The Teaching Pool

You can put the Saturday night marathon study sessions to rest.

All across the country, several churches and their pastors are beginning to create a new way of constructing their weekly

messages, choosing to move from an individualized study model to a communal one. And the results, thus far, have been something to consider.

Leadership is lonely. Perhaps you’ve heard this phrase. After all, it’s used by the majority of leadership experts, whether Christian or not. The reasoning stems from our CEO society in which the leader is alone atop the pyramid, and the church is no different in its structure. Therefore, leaders must simply brace for the worst and hope for the best since there is no one around them to lean on or share the load.

The statistics demonstrating the problem are staggering. Consider the following:

• The Alban Institute recently conducted a survey in 2001 in which 17 percent of pastors are currently experiencing burnout and another 40 percent are “heading for burnout.”

• According to a 2002 Alban survey, 74 percent of pastors reported “that they had too many demands on their time.”

• Leadership Journal also conducted a study stating 70 percent of pastors do not have someone they consider a close friend.

This lack of community and time has so negatively affected the pastoral role that something has to be done.

Because of this, leadership models both in and out of the church have begun to move toward something different. An Industry Week article from September 2000 by Peter Strozniak noted that businesses are now more team-oriented than ever. Strozniak goes on to say that “leadership must shift from the traditional command-and-control mode to a coach-and-collaboration style that supports a team environment.” Peter B. Grazier, founder of Teambuilding, Inc., also notices this trend, stating that more companies than ever are redesigning workspace for collaboration, using team-oriented software and tapping into the collective mind of the work force.

But while the business world may be moving forward, the church is still behind the shift. Pastors still continue the hard work of solo leadership. Rather than seek alternatives to the loneliness at the top, they choose harmful methods of dealing with the issue. A leader might mask the pain or loneliness, pretending that everything is going OK. Another leader will just continue to push himself until he can work no more. And this, in a large part, is where the statistics of burning out in ministry come from.

But it was not supposed to be this way. The business of church is actually rooted in a communal model of leadership if you take it back to its Hebraic roots. Jesus obviously had His 12 disciples. Rabbis always had their group of students, where they would study through a process of debate and dialogue. Leadership was not designed to be lonely then, and it doesn’t have to be this way now.