How to Identify Healthy Leaders For Your Church

by Rev. Dan Holloway

As one who has spent much of his ministry working as a consultant with conflicted churches, I’ve come to believe that all communities of faith experience some level of conflict sooner or later. Anytime human beings seek to work together on something of importance, there is a good possibility of at least occasional conflict. One might even argue that a bit of low level conflict is essential to finding best ways forward in our changing culture. The convergence of different ideas may well be the place where best learning takes place.

However, I’ve also come to see a clear difference between those congregations that handle conflict well and those that find ways of keeping the conflict alive long beyond anything that is rational or necessary. The difference seems to be the kind of leadership that is chosen for service in the church including both volunteer leadership and those who are paid for their service.

Faith communities that generally manage conflict well are led by those who demonstrate what I have come to call healthy leadership. Such leadership is generally marked by the following characteristics. While not an exhaustive list, these qualities seem to appear over and over again in the healthy leaders I have seen:

(1) Healthy leaders know they always have more to learn. They recognize the reality of both their gifts and their blind spots and remain committed to continual learning. There is never any sense of “having arrived” and instead have a commitment to a lifetime of growth and faithfulness. To say this another way, healthy leaders have a high level of Emotional Intelligence, the gift of both self-awareness and contextual awareness.

(2) Healthy leaders recognize the impact of cultural and social change on their lives and consider this not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity for learning and best practice. Healthy leaders spend less time trying to argue against what is changing around them and more time asking what their best response is to the presence of such changes. This is not to suggest blind acceptance to all that is changing but rather a willingness to ask good questions about what is changing and a desire to engage it with openness and a sense of discovery.

(3) Healthy leaders don’t think of the church as “my church” but as God’s Church. Even at those times when they use the expression “my church,” they use it in the sense of participation and not ownership. Healthy leaders know themselves as those called not to claim their own power but to proclaim God’s power. They are not called to protect their own authority but rather to lift up the authority of the gospel. They likewise recognize that shared leadership means they don’t always get their way and they don’t take this as a personal affront.

(4) Healthy leaders learn to focus on the big picture of where the church is heading and what will be required to get there. They are less concerned with winning smaller battles and more concerned with decisions that benefit the whole community of faith. This allows them to make choices that may require changes to past practice but allows the larger community to move in a necessary direction.

(5) Healthy leaders talk about Jesus a lot. They immerse themselves in his teachings and his ways of relating to others even when it means discomfort with current community practice. Healthy church leaders are unapologetically committed to being known as disciples of Christ. It may even be said of them that they focus too much on Jesus, a charge they are willing to endure.

(6) Healthy leaders are hopeful. While this is not always easy, healthy leaders continue to believe that God is at work in their community of faith and world and that there are possibilities for faithfulness yet to be discovered. With support from others and their own continuing faithfulness to their call, they don’t just “hang in there” but in fact live with enough imagination to dream of what God may yet do among them. This hope in turn inspires and encourages others around them.

None of us lives up to these standards at all times and need not live with guilt when we fail to do so. Forgiveness is the condition of our lives as disciples of Christ. Yet a commitment to being a healthy leader may be the best gift we can give to our brothers and sisters in the faith.