact their founders envisioned.

On a related note, the absence of evangelicals in elite intellectual, political, and cultural spaces is striking. For example, evangelicals are one of the most politically engaged groups in America, yet have limited representation in the highest reaches of our government. One wonders if there is some fatal flaw in the way these institutions prepare young men and women to be leaders and “ambassadors” across various domains.

Finally, American evangelicalism faces a paradoxical occurrence of events. On the one hand, storied evangelical institutions are splintering on cultural, ideological, and theological lines (no doubt because there’s a shortage of dynamic leadership). This is suggestive of decline. On the other hand, data shows that young people—and young men in particular—are more receptive to conservative expressions of Christianity than they have been in recent decades. A lot has been made of conversions to Big-O Orthodoxy and the so-called “trad Caths,” but the reality is most of these younger Millennials and Zoomers, if they’re going to church at all, are “retvrning” to large, evangelical and nondenominational churches.

In other words, American evangelicals have not done a great job addressing institutional and leadership challenges in the past, but their potential for improvement has never been higher.

Let’s consider some practical strategies evangelicals might consider in order to meet the immediate challenges of generational turnover and achieve their longer term social, civil, and ecclesiastical goals.

Make Leadership Aspirational Again

The first and most important thing evangelicals can do is inspire young people to pursue leadership opportunities. The warnings about so-called “toxic” leadership are long past the point of overcorrection and take up too much space in the social imaginary. We need to make leadership aspirational again.

Let’s take pastoral leadership for example. Much is made about the significant financial hurdles one must overcome to obtain proper credentials for ordination. What’s not mentioned is a creeping ambivalence toward the duties of pastoral ministry: preaching, administration of the sacraments, and church discipline.

In a time when everything you say can be scrutinized endlessly on social media, preaching is an increasingly dangerous occupation. The fear of saying something at the risk of not saying everything means more men would rather not say anything at all. Fencing the table and church discipline sounds exclusionary and offensive.

Rather than challenge cultural assumptions head on, the temptation is to bracket traditional pastoral duties as supplementary if still necessary parts of more critical functions like counseling, discipleship, and shepherding.

While that strategy may make pastoral leadership more accommodating to less assertive men, it does not reflect the biblical criteria for leaders in Christ’s church called to preach and preach boldly.

As John Currie argues in his new book, The Pastor as Leader, preaching is the primary means given to pastors for shepherding God’s flock. Yet, few people writing and commenting on pastoral theology connect preaching and leadership like Currie does. Instead, an inordinate amount of attention is given either to appropriating secular management theories, handwringing about bully pulpits, or pushing “self-care” strategies to treat the mental, emotional, and physical perturbations of ministry.

All of this is indicative of a pietistical climate that breeds an attitude of fear toward assertive leadership. We attract managers, bureaucrats, and gatekeepers, not aspirational leaders.

Is it really too much of a leap to ask if people in the pews are picking up on the signals evangelical pastors broadcast about their own occupation and applying it to their own? Is this not exactly what’s happening when Christian theologies of work focus more on evangelizing coworkers or individual fulfillment than ascertaining the nature of the work itself and ordering its particulars to the common good and the glory of God?

But this is to be expected when the operative paradigm for stewarding our God-given capacity is a confused reading of The Lord of the Rings rather than The Parable of the Talents. There is no virtue in smothering or hiding away our natural gifting. To whom much is given, much is to be expected. Either we make leadership aspirational again or suffer the slow death of managed decline.

Be Curiously Traditional and Traditionally Curious

Another reason evangelicalism struggles to identify and develop potential leaders is that it’s grown tediously boring.

Imagine you are a young person naturally curious about politics and the way to relate that discipline with your Christian faith. You are a faithful member of your evangelical church, so you start to ask questions about what resources are out there that can help guide your study.

At first blush, the number of articles, books, and programs is overwhelming! After some research, however, you realize the sheer size is misleading. Most are pop-level works by amateurs from unrelated fields endorsed by a handful of approved evangelical authorities. If there is one by a trained professional, odds are he or she is both credentialed and employed by an evangelical institution.

You start to realize that evangelicals are stuck in an intellectual silo where a lot of “content” is produced but everyone more or less says the same thing. Few people writing or speaking on politics and faith are able to transcend the nascent biblicism of modern evangelicalism. Interaction with the ancient sources of the Western tradition, a prerequisite for any serious academic pursuit in the study of politics, is limited. Most evangelicals participating in “The Great Conversation” rarely do so as good-faith interlocutors. Rather, they assume the critical posture of a tradition-less “exile” meant to save the tradition from itself rather than someone who might stand to gain from the wisdom of their forefathers and carry the conversation forward.

What this means is evangelicals end up spending more time ruthlessly enforcing intra-party orthodoxy among themselves than creatively and constructively engaging with different ideas. With each new iteration in the wider scholarly debate, evangelicals grow further and further adrift until they are almost indecipherable to anyone outside their milieu.

The solution is a curiously traditional approach—at least for Protestants.

The problem is evangelicalism’s heterodox approach to institution-building. Part and parcel with their nascent biblicism is a failure to differentiate between the sacred and secular. Recovering a traditional two-kingdoms view that lets the church be the church and the academy be the academy would go a long way in freeing aspiring evangelical scholars to cross swords with the best and brightest in their field. It would not only facilitate greater intellectual and philosophical diversity within evangelical institutions, but also equip their stakeholders to compete for postings and positions at legacy institutions.

If evangelical institutions are going to have the kind of cultural influence they desire, fostering an internal culture of traditional curiosity and curious traditionalism would be a great place to start.

Cancel Conferences, Connect With Cohorts

That leads me to a final and, perhaps, more specific recommendation: Evangelicals must ditch the conference model of institutional formation and embrace a cohort strategy.

Interestingly enough, evangelical pastors have already heeded this advice. It is hard to find pastors in my own denomination who aren’t active members of several cohorts for professional and personal development. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for other vocations.¹

Let’s stick with the example of the evangelical interested in politics. If you were interested in gathering and interacting with like-minded peers, you might attend a specially-themed, TGC-style conference. However, like your experience in evangelicalism’s intellectual silo, you probably find these conferences rather stifling—even discouraging.

And for good reason. Think about what the optics of the conference model communicate. Attendees are largely passive recipients of whatever premeditated message the conference organizers want to disseminate. Too often, it’s pastors who headline these conferences which adds a “thus-saith-the-Lord” gloss to the event, (un)intentionally signaling to the attendees that whatever the speaker says is the final word on the matter. That pastors may not have any kind of final or ultimate authority to speak on politics in the first place is largely ignored. Worse still, vocalizing your disagreement is likely to be met with suspicion. No wonder you, our budding evangelical politico, starts to look for greener pastures across the Tiber.

Admittedly, Roman Catholics have done a much better job than evangelicals in this area—demonstrated by the proliferation of Roman Catholic scholars in the constellation of elite think tanks, offices, and organizations.

Far from being some kind of papist conspiracy, the dominance of Roman Catholics among America’s elite is a natural by-product of a cohort model of professional development. Cohorts naturally inspire organic networks that identify prospects, maintain accountability, and facilitate placement in leadership positions.

Imagine an evangelical ecosystem in which any young evangelical interested in politics, business, art and culture, or the hard sciences could find an online or regional cohort specially tailored to his or her vocational interests. Cohort leaders, experienced leaders in their fields, could develop unique curricula to facilitate integration between the participants’ faith and the nature of their callings. Middle managers at various related organizations could tap into the cohort to fill junior positions, senior leaders to fill middle manager slots, and so on and so forth.

In the end, the primary feature of evangelicalism’s leadership deficit is not that it’s failing to meet high expectations; it’s that our sights are too low. Let’s work toward a future when evangelicals are praised, not just for their manners, but for being excellent.

Image credit: Steven Lelham via Unsplash

1. A couple noteworthy exceptions that prove the rule are American Reformer’s Cotton Mather Fellowship and Providence Magazine’s Jean Bethke Elshtain Fellowship in Christian Realism, both of which are serious academic and professional programs that I recommend heartily.