Church Leaders, Rhetoric & Reality

Christian leaders are complex human beings.

That shouldn’t need saying.

But sometimes it does.

We are shaped over time — by desire, fear, love, disappointment, trauma, hope. We change. We are never static. Christian theology speaks of a 'calling' towards Christlikeness, often named as cruciformity. But calling is not direction, and vocation is not arrival.

Leaders, like the communities they serve, are a mixed bag. Some are being softened. Some are being hardened. Formation in a tov direction is not automatic. Faith does not move in a straight line. Time in ministry does not guarantee depth, and proximity to holy language does not ensure holiness.

Language still matters though.

In church life, leaders often speak from aspiration: 'full surrender', 'dying to self', 'faithfulness', 'obedience'. Sometimes this names a genuine longing. Sometimes it names an ideal we think we should want. The difficulty is that aspirational language is easily heard as evidence of arrival. Over time, words meant to point beyond the leader begin to sound like a quiet testimony about the leader.

Aspiration slips into projection.

Psychology helps us here. We become who we are partly through what is reflected back to us. When leaders speak the language of surrender and are met with affirmation — 'you’re such a godly leader', 'so faithful', 'so Christlike'— it doesn’t just encourage. It forms. Slowly, often unnoticed, it can soften our capacity for self-critique, especially around power, motivation, and desire.

What’s striking is how little patience Paul has for the illusion of arrival.

The Apostle Paul does not present himself as someone who has finished the work. He writes openly about inner conflict, contradiction, and struggle — about wanting one thing and finding himself pulled toward another:

“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19)

This is not pre-conversion Paul tidying up his testimony. This is Paul as an apostle refusing to collapse complexity into spiritual certainty. Formation, for Paul, is conflict, not resolution.

When challenged about his authority, Paul refuses to defend himself through strength or spiritual success:

“I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Weakness here is not a performance. It is an acknowledgement that what is not brought into the light does not disappear — it simply gains influence in the dark.

And Paul is equally clear that the journey remains unfinished:

“Not that I have already obtained this or have already arrived at my goal; but I press on…” (Philippians 3:12)

Direction without presumption.

Aspiration without arrival.

There is a Native American proverb, the two wolves, that speaks of two impulses living within a person — one oriented toward life, the other toward destruction — existing in constant tension. When asked which one prevails, the answer is not the stronger, but the one that is tended, the one that is fed.

Formation is not assumed.

Direction is not guaranteed.

What we attend to, practice, excuse, or ignore slowly becomes who we are.

The Christian tradition has often been healthiest when it has stayed close to this realism. Conversion does not remove disordered desire; it exposes it. Augustine spoke of the divided heart — genuinely drawn towards God and yet still tangled within itself. Formation, where it happens, is slow, uneven, and unfinished.

The shadow does not disappear at baptism, an altar call, ordination or when singing songs about surrender.

Psychology would describe the shadow as the parts of us that remain unintegrated: unmet needs, unhealed wounds, old survival strategies that once kept us safe and now quietly shape how we lead. Leadership tends to intensify these dynamics. Power does not create the shadow; it gives it reach.

Recent stories of abuse in the church have made this painfully clear. Leaders can end up living off an image of holiness that others help construct, while communities — trusting the rhetoric of surrender — suspend discernment. The gap between what is preached and what is practised can grow quietly, invisibly, until it ruptures. Abuse rarely begins with cruelty. It often begins with unexamined power, spiritual idealisation, and a shared reluctance to question those who appear to have arrived.

Church culture can make this easier than we like to admit. Communities often honour leaders in ways that reward wholeness rather than honesty. Praise can become insulation. Honour, detached from truth-telling, can dull discernment. Over time, leaders may be shaped more by affirmation than by repentance, more by image than by reality.

This is rarely about deliberate deceit.

More often, it is about formation.

Cruciform theology offers another way — but only if we refuse to turn it into performance. The cross is not a badge or a credential. It is a place we return to. Again and again. It undoes us. When cruciformity is spoken of as something leaders possess rather than something they keep consenting to, it loses its edge.

This places a responsibility on leaders. Faithful leadership is not only about naming Christ as the horizon, but about interrupting the illusion of arrival — especially when it gathers around us. It means resisting spiritual flattery. Naming complexity without drama. Choosing practices and relationships that tell us the truth, not just the parts we like hearing.

It also shapes how we tell stories.

Some of you may know I’ve been working on a series of 'East of Eden' poems. They step inside the doubts, frustrations, and aspirations of 'fictional' priests. These poems are not autobiography. And yet they echo parts of my own life — not as direct confession, but as recognisable terrain. They arise from the overlap between personal experience and the shared interior world of leadership.

The aim isn’t exposure for its own sake. It’s humanisation. I want to show the priest not as someone who has arrived, but as someone still being formed — or sometimes resisting that formation.

These poems are mirrors. They name an interior world many leaders recognise but rarely voice — a place where longing for God sits alongside fear, fatigue, ambition, and the slow work of grace.

Vocation does not resolve complexity.

It gives it somewhere to surface.

Perhaps true honour in the church isn’t about denying complexity, but about holding it. Desire and distortion. Calling and compulsion. Love and self-interest — all within the patient, unsettling mercy of God.

The question isn’t whether leaders have a shadow.

The question is whether we are willing to lead as if that were true.

Leadership shaped by the cross will always feel unfinished.

That may not be a problem to fix,

but a truth to stay faithful to.