As the son of a preacher, I noticed a curious thing growing up: People in church leadership positions didn't necessarily know how to lead. I found this to be true in business, but as the exception. My father pastored a number of small churches in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Unfortunately, many of the people were small too. In those churches, factory workers who ran plant machinery by day came to board meetings at night and tried to become executives. It didn't work. Even in my early teens, I could sense the ineptness.
As employees, they had no experience in good management, and they were incapable of offering anything better for the church. They assumed places of leadership without having leadership training. I watched day laborers with warped ideas of what it meant to "be the boss" become absolute dictators in the church.
One of these men would suddenly find himself chairman of the board. He did not know a thing about organization, future planning, human dynamics, or vision. He didn't practice leadership in his job, or even in his own family. Yet suddenly he would become a religious mini-mogul.
What was worse, these people rarely recognized their lack of ability. They assumed leadership was a position when in fact it is a function. Leadership is not a title that grants you license to force others to knuckle under; it's a skill you perform, a service you render for the whole group.
I saw my father as a genuine man of God. His longest stay was in a small church in the cotton mill section in Nashville. He became something of a padre of the slums. He had no fear of walking through the dangerous parts of the city. In the first place, he was an extremely strong, powerfully-built man. He'd been a blacksmith when he was young, and I don't think anyone would have touched him. More importantly, he was revered by many in the neighborhood as a godly man. It does something to a son when you know your father is held in that kind of reverence.
But he was not a politician, nor was he gifted organizationally. When he would be outmaneuvered or put down by the power brokers in the church, I wondered " Where's God in this? If we're supposed to be serving God and God is supposed to take care of us, then why is the rich guy (or vocal guy or angry guy) able to run us off? Are these people more powerful than God?"
Dad was a people person, not a natural manager. He would let things take their course without offering much structure. As a result, he struggled throughout his ministry.
My mother was the manager; she was a very well-organized person, and I admired organization even then. She saved us from starvation—stretching the $125 a month my father made so it could feed seven people. I could see these lay people did not have the leadership and management skills my mother did. These experiences convinced me of the value of an orderly way of doing things. I grew up wanting to become a leader— not just to occupy a position of leadership, but to perform competently.
