Pete's Blog

On the bus yesterday I listened to a talk called The Pathway to Eldership: The Qualities and Making of a Leader, given by Richard Mayhue. He's the Dean of MacArthur's college and seminary, The Master's College and Seminary, respectively. I think he's an amazing speaker. Very talented.

I usually don't recommend talks or sermons that I can't link to, but this talk was so valuable that I will direct you to it even though I can't hyperlink you to it: Go to the "Media Vault" on the website of either of MacArthur's major conferences Resolved or The Shepherds' Conference. From there, if you search "Pathway to Eldership" it should be the first option. Otherwise, you can select in the first box "Shepherds' Conference," then in the second box, "Audio Downloads," "2001" in the third box, then finally "Seminar Sessions" in the fourth box. The tenth listed talk should be the one I'm pointing you to.

Listen to it. While listening to it, he started talking about how ministries get leaders who they later regret taking in. I've thought about this along similar lines before, namely, how easy it is to ask an administratively competent person who was spiritually weak to join leadership, only later to regret it later.

Dr. Mayhue in this talk addresses a different mistake that happens in calling leaders, though it's along a similar line as I have thought before. So, for those of you who will listen to the talk, maybe this will make you more interested in it. And for those who weren't going to listen to it, hopefully you'll find the following segment taken from the talk insightful, and take it as a good warning. The segment starts at 9:36.

And I asked the question, "How in the world did he ever get into the leadership at that church?" And some of you are asking the question, "How do I inherit the leaders that I have or leaders that I have had in the past?" The basic answer to that is that leadership was based on strong natural leadership rather than on strong spiritual leadership.

And if you read much leadership literature whether it's biblical or not for the most part you're reading about strong natural leadership, you're reading about men who are highly motivated, men who have all of the externals—their style, their sophistication, they're suave, . . . [he start's this list item with "they're" again, but I can't figure out what the word is, it sounds like "high why" or "high wide" but I don't know what word he's really referring to, if you download the talk and figure out the word, please comment and let me know], and handsome, they're very, very knowledgeable, they're very, very bright men, they're successful in their field, and they're immediately available to step in and solve whatever problems are there. And that's just what you've been looking for, right? . . . [I've cut out this part because I don't want you to think that I have hidden motives behind posting this section from the talk. If you're curious what I've cut, listen to the talk.]

But if you're the one selecting leadership and now have problems with them, there's a high probability that the mistake that you made was looking at his external successes rather than asking was he a spiritual or a godly man and qualified about who he was on the inside, rather than who he was on the outside.