Gospel Leadership Part 1
Crafting a vision for leadership in the church.
About five years ago, I preached a sermon series called Gospel Leadership. It was an attempt to draw out a biblical vision for church leadership flowing from the conviction that the church is intended to function as a family. As is often the life of a preacher, the series was probably largely forgotten as we moved on and continued preaching through the Scriptures. And yet, it has quietly shaped my thinking ever since. The next series of posts will be drawn from that original series.
The Beauty and Danger of Leadership
Leadership can be a beautiful, powerful force. When used well, leadership brings the best out of people, leading to collective flourishing in families, communities, and even nations. When abused, however, leadership is profoundly destructive.
There are few human endeavours that carry such potential for both good and harm. For that reason, our theology and practice of leadership are absolutely vital to get right.
In recent months, the church world has once again been rocked by stories of leadership gone awry—moral failure, sexual abuse, breaches of trust, and financial mismanagement. These stories raise necessary and painful questions: How do we address abuse of power? How do we prevent a cult of personality?
As I’ve wrestled with these questions, more have begun to surface. How do we genuinely empower every believer to participate in mission? How do we prevent church leadership from becoming merely a job or career? How do we cultivate thriving maturity in Christ across the whole body? How do we keep discipleship at the centre of how we think about leadership?
It doesn’t stop there. Why do senior leaders have such an influential voice in the life of a church? How does authority work? What about discipline? Why should the church ever discipline its members publicly? What about doctrine and theology—how do we ensure we are walking a well-worn, Jesus-honouring path?
Is Christian leadership simply organizational leadership with a few “Jesusy” principles—like servanthood—layered on top? Or is it something altogether different? If we have truly been raised from death to life by the grace of Jesus, shouldn’t our understanding of leadership be re-envisioned in light of resurrection life?
In short: what would a theology of leadership look like if we started with the gospel and Jesus’ vision for the church, rather than importing organizational principles?
What is the church?
Before we can clarify how leadership functions in Jesus’ church, we must return to a foundational question: what is the church? Our understanding of leadership will always flow from our understanding of the church itself. We cannot understand leadership until we understand the why of the church. Leadership exists to serve the church’s deeper, cosmic purpose.
Therefore, the basic thesis of this series is simple but far-reaching: the biblical vision of leadership is rooted in the church as family and in the call for every believer to participate in mission.
This means leadership is not the concern of senior leadership teams alone. It applies just as much to house church leaders, disciplers, and everyday believers. The call to leadership is not reserved for the spiritually elite or the most visible figures. It is a universal call to participate in the reproduction of disciples.
A helpful place to begin is Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Paul had a deep connection to the Ephesian church—he spent significant time there, exercised great influence, and eventually saw his disciple Timothy lead the church. Ephesians gives us one of the clearest windows into Jesus’ vision for the church.
Jesus Has Been Building His Family
Ephesians 1:5–6
“He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One.”
What is the church? At its core, the church is the fulfillment of the Father’s eternal plan—to unite a people as his family through Christ. Notice that we were not predestined for a thing (such as salvation alone), but for a family. God’s design has always been relational and communal.
This family vision stretches back to the very beginning. In Genesis 12, God reveals to Abraham that his redemptive purposes would be fulfilled through a people:
Genesis 12:2
“I will make you into a great nation.”
This was not a modern nation-state, but a family born from Abraham. Before the law, before sacrifices, before kings and prophets, there was a promise of a family.
Initially, Israel understood itself to be the exclusive fulfillment of that promise. But Jesus’ death and resurrection changed everything. In the resurrection, God formed a new humanity—a new family—defined not by shared genetics, but by shared allegiance to Jesus and participation in his blood.
Why This Matters for Leadership
What does all of this mean for leadership? It means the church is not a human institution created to meet human ends. It is a family created to fulfill God’s purposes. The church is not our project; it is God’s supernatural work, planned from the dawn of creation.
Paul puts it this way:
Ephesians 2:19–20
“So then, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints, and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
The church is a supernatural family—bringing together those who would otherwise be strangers and making them brothers and sisters, not because of what we have done, but because of what Christ has done.
Very practically, this means we cannot simply import human organizational principles into the church. We must do the harder work of asking: what does it mean to be a family, and how do we then work together for the mission of that family?
Some Takeaways
We must resist wholesale importing of corporate leadership models into the church. While there is overlap with the business world, the church does not begin as an organization—it begins as a family.
In the corporate world, the aim is to climb the ladder. In the church, the aim is to raise spiritual sons and daughters.
Church leadership must flow from relationship, not contracts or employment. Authority grows out of shared life, trust, and spiritual responsibility—not job descriptions.
Leaders exist to steward the mission, not preserve the institution. Disciple-making that multiplies must remain the central mandate of church leadership.
The “why” of the church is eternal. That calls us to lift our eyes from building temporary kingdoms and invest ourselves in what lasts forever: people being reconciled to God.
Church should be fun! Because the church is a family that has already been won by Christ, we should enjoy the journey together!
We’ll leave it there for this week. Next week, I’ll dig deeper into the purpose of the church—and why leadership is needed in the first place.
“…it is God’s supernatural work, planned from the dawn of creation.”
I think this is a brilliant line. Perhaps the whole calling to be a family is why the Church, regardless of one’s ecclesiology and unlike any other human institution, has managed to stick around for each other and alongside Jesus for 2,000 years, despite all the human scandals and constant attempts to destroy her through heresies and schisms.
If God’s still working (He is), then that leadership has to be robust, unmoved by the ebbs and flows of culture, by heresies masquerading as “new ways of fulfilling the Great Commission,” or by generational shifts that play out in decades and centuries. I know you’ve touched on this before, but I’d love to see you expand on it in the context of this series if possible.
Looking forward to reading the rest of the series. Thanks for writing this!