"Who runs the church?" is a question that divides many Baptist congregations.
In healthy churches, experts say, secure pastors and secure lay leaders share a common vision of mutual leadership. But when either the pastor or lay leaders attempt to tip the balance in their favor against the wishes of the other party, conflict often results.
Control issues are the No. 1 reason for forced terminations of Baptist pastors, according to research by LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The number of ministerial firings by Baptist churches has grown to alarming proportions, says Jan Daehnert, director of minister/church relations for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
In a majority of these cases, disputes over pastoral authority plays a significant role in the conflicts that led to termination, Daehnert said. And that doesn't even include the many other cases where ministers moved on to another church to keep the issue from coming to a head.
While it's easy to point fingers at either pastors or laity in conflict over authority issues, responsibility lies at the feet of both, Daehnert said. "The authority issue is primarily seen in the pastoral role, but it's also a layman's authority issue," he said.
Two scenarios are common, he said. In one, laymen accuse the pastor of being "too heavy-handed," "too authoritarian" or a "dictator." In the other, the pastor views lay leaders as thwarting his leadership with their controlling tactics.
Theological perspectives of some pastors, who believe they have a God-given mandate to run the church, compound the problem.
Authoritarian pastoral styles are commonly associated with a fundamentalist theology, but such tendencies affect non-fundamentalists as well, said Howard Batson, pastor of First Baptist Church of Amarillo. Texas. "It has nothing to do with Baptist politics," he said. "It really is an interpersonal skills problem."
"As a pastor develops a healthy self-esteem, he is less likely to be dictatorial and more likely to be a strong leader," Batson said. "When he's not sure of himself, he'll either hide in a corner or shout from the rooftop. When he's sure of himself, he'll do neither of those."
Bob Sheffield, a specialist in church-conflict mediation with LifeWay, agreed with Batson's assessment. "The more insecure a person is, sometimes the more authoritarian he has to be. If you're secure, you can allow people to be involved in decision making."
Daehnert said conflicts over pastoral authority stem from deeper, unresolved theological issues in churches. "Pastoral authority is a piece of the picture that has been overemphasized because other parts of the picture are out of shape," he said.
He said he believes the problem is that Protestant churches "never completed the Reformation."
"We've never known how to reconcile the role of the pastor and the role of the layman in ministry," he said.
The fault sometimes lies with pastors who, even though Baptist, "have kept some of the old Catholic church tendencies" of clerical superiority, Daehnert said. That may be compounded when laity "turn over to the pastor authority that really belongs to Jesus."
At other times, amid a succession of short-term pastors, lay leaders become so accustomed to managing all the business of the church that they leave no room for pastoral leadership.
While another problem receives less attention, Batson said, some pastors give too little leadership. "On that end, they're withdrawn and apathetic and provide sporadic leadership. They lack initiative."
The best road to travel lies between these two ditches, he said.
"What most churches want is a healthy team-ship approach to leadership. You lead, but you do it as part of a team, including the committees and the congregation. It's not so much, 'God told me, and this is what we've got to do,' but, 'Here's what God has told us together.'"
Batson, Daehnert and others acknowledged that some Baptist churches want a pastor who will give strong direction. That's OK, they said, if the church hires a pastor who shares that vision of leadership.
"Problems usually arise when a congregation expects one type of pastoral authority and they get another," Batson noted. This requires the pastor-search committee to "really know the story of the church and match that with the story of the candidate."
Too often, Sheffield said, search committees don't adequately understand what the church wants in a pastor.
"If you get one pastor who has been a precipative-type pastor, trying to develop a shared-ministry approach, followed by a person who is very autocratic, you're going to have problems," Sheffield said. "Congregations don't realize this. They don't take this into consideration in the pastor-search process.
"Sometimes what the congregation has been heard to say is, 'We need a strong leader.' But their definition of a strong leader and the pastor's definition are different," he said.
But more often, "the pastor-search committee will go on the basis of what they think," without surveying the congregation, Sheffield said.
That can be a problem because "most pastor-search committees don't represent the church as a whole; they represent the cutting edge of the church. Why are people put on the pastor-search committee in the first place? Because they're leaders and they want things to happen."
In reality, churches may need different styles of pastoral leadership at different stages of the congregation's life, Sheffield said.
He compares the situation to a parent's role in leading a child. "There are times, if you're pastoring a mission church, the pastor is going to have to be more hands-on and directive than he might need to be if he has developed his congregation properly."
But just as a parent cannot give direction to a grown child the same way he or she would to a toddler, a pastor must adjust the leadership role as a congregation matures, he added.
Sheffield and Daehnert both believe many pastors have bought into an incorrect definition of leadership, confusing it with management. Leaders are not managers, they insist, and authority is not the same as influence.
"If you take Ephesians 4 literally, our job as pastors is to equip the saints for a work of ministry," Sheffield said. "We will be leaders, which is a sphere of influence, not managers."
Daehnert pointed to a book, "The Servant," written by a corporate executive using biblical principles. The author, James Hunter, quotes sociologist Max Weber's distinction between power and authority.
Power, he said, is "the ability to force or coerce someone to do your will, even if they would choose not to, because of your position or might." Authority is "the skill of getting people to willingly do your will because of your personal influence."
So a person could be in a position of power but not have authority with people, Daehnert said. "Authority is based not on position but on influence."
A practical misapplication of authority happens when young pastors or pastors new to their churches look at older mentors with long tenures and attempt to duplicate their leadership styles, Sheffield explained.
The older, more tenured pastors have "gone through the fire" and earned the right of leadership, he said. "Yet we may think we can be there without earning the right to be the leader."
The problem of church conflict due to leadership issues is well-known, acknowledged Larry Ashlock, a professor of pastoral ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and former pastor. "We seem to know the reasons for the problems but have not taken proactive steps to correcting it."
Southern Baptists are attempting to address the problem nationwide through LifeWay's LeaderCare unit, which includes counseling and other resources for ministers. The BGCT addresses the problem through its minister/church relations office.
One practical solution is for pastors to learn better listening skills, Batson suggested. "We teach people in seminary how to talk, not how to listen. The greatest skill a pastor can have is his ability to listen."
The same can be said for lay leaders. "A healthy church is where people are submissive to the leadership of God in their lives and equally submissive to one another," Daehnert said.
In the ideal situation, he added: "The pastor has a role and responsibility and lay leaders also have a role and responsibility. Together, they determine what is God's will for the church."
The model that works best for a pastor, he suggested, is Jesus the Good Shepherd rather than the Old Testament model of religious leaders as "prophet, priest and king."
Yet while the New Testament offers principles for church leadership, it does not spell out a detailed plan of church administration, Batson said. "I don't think (first-century Christians) ever imagined the church being structured like it is now," he said.
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