In my reading today I was looking at ‘church leadership structures’ in the gospels and Acts.

Yes I realise ‘the church’ didn’t exist in the gospels but surely if Jesus was concerned for our church leaderships in the days after he was gone, he would have given some guidelines – right?…

Apparently not…

He does speak of how we are to treat one another and the place of greatness etc but he doesn’t tell us how we are to organise ourselves as churches to be effective. And yet we spend a lot of time on this issue.

What does that say?…

Obviously he had some kind of plan and system within the apostolic group. And he was the primary / focal leader

For all the talk of ‘flat leadership structures’ that I hear there is no question that Jesus was leading the apostles. In the early church unless I am blinded by my upbrigning it would seem that Peter, James and John played major ‘structural/positional’ leadership roles.

To be crass they were at the top of the apostolic food chain…

A heirarchy? Hmmm… another naughty word in Emerging Church circles! But is a heirarchy bad? Really?…

Abuse is bad – and heirarchies do hold the potential for abuse – but so do ‘unled’ groups where the loudest or most dominant or most manipulative voice can often set the agenda.

Sometimes I think that in our efforts to be ‘biblical’ we have simply framed our culturally biased pendulum swings in some biblical proof texts.