The best leaders are the ones who have convinced their congregations that by just doing the simple act of going to church on Sunday to hear them preach, that they are doing everything that they need to do for fulfillment. Think about it. The churches with the best leaders are the the ones with the biggest churches. It certainly isn’t because they are causing them to be an effective force in their neighbourhoods and it’s not because they are good at challenging them to live lives that are more like Jesus. The common denominator with all these “good leaders” is that they all have big churches and big gatherings of people that listen to them. There is nothing else really that all these leaders have in common, besides the size of their followings.
This means that consciously or subconsciously the leader at the front has one job. This job is to convince you that your main goal in your Christian life is to keep showing up. If you keep showing up and you can get your friends to keep showing up, then there really isn’t more expected of you (besides to make sure you show up more often to the programs and make sure your money shows up in the plate). Great leaders have mastered the art of summarizing your entire Christian walk into showing up and listening to them preach and convincing you that this is your main duty in life. The cycle goes around and around as great leaders convince through their clever communication skills that the very act of being communicated too is what life is about.
The bad leaders are the ones that work themselves out of a job by making themselves unnecessary. Bad leaders are the kind that tell everyone that is being preached to and showing up at church is the most important thing they can do, and then do a below-par job at actually convincing them to stay at their church. You generally get people complaining that they aren’t being fed at church, they aren’t being spoken too or the church just isn’t for them. It sucks when you are a bad leader because you think the way of getting these people back is to just to become more convincing, but really it’s just a Catch 22. You’ve already convinced them that all they they need in life is to show up, and then you don’t give them anything worthwhile to show up to.