Abolition and True Leadership

Welcome to Episode 54 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I would like to tackle the question, “What is true leadership?” And, to ask the same question in more practical and obvious terms, “What kind of leadership changes history?” The question, obviously, is the same, because true leadership is only defined by real results from it. If the work of an alleged “leader” doesn’t result in any visible change in history, if things remain the same as they have always been, then that alleged “leader” hasn’t really led his people too far, has he? And as I tackle true leadership, I want to do it in the context of a growing movement, or, rather, a growing ideology, or, rather, a growing worldview in the Church in America today, namely, Abolish Human Abortion. Why do I want to do it in this context? Well, because abolition of abortion is about the most “radical” of all ideas that are floating in the church today. You know, there are many ideas whose authors and adherents claim to be “radical”; but when I look at them, the claim is simply ridiculous. Recently, for example, a supposedly Reformed celebrity preacher thundered from his pulpit that the idea of the grace of God being sufficient for salvation was a “radical” idea, and there is no idea that the world hates more than it. He, of course, has been preaching mainly the grace of God (not His Kingdom, nor His judgment, nor much of anything else) for over thirty years, and that from behind one of the safest pulpits ever in history, raking in 70+ million dollars in tax-free donations a year; and over the course of those 30+ years, there has not been one recorded case where he has been persecuted by any worldly power for preaching the grace of God. (In fact, in at least one case, he encouraged the state to persecute other Christians for acting as Christians.) It doesn’t take much brainpower to realize that his claims of the grace of God being a “radical idea hated by the world” are empty babble. Hated, radical ideas meet a different kind of reaction from the world. Such truly radical idea today is the abolition of abortion. Judging from the reaction of the world – and judging from the reaction of the vast majority of alleged “church ministers” – it is truly a radical and hated idea. Thus, obviously, if there is an area where we will have to see true leadership, it will be in the abolition of abortion in America. Preaching the same old theological milk from behind safe 501(c)3 pulpits or making celebrity debates and conferences on long-resolved theoretical and theological topics is not where true leadership is exercised.

Anyone who has been at the abortion mills knows what hatred is; he knows what it is to meet the Beast face in face. (Remember that scene from The Lord of the Rings where Pippin decided to look into the Palantir, and the paralyzing hatred he saw? That’s you see every time you confront the staff and the murderous mothers in front of the mill.) Operation Rescue people experienced it on their bodies when they tried to interpose and block the access to some mills. The hatred of their opponents was so strong that even cops who otherwise claim they are Christian and go to church every week, were not above brutally torturing women and elderly people on the street, and even kicking and torturing pregnant women until their babies were killed in the womb. This same hatred continues today, unabated, and it comes more and more from the same celebrities who hide behind their 501(c)3 pulpits, and call the cops on those faithful Christians who today call for the abolition of legalized murder. And when it comes to political action, even elected representatives are not safe from this hatred; the Texas House representative who introduced the bill to abolish abortion, Tony Tinderholt, was the target of numerous anonymous death threats. And the same happened to representatives in other states as well.

Thus, Evangelical celebrities worth millions of dollars babble about persecutions, but they always stay within their safe perimeters when it comes to preaching and action. The real action and preaching, earning real persecution, is done outside the institutional system of American Evangelicalism. And it is there where we should be looking for examples of true leadership, and it is on that soil that we need to discuss the different approaches to leadership. The pulpits are dead, and it’s time for us to acknowledge this reality. But the Church is still alive, outside the pulpits and separate from the pulpits, and we need to plan and discuss the future of the Church in such terms.

Just plunging into the world of radical and universally hated ideas, however, is not sufficient . . . especially if we plunge in it with no clear idea of what we are doing, and with no principles for action and plan for expansion and success. By default, being the proponent of a radical and hated idea is a lonely business; to make it worse, being an active worker for a radical and hated idea leaves you not only lonely but also a target for other people’s hatred. (I can tell you a number of stories from my mission work in Bulgaria.) By default, you start from very small and humble beginnings. You need to grow from those humble beginnings. The vast majority of people around you will be most apathetic about your passion. At the very least, they don’t care if children are butchered across the street from their church building. In most cases, they or their pastors have made up some good excuses why they shouldn’t care or why they shouldn’t act as if they cared. And since our war is first and foremost for capturing the minds of men, anyone who engages in such a ministry, will have to be a true leader, if he is to succeed in his vision and mission. People will follow a true leader; they won’t follow a fake leader. Or, more precisely, a true leader will attract the right kind of people, those who will indeed fight the right battle the right way and with the right spirit. A fake leader, on the other hand, may attract people, but they won’t be the right kind of people, and they won’t have the right spirit to fight the battle. At the beginning, it may not be obvious who’s attracting and leading the right kind of people. Over time, however, it will become obvious. What I want to do here is to lay the principles for making that judgment as early as possible, so that we don’t waste time and effort following false leaders.

Now, before you misunderstand me, this episode is not about training leaders. As much as we can talk about leadership, I don’t believe in training leaders. I don’t believe in leadership conferences, seminars, books, training manuals etc. All these are useless. Why? Because Biblically, leaders are not trained, they are born. No matter how much you train a person to be a leader, no matter how many titles you put before his name or ordain him thousands of times in big ceremonies or give him enormous power over people, he won’t be a leader if he was not born to be a leader. And no matter how much you try to suppress a born leader – put him in chains, in jail, or even kill him – he will continue to be a leader once he touches the field where he was born to be a leader. We don’t try to create leaders; leadership is a spiritual gift and it is only conferred by the Holy Spirit, irrespective of human decisions and PR campaign and ordination ceremonies. The best we can do is try to encourage the born leaders among us by opening the broad horizons of the Kingdom of God before as many covenant people as we can, hoping that the Holy Spirit will stir their leadership gift to action, and praying for discernment to be able to recognize His leaders and sift out those driven by human ambition and pride. Thus, y’all need to understand, my purpose here is not to talk about how we train leaders. My purpose is to talk about how we discern and recognize the true leaders God has raised. And it is there where we Christians so often fail, and where we so often reward with our obedience and money petty dictators, manipulators, soulless and faceless bureaucrats, entertainment gurus, PR experts – in short, we obey and follow and elevate and idolize people whom God despises. And we despise those whom He has really raised as His servants, for the growth and the maturity of His Church. And it is because of this widespread failure that the American church in the last one century has been such a disaster, delivering into the hands of the enemy a culture that our ancestors in the faith had won for Christ.

Whether we realize it or not, whether we are willing to admit it or not, our modern Christianity has inherited a concept of “leadership” from our pagan past, a concept which continues to plague our churches today and our society today. That concept is that a leader is someone who is capable of gathering a host of followers who do the bidding of the leader. He has the collective vision, he has control over the collective mission, and he is the one barking out orders. The structure of his ministry is usually pyramidal, with one or a few elite leaders at the top who control everything the ministry does. The rest are either only participants, or workers, whose function is only to perform the tasks given to them by the leaders. They are not expected, and often not allowed to speak as representatives of the ministry. They are all admonished to “submit” to the leaders of the ministry, or, to put it in some more religious terms, “to place themselves under the care” of the leaders of the ministry. Under permanent care, to be precise, for such an ideology of leadership assumes the permanence of the relation “leader-follower.” A leader is a job for life, and the leader is entitled to permanent obedience from his followers. Or, to put it in Biblical terms, the followers are expected to remain immature and in need of being babysat by the leaders for life.

Just a couple of months ago I had the opportunity to witness an example of such kind of thinking and ideology, in a conversation with the pastor of a PCA church. The man was no different than the vast majority of Presbyterian pastors in this country – about 99% of them: limited knowledge of the Bible, barely educated in the doctrines of the Reformation, unfamiliar even with the constitution of his own denomination, and utterly incapable of any logical discourse. In short, the typical representative of three generations of Presbyterian ministers who, for the last one century, have led Presbyterianism to collapse from being the dominant cultural influence in America to being just a marginal sect today, salt thrown out and trampled under the feet of men. At some point in our conversation I asked him if he believed that church government was necessary for the existence of the church; my point was to return him back to his own denomination’s constitution which explicitly says that church government is not necessary for the being of the church, only for its well-being. His first reply was that church government was necessary for the being of the church – that is, if there is no formal church government, there is no church. That was contrary to his own denomination’s constitution. When I pointed to him the very church constitution to which he had taken an oath to subscribe, he changed his reply, and then added that what he meant was that a mature church would need church government, and that he expects only immature churches to not have governments . . . but as they mature, they will have to have governments.

I know, this is just one Presbyterian pastor, and he was rather low-level in terms of knowledge and education; but the evidence around us is that he is not alone. Presbyterians or Baptists, Reformed, Charismatics, Methodists, Lutherans, in the whole American church today, this is the established view: that the more “mature” a church becomes, the more it has to have institutionalized legal power and the establishment of an elite caste of “leaders.” The function of the Church is defined by its elite government; the purpose of the Church is institutionalization, and “maturity” is defined not in terms of the growth of the individual believers in the Church, but rather in terms of greater institutionalization.

This, of course, is contrary to the testimony of Scripture. The promise of the New Covenant is that it will lead to mature individuals who won’t need to be under anyone’s guidance, because they will all know God (Heb. 8:11; Jer. 31:34). Numerous other promises in the Old Testament point to the fact that under the New Covenant, all believers will be taught directly by God (see, for example, John 6:45, or Is. 54:13). The author of Hebrews, in chapter 5, chastises his readers that they still need someone to teach them, and then admonishes them to grow to maturity where they themselves should be teachers and don’t need to return to the six basic doctrines. Where special ministries of special authority will be needed, they will be temporary, until the individual believers under their ministries achieve maturity: In Eph. 4, after Paul says that God gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, he adds, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” The role of these ministries is temporary, and their authority is temporary, just as the authority of parents and teachers is temporary; and Paul adds: “As a result, we are no longer to be children.” The purpose of Biblical leadership is not the maturity of the institution, but the maturity of the individual. Thus, Biblically, the more mature a church is, the less it will need a government. Not the other way around.

Such a top-down view of leadership, of course, comes from paganism. It is in paganism where “authority” is conceived of as a top-down relationship, and where authority is expected to “organize” men into collectives under a central command. The Bible contains numerous testimonies that the farther men deviate from God, the less value their human individuality has to them, and the more they succumb to centralized government, tyranny, and bureaucracy. Right after the Flood, we see Nimrod leading the way by establishing his own empire in the lands where today Mesopotamia is (Gen. 10:8-12). The Tower of Babel of which the next chapter of Genesis speaks was built in the same lands, under Nimrod’s empire. (By the way, contrary to modern fashionable interpretations, the Tower of Babel was not an attempt at globalism; it was rather an attempt at localism, at gathering people locally under the power of a local leader, or local pastor, or local governing body. The fear of these people was that they were going to be scattered globally. God’s answer to their rebellion was true globalism: He scattered them over the face of the earth. Next time you hear some celebrity preacher see “globalism” in the Tower of Babel, keep in mind he hasn’t read the text.) Further on, the pagan nations around Abraham and later Israel are shown to be controlled by the whim of their kings. Neither Egypt nor the nations of Canaan had anything close to a free society based on public law and self-government; they all had kings who were expected to rule by diktat and permit. The same principle was operational in all pagan empires in history: a small elite at the top, ruling with raw power over the masses of people. At the first attempt at establishing a monarchy in Israel, the rule of Abimelech, Jotham, the youngest son of Gideon, responded with the finest parable in all history of the nature of centralized political power, in Judges 9:7-15. In the final account, when people want to establish a centralized power over themselves, they end with the worst (the brambles) being at the top, trying to subjugate all the productive members of the society (olive trees, fig trees, and vines), threatening them with vengeance if they don’t. Israel was meant to be exactly the opposite: the ideal constitution was no earthly king, and a population that was thoroughly instructed in the Law, in private and in public, capable of maintaining law and order without any official bureaucracy or police or other executive institutions.

Jesus explained the same principle to His disciples when they were arguing who would be the greatest: “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them are called ‘Benefactors’” (Luke 22:25). And then He said that “It’s not this way among you.” In His Kingdom, the concept of greatness and leadership and authority was to be very different.
Modern churches and modern church ministries have adopted exactly that pagan view of leadership. It doesn’t start with servanthood, as Jesus said it should be. It starts with the establishment of an authority structure. Every church and denomination in the US today starts with the concept of who will be greater and the greatest, and then, a significant effort of sermons, teachings, and organizational work is put into programming the people under the “leaders” to obey the leaders. All this is based on one or two Biblical verses – and, as with so many other false or misplaced and misbalanced doctrines in the churches today, one or two Biblical verses are made into a whole theology of obedience to the leaders, a theology that the Bible doesn’t emphasize, and neither does it teach it. And of course, just like the political leaders of whom Jesus speaks call themselves “benefactors,” (despite the fact that it is actually their subjects who work for them), the modern celebrities of the ministry-industrial complex call themselves “ministers,” when in fact, demand the opposite, that their followers serve and obey them.

In general, such ideology of the vertical nature of leadership affects everyone in the churches, but its principal victims are people who have been through some abuse in their past – usually drug addicts, orphans, slaves, victims of domestic abuse, oppressed peoples, etc. The tactics of establishing a mini-empire of vertical “leadership” is to find a social sample of people who suffer from abuse, and liberate them from that abuse, but only to the point where they will be simply attached to their new liberator, not freed to develop to maturity and to follow their own individual purpose in life. Being freed of a more damaging dependence, such people will gladly accept a less damaging dependence as an “improvement” in their life; and then, not being taught to become independent, they will be constantly reminded of their old dependence, so that they appreciate the new one. A very informative example of the nature of this tactics can be seen in the educational theory and practice of the Communist educational expert, Anton Makarenko, in the 1920s and the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In his attempt to create, through education, the new Soviet man who will be perfectly obedient to the Party and shaped and motivated and conditioned by the collective, Makarenko focused his educational efforts on orphans who were in abundance in the Soviet Union after decades of constant wars and political purges. Having come from a life of chronic starvation and living on the streets, without shelter, the orphans found in the new educational colonies obvious improvement of their lives: regular nutrition and relative safety. An important part of the children’s education was being reminded of their past; but since no individual purpose and future were taught, the children were trained to grow in subjection to the collective, and in obedience to the Party. Eventually, some of Makarenko’s early disciples became henchmen for Stalin’s regime; after the death of Stalin, many were used as spies abroad or as informants at home.

Granted, the same ideology of “leadership” in the churches doesn’t result in such extreme immoral use of people, but it does lead to the same lack of individual purpose and future for the followers. The exorbitant focus on “grace” and on “our wretched sinfulness” in modern “Reformed” preaching, without any follow-up with the concepts of the Dominion Covenant and the Kingdom of God in history, has the same purpose as the educational tactics of Makarenko: Keep the listeners focused on their miserable past, never offer them a glorious individual meaning of a future of maturity and productivity, and insist on their “obedience” and “being under care,” so that they remain constantly dependent on their current “leaders.”

Of course, since a mass of people is supposed to be ruled or “taken care of” by a small elite of “ministers,” high social visibility is a must for the “leaders,” for without such high social visibility, control and manipulation become difficult. In previous eras, such visibility was achieved through two means: magnificent construction projects (think the Tower of Babel, designed to prevent people from scattering, and think of all the construction marvels of the ancient world), and lavish garments and ceremonies. Israel’s public ceremonies were decentralized and limited to eating and drinking before the Lord; the only centralized public ceremony was every seven years and was a public reading of the Law, not a pompous ceremony of worshiping the political power. Communism was just as committed to gigantic centralized ceremonies that establish the high social visibility of the state. But Communism was also the political system that introduced the new tool for high social visibility: the media. Vladimir Lenin said in 1919, in conversation with film producers, that “of all arts, the most important to us is the cinema.” Following that, the Soviet Union produced the first state propaganda films in the 1920s and the 1930s, and they astonishingly impressive for the time. With the cinema – and the media in general – providing this high social visibility, modern “leadership” thus has changed the requirements for the modern so-called “leaders.” A “leader” today is is an entertainer, someone proficient in the use of media, someone capable of keeping his followers fixed on the screen, a PR expert, a producer of movies or of music, etc. This change in the concept of the “leader” into an entertainer led to the emergence of modern celebrity worship in the churches in the US; all the celebrity preachers in the US are skillful media manipulators first and foremost. Most “ministries” are stuck at the same level of teaching and preaching, ministries of 30+ years teach today exactly the same things they have taught 30 years ago. Thus, real service of helping their listeners mature to higher levels of theological and practical knowledge is not valued; what is valued is the ability of the “leader” to find fancier and more entertaining ways of saying the same old simple, basic things, to keep his audience fixed on the superficial, and never really go in depth in teaching them to discern good and evil in everything, as mature men should do. Only in the last one year I have counted two dozen new and fancier phrases by modern “Reformed” celebrities to say that we were dead in our sins and we were saved by grace; for the same period, not a single one of these same “Reformed” celebrities offered to his listeners any tactical knowledge of how to fight evil and injustice in our society, let alone lead them in the fight for abolishing abortion. The modern “Reformed” world is a huge tomb full of dead bones, but its walls are covered with pure sparkling white. No true leadership can come out of dead bones.

While the system based on such concept of leadership – a small elite of entertainers and conference speakers and a large crowd of faceless and inactive listeners – may command for a time superior financial resources, in reality, it produces no results. Let me qualify this statement: it can produce no results for the Kingdom of God. It does serve well the purposes of small human kingdoms – whether political establishments or denominations or local churches – but it never produces any advance of the Gospel. As the churches in the US shifted their operational focus from individual maturity to collectivist submission to institutional hierarchy (local churches and denominations), they lost both their ability to preach the Gospel and their ability to influence the culture. I have talked in a previous episode about American Presbyterianism and how within less than two generations it degenerated from being the dominant influence in America to being a marginal sect of no significance at all: an astonishing modern example of salt that has lost its savor and is thrown out to be trampled by men. The same applies to all American churches in general. The pro-life movement, very early in its history, adopted the same system of leadership, a small political and ecclesiastical elite and large faceless masses who are only expected to send the checks and wait for the magic to happen at the highest levels of church and civil government. Forty-plus years later, that kind of “leadership” has led us nowhere, abortion continues to be legalized, Planned Parenthood makes more money than ever and laughs in the face of the pro-life movement, and the “leaders” of that movement continue asking for more money from the same gullible public that has bought into their concept of leadership. And, as if that is not clear, we have new celebrities now who continue subscribing to the same kind of institutionalized leadership, and continue offering promises that if we just have another conference to “train” church ministers how to do it, this time we will certainly be able to “end abortion.” As if the problem of these church ministers so far has been their lack of knowledge, and not their cowardice, greed, and lust for power. Institutionalized leadership doesn’t work for the Kingdom of God. It has never worked for the Kingdom of God, and never will.
What is, then, the Biblical concept of leadership; of true leadership, that is, based on Biblical principles and practically applicable and successful?

Sit down and hold fast to your chair. You will be administered a doze of BFO, that is, a blinding flash of the obvious. If you grasp it, it will immediately explain to you the reasons for the gigantic failure of leadership in the American churches in the last one century, that same failure which has made the church be thrown out and trampled under the feet of men.
Ready for your blinding flash of the obvious?

Here it is: The ultimate example of true leadership and discipleship in history and in the Bible was designed so as to only continue three and a half years.

In three and a half years the disciples were given the vision and some initial training in basic things. Then they were left alone with the Holy Spirit. Worse than that: they were brutally weaned off of their dependence on their Leader. Yes, not just left alone; they had to witness the crucifixion of their leader, which pretty much sealed it for them: He is not coming back. He designed it that way, to show an example of leadership. In His concept of leadership, unless He left them alone, they wouldn’t get the Holy Spirit. John 15:7 is very clear: “If I don’t go, the Helper will not come to you.” The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to people who are dependent on constant babysitting by their leaders. The Holy Spirit comes only to teach adult people to maturity, to being able to discern between good and evil in everything, without having to be “under the care of leaders,” and without having to return over and over again to the milk of the faith (Heb. 5:11-6:2).

This should be a no-brainer. As I have mentioned in many other places, this is one of the most prominent promises of the New Covenant, that all will be taught directly by God (Is. 54:13; John 6:45); that there will be no more a need for people teaching each other (Jer. 31:34; Heb. 8:11). That was the very purpose of the giving of the Holy Spirit: so that everyone who believes can know God, and there is no need for middlemen. The Levitical priesthood was removed; the access to God is open. And this access is not just limited to salvation, as many allegedly “Reformed” claim; it is an access of priesthood, that is, of direct learning and direct authority for every individual believer in the redemption of the world.

True Biblical leadership, therefore, has for its purpose not the perennial dependency of the masses under the leaders, but to the contrary, the maturity of each individual to do the work of the Kingdom. It is always temporary, until the listeners achieve maturity, as Ephesians 4:13 teaches. A true Biblical leader is not one who leads a host of faceless followers; he starts a fire in the minds of men and only makes sure the fire continues to spread. As far as his leadership and authority is concerned, the Biblical leader works hard to phase himself out of relevance; he does everything he can to say to his disciples, “I have to go, so that you continue the work.” The sooner, the better. Any Evangelical celebrity who plans for a lifetime of “ministry” – profitable ministry, to be precise – is not worth following, and odds are, he is a dangerous wolf. Especially if he continues insisting on “obedience” and “being under the care of leaders.” It is the maturity of the disciples that is the focus of a true leader, not the survival of his own “ministry.”

This is the way Jesus acted with His disciples, and this is the way Paul treated his converts. Paul never stopped for too long at the same place to establish himself as a “leader.” He never requested obedience to himself as a leader. Initially, he didn’t even establish authority structures in the churches he planted; most of his epistles speak not to the elders in the churches but only to the mass of Christians in them. See, or example, how he deals with the disorder in the Corinthian church; there is not a single reference to elders or church ministers in the several chapters where Paul lays down the rules for order in the church. He expected that the Christians in Corinth – yes, even in Corinth – will be mature enough to establish order without any hierarchical structures. The only cases in which he arranged for the ordination of elders and establishment of structures is in the epistles to Timothy and Titus; and in both cases the reason was that disorderliness of those churches was so great, that there was no hope of recovery without some level of institutional structure. If the Christians in those churches were more mature – like the Corinthians – such measure wouldn’t be needed.

“I have come to cast fire upon the earth,” Jesus said in Luke 12:49. He had just finished speaking about stewardship as servanthood. He continued speaking about division on the earth; and that division was to be not some gigantic collective clash of armies but division on individual and family level, within the families: three against two and two against three, father against son, mother against daughter, etc. This all tells us that the fight will be at individual level first and foremost; for people to be willing to stand against their families, there had to be strong commitment and leadership in each one of these individuals. The family always commands the strongest loyalty; only a committed leader will be able to break from the bonds of such loyalty and pursue righteousness and justice. The fire Jesus was speaking about was that leadership which spreads like a fire: creating more and more independent individuals who can lead others to become independent individuals. So independent that they would be able to stand even against their own families of they oppose the Gospel. It was not a fire of faceless collectives; it was a to be a movement of committed, independent, free individuals, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And only such a movement can achieve the goals of the Kingdom of God.

Abortion, therefore, won’t be ended by professional entertainers and institutional leaders building their own brand names and a host of spectators. Neither will it be ended by conferences that rely on the institutional church system to do the work; the pastors’ inactivity is not caused because they don’t know what to do, and won’t be removed by teaching them what to do. Abortion will be abolished only by the work of those leaders who, within three and a half years, recreate themselves in many others, through teaching them the vision, and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit. The true Biblical leaders whose first care is the maturity, and not the institutional obedience of their listeners. Those who are building a movement based on a vision and a worldview, not an institution based on personal charisma and soundbites. And therefore leaders who work hard to phase themselves out of relevance, because their vision has been multiplied beyond their limited reach, and the fire is spreading.

The book I will assign this week is R.J. Rushdoony’s The Atheism of the Early Church. A short book with short chapters. But full of important content. There is a chapter in it, titled “The Future of Justice.” Pay close attention to what it says.

And remember in your prayers and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries: A foreign mission devoted to building a Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by building first the intellectual foundation for it: translation and publishing of books and other materials. While working on this episode, I am also preparing for my annual trip to Bulgaria for our Worldview Conference there, where Joel McDurmon and I will be speaking on personal investment, entrepreneurship, and the future. We need your prayers and your support. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. May God bless you all.