Leadership is the gifting I have had the greatest struggle to describe. Two reasons account for this difficulty.
First, leadership comes in different varieties. A church planter and a pastor are both leaders, but they are quite different beasts. Paul is not John. Both have leadership giftings, but they have very different strengths and weaknesses.
Second, Paul mentions the gift of leadership in Romans 12, but in Eph 4, he mentions as leaders the gifts of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers. So is Paul using different terms to refer to the same thing? And if so, which term in Ephesians most corresponds to the gift of leadership in Romans? Or is Romans a broad umbrella that includes different types of leaders? Or is Ephesians merely a list of offices not related to spiritual gifts at all? These are some of the questions I have asked in trying to figure out exactly what Paul means by leadership.
Given these questions, here is how I plan on approaching the gift of leadership.
I believe it more likely that Paul’s use of the term “leadership” in Rom 12:8 is a reference to pastoral leadership than to more entrepreneurial leadership. Here is why:
Paul uses the same term in I Th 5:12 and I Tim 5:17 to refer to the elders of a church, and Biblically elders, overseers, and pastors are all different words for the same office. In addition, the word for “lead” can equally be translated “care for” (see BAGD) and care is a central component of pastoral leadership, but it can often be a weakness of entrepreneurial leaders.
These two facts are not conclusive, for entrepreneurial leaders can still be elders, and church planters still need to care for the flock, but, nonetheless, Paul’s use of the word and the alternate meaning of the word make me lean in the direction of saying that Paul has in mind a more pastoral function than a function that begins new works.
However, because my leaning is not certain, I will describe both of these leadership types with the proviso that I believe the pastoral one is the more likely of the two. Thus, in the next couple weeks, I will post blogs on entrepreneurial leadership and pastoral leadership.
