The myth of the servant leader

For all that God has not given Christians a spirit of fear, it seems that most church leaders in America today are governed by one. Barna gives us to understand that although they know God hates divorce, Christians are as likely to file for it as non-Christians and it is the rare church where the pews are not filled with practicing and unrepentant adulterers.

Nowhere is the disconnect between the ideal Christian life as described in the Bible and the quotidian practice of American Christians greater than with regard to marriage and the structure of intersexual relations within it. Indeed, the modern church is now far more accepting of the "Love That Will Not Shut Its Mouth" than it is of the biblical concept of submission.

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After almost four decades of feminist indoctrination, it is understandable that women who have been told their entire life that they can do anything, be anything and possess the absolute right to obtain the full measure of their momentary desires on demand would react to the doctrine of marital submission as if they were being asked to drink a brimming cup of venom milked from Oxyuranus microlepidotus. Being submissive, after all, is directly contradictory to being a Strong, Independent Woman, and submitting oneself to another individual puts a certain cramp in one's ability to pursue one's passing whims at all times by any means necessary.

And yet, distasteful or not, one's personal feelings on the matter are irrelevant. No doubt there was a Roman or two who thought it entirely possible that a certain Nazarene had risen from the dead and in doing so saved mankind, but looked askance at unseemly demands that he abandon his vomitous banquets and slave-girl orgies. And so it is perhaps worth remembering that Jesus Christ described His way as being a hard and narrow path, not a wide, easy, politically-correct and culturally-approved one.

Even in these latter days, it still occasionally occurs to a pastor to gently remind his congregation that the duty of a married Christian woman is to submit to her husband in all things as the head of the household. As one can expect, this does not tend to go over well in an audience where the women understand themselves to need men about as much as marine dwellers require two-wheeled transportation.

However, before the outraged audience has recovered from its shock, stormed the pulpit and revived the ancient rites of Cybelline, this delicate reminder is almost always quickly followed by a long dissertation on how the leader of the household should not be interpreted as being an actual leader per se, but rather as a servant one, and if the ladies will just refrain from committing violence long enough to listen and reflect upon the matter, they'll soon realize that a servant isn't all that different from a slave, and therefore submitting to a husband's servant leadership is merely a matter of giving him his orders, so please, please don't hit me, just keep doing what you're doing and God will be happy, world without end, amen.

This creative doctrine is loosely supposed to be based on the command for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved His Church. But sacrificial love is not synonymous with servanthood, much less servitude. The soldier who leaps on a grenade to save his buddies is not their servant, nor did Jesus Christ's humility in washing His disciples' feet alter the fact that He was still the Master and they the followers. It is unlikely, for example, that even with his clean feet Peter would take it upon himself to inform the Messiah what He would be teaching the next day.

It is true that there is a sacrificial element in all leadership. The true leader must always put the interests of the family/business/team ahead of his own desires. He must accept responsibility for failure and deal with the consequences, even when it is not his fault. It is C.S. Lewis who may have described the concept best when the king of Archenland explains the burden of kingship to his newly-discovered heir in "A Horse And His Boy":

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" said Corin. "I shan't have to be King. I shan't have to be King. I'll always be a prince. It's princes have all the fun."

"And that's truer than thy brother knows, Cor," said King Lune. "For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land."

The doctrine of the servant leader is little more than the attempt of the American Christian church to accommodate feminism within its body, in much the same way that its predecessor once transubstantiated pagan gods into Catholic saints. It is neither rational nor biblical, and the poverty of its fruit can be seen in the continued fraying of the bonds that hold Christian marriages together. Christian husbands, wives and their so-called leaders alike would do well to honestly consider a variant of Joshua's great question: Who do you serve, your culture or your God?