Several years ago I read Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Temptations of a CEO, a “leadership fable” about Andrew O’Brien, who is approaching his one-year anniversary as CEO of Trinity Systems.
Faced with his accountability for the company’s poor fiscal results, Andrew learns some tough leadership lessons from a quirky old man named Charlie. Woven into the parable are a CEO’s five temptations:
- The desire to protect career status
- The desire to be popular
- The need to make correct decisions, to achieve certainty
- The desire for harmony
- The desire for invulnerability[1]
To overcome these five temptations, a CEO must learn to:
- Choose trust over invulnerability
- Choose conflict over harmony
- Choose clarity over certainty
- Choose accountability over popularity
- Choose results over status[2]
A pastor is not a CEO. There are (or should be) significant differences between the driving convictions and priorities of a pastor and a CEO. Yet, as I read Lencioni’s book, I realized that a CEO’s temptations are similar to some leadership temptations that pastors face:
1. To put personal career over the church’s health
This happens when a pastor adopts a professional mentality instead of a servant’s heart. When a pastor’s driving concern is to produce a certain kind of church, have a certain kind of ministry, or scale the ladder of ministerial success (e.g., advance from a smaller church to a larger one), he will be tempted to put himself before the church.
To avoid this temptation, pastors need two things. First, they need an uncompromised desire to honor Christ and love people as Christ’s servant. Paul said, “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5).
Second, pastors need biblical criteria for measuring church health. Unlike a CEO, a pastor cannot measure church health by watching the bottom line. More numbers and higher offerings are not necessarily signs of spiritual vitality. Instead, pastors should ask questions that probe the spiritual health and growth of the people:
- Are the members and attendees growing in Christlikeness?
- Are they developing spiritual disciplines, growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ, and learning to walk in the Spirit?
- Are their relationships marked by love, compassion, humility, and purity?
- Are they making disciples and bearing witness to the reality of Christ in their lives?
2. To put personal popularity over biblical faithfulness
Everyone likes to be liked, but popularity and approval can be an insidious temptation for pastors whose “job security” often depends on keeping a majority vote.
Pastors should, of course, care about maintaining healthy and loving relationships with church members. But the desire to be well thought of must never compromise a pastor’s faithfulness to preach and teach God’s Word.
The desire for approval can also tempt pastors to avoid confronting sin and exercising church discipline. The opposite temptation exists as well—to discipline people with no love or desire for restoration—and all too often, churches have erred on this unloving side. In a day where tolerance is the highest virtue and the desire to be liked rules many hearts, church discipline is increasingly rare.
Paul said, “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10). Pastors must set their sights on serving Christ as faithful stewards of the gospel, not on winning the popularity vote.
3. To avoid seeming risks for the kingdom out of a desire to always make safe decisions
There are few certainties in this life, and there are no guarantees of success in human terms.
There is the certainty of God’s faithfulness, however, when we seek first His kingdom (Matt. 6:33); and there is the promise of the gospel’s ultimate triumph (Matt. 24:14). Relying on these promises, we should step out in faith, leaving the outcomes to God.
Several years ago, I was challenged by a message from Luke 5 about Jesus telling His disciples to launch out into the deep to catch fish. The sermon’s key statement was, “Those who stay in the shallows miss the miracles.”
Just completing my first year pastoring a small, under-budgeted church which had never sponsored a short-term, overseas mission trip, I believed God wanted us to step out in faith and send a team to Africa for a short-term trip. We did, and God provided.
In the following four years, I’ve seen the Lord do more than I imagined possible. For example, last summer we sent five people to a Bible college in South Africa, and they took $8,000 worth of books to give away. Still under 150 on Sunday mornings, this was huge for our blue-collar congregation, but it all started with an act of faith that seemed risky and was initially very uncomfortable.
4. To sacrifice truth to peacemaking or to sacrifice unity to ambition
The New Testament places a high premium on peacemaking. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). But this does not refer to peace at any price.
In Ephesians 4, Paul exhorts us to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). But then he lays out the foundations for this Spirit-created unity in a series of non-negotiable truths that demand our confession and affirmation:
There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Eph. 4:4-6).
In other passages, the New Testament authors defend:
- The gospel’s integrity of salvation by grace through faith alone (Galatians)
- Jesus Christ’s full deity and true humanity (1 John)
- The sufficiency of Christ’s cross to bring reconciliation with God and spiritual maturity (Colossians 1–2)
- Christ’s literal, physical resurrection from the dead (1 Corinthians 15)
Core truths integral to the gospel must be affirmed. Truth cannot be sacrificed on the altar of unity.
However, the opposite temptation also exists. Christian leaders can spend so much time on the margins of Christianity, enforcing their particular views on hot-button issues, that they foster a party spirit which belies the fundamental unity of the body of Christ. This is the situation Paul confronted in 1 Corinthians 1–3.
So don’t misunderstand: I am not advocating Lencioni’s policy to “choose conflict over harmony” in any and all situations. Church harmony and unity is a very high priority in the New Testament (see Paul’s letter to the Philippians, for example).
There are a lot of issues that should never split a church: worship styles, church programs, carpet color, etc. While pastors should not sacrifice the gospel truth for church unity, neither should they sacrifice church unity for carnal ambition and personal preferences.
5. To minister from a pretense of perfection and lead with an impenetrable and unapproachable self-confidence
Sometimes it seems that lay people expect their pastors to be perfect; and pastors all too easily believe their own press clippings and develop an impenetrable exterior that never admits to struggle or failure. Few things can be more deadly to a pastor’s spiritual life.
Even worse is an overblown self-confidence. Leaders who always know “God’s will” and never admit to faulty judgment or personal limitations do not engender trust in their followers.
Pastors must never cease to be human and genuine. Every sinful word or desire does not need to be broadcast; but every pastor, like every Christian, needs spiritual friendship and personal ministry from others with whom sins can be confessed and personal sanctification pursued with love. Even from the pulpit, I’ve found that people usually resonate with understanding and hope when I teach from my own failures and struggles.
Endnotes
[1] Patrick Lencioni, The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 111–118.
[2] Ibid., 119.