A Word for leaders

Christian leadership involves a lot of words: sermons preached, Bible studies led, meetings with individuals, families and teams. Words are the pastor’s tools of trade.

It makes a lot of sense since words are of crucial importance to Christian people—after all we trust a God who speaks! It means that fundamental to Christian spiritually is listening to the Word of God. In Isaiah 66:2 God declares that, "But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word".

God’s word to the world is the gospel: the message of salvation from the coming wrath that only comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus for our sin. This word has been inscripturated in the words of the Bible as “God’s word written” and is preached to the nations. Hence, teaching the Bible and sharing its message lies at the heart of Christian ministry and leadership. Therefore the Christian minister will often be the one who is gifted in using words.

However, being good with words can be a dangerous thing.

It is important that Christian leaders are good with words and able to teach, but the more important question is what do they teach? A huge trap in life is to be good with words in a way that disguises the reality that you are not ‘good’ with the Word of God. An extreme form is the false teacher who distorts the teaching of the Bible (2 Peter 3:16), another is the teacher whose success is based on the fact that people are wanting to hear “what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim 4:3). The Apostle Paul had to contend with the “super apostles” and the way the church in Corinth had ignored him, considering him personally unimpressive and held his speaking ability in contempt (2 Cor 10:10). Being good with words meant the super-apostles were able to hide the fact that they were leading people astray from their sincere devotion to Christ (2 Cor 11:3).

The call of the Christian leader is to be someone who is reliable in teaching the word (2 Tim 2:2) and correctly handles the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15). You must be able to teach in order to lead God’s people, but being great with words means you have to be doubly careful to be good with the Word.