Stepping off the Pedestal

Over the last seventy years, we’ve built a personality-centric church model. 

We have discovered, unsurprisingly, that a great way to have a growing church is to have a charismatic personality as the leader with a well-defined status ladder that people with the most negligible status can aspire to climb.

Over the last decade, this approach to Christian Ministry has repeatedly failed. I am sure that Ravi Zacharias, Bill Hybels, Mark Driscoll, Brian Houston, Mike Pilavachi and Jean Vanier did not plan for their ministries to end as they did; however, each one found themselves atop status ladders that crumbled.

The implosion of a status ladder is not a small thing. People are profoundly hurt as it becomes clear that someone they had trusted and given a place of significant personal influence may not be worthy of that entrustment.

For the leaders themselves being on a crumbling pedestal is a horrible thing. I have witnessed what it means and wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

I am incredibly proud of what my father, Mal Garvin, achieved in his life. Coming to faith as a 15-year-old, he just wanted people to know about the Jesus who had changed his life, so he began to tell them. 

His enthusiasm was infectious, and by the time he was 18, in 1960, he founded a mission organisation known as Teen Crusaders.

My dad was a gifted communicator and a visionary leader. One of my earliest memories is of him speaking to a sea of hundreds of people at a rally outside Australia’s Parliament House in March 1973. 

My childhood was marked by many events where Dad would speak, and people would hang on to his every word. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my dad led hundreds and probably thousands of people to Jesus. He was one of the better-known Christian speakers in Australia in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Dad was also one of the best-known voices on Australian radio. His four-minute syndicated radio spot, the ‘Breakthru Generation’, was heard on over 100 commercial radio stations long before Christian radio stations existed. In fact, Dad helped Australia’s first Christian radio station get its license.

For most of his life, Dad wrestled with the disconnect between the life he has found in and through Jesus and the way the Christian church engaged with Australians. One book about the history of the Evangelical Church in Australia wrote about his impact:

From late 1977, an increasing stream of articles on belief and national identity appeared in On Being, mostly authored by Mal Garvin. A jewellery craftsman converted at 15 through the Sydney City Mission, in 1960 Garvin founded Teen Crusaders as a ministry to unchurched and troubled youth in Hornsby, followed by ‘The Attic’, a counter-culture coffee house. In January 1977, he delivered a seminar on ‘Youth in Australian Society’ at the National Christian Youth Convention, an annual gathering of 1,600 Christian adolescents and youth leaders that was also addressed by the Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. John Walker, a young evangelical attendee, found Garvin’s examination of national identity the most profound aspect of the Convention. ‘This discovery of my “Australianness” was a revelation,’ he wrote, ‘and its implications for me as a Christian are staggering. ^[1]

This quest to understand the “Australian soil” into which the seed of the gospel was planted led him to write the book Us Aussies and was a central theme of most of his life.

As Dad strove to help people live faith, he quickly discovered that he needed to develop his interpersonal skills. Eventually, he became a self-taught counsellor using his extensive experience and uniquely integrated mixture of frameworks, including Transactional Analysis, Logotherapy, Rogerian reflective listening, Erikson’s developmental stages, Sensitivity Group training and a biblical understanding of the human spirit and sin.

Teen Crusaders changed its name to ‘Fusion Australia’. They grew 30 locations across the country by the early 1990s with the stated goal “To ensure that by the end of the ’90s every young Australian, from early adolescence to young adulthood, will have come into meaningful contact with the claims of Christ, and a model of the wholeness they promise.”[2]

In 1992, after completing a journalism cadetship in a little outback radio station, I did the six-month bible college course that Dad had written, taught by people from a broad range of backgrounds, and then began to work under him in the organisation.

Working with Fusion felt like you were changing the world, even if the world itself didn’t always seem to notice or care that much.

I also loved the deep and connected sense of community within Fusion. When you feel like you are working on something that really matters, there is something about the relationships you build with those with whom you serve that is hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it.

Dad had continued to lead Christians to moments of prophetic engagement with the culture throughout my childhood. Some of my fondest memories are the adventures of rallies and rock concerts in the International Year of Youth (1985), the International Year of Peace (1986) and the massive prayer gathering for the opening of the New Parliament house in 1988. Those gatherings and marches developed momentum. Dad led what became known as the Awakening movement, as Christians gathered in capital cities at Easter each year for all-night prayer vigils and nationally coordinated marches to ‘reclaim Easter as an Australian Christian Family celebration’.

All of these experiences meant that Fusion was uniquely placed to facilitate churches who were interested in outreach during the Sydney Olympics, which also meant that the organisation gained international interest and invitations to help churches in other countries hosting major sporting events (Greece, Canada, South Africa and China) connect with their communities.

Suddenly, the organisation that had been proudly Australian was international. Within ten years, there were Fusion centres in fourteen countries, and the one-week discipleship training course Dad wrote as a 20-year-old was being translated into six different languages.

I could see that my dad was tired. Everyone could. He kept talking about wanting to retire. At one point, he set a date but then decided that there weren’t enough competent people to pick up the baton, so he changed his job title from ‘National Director’ to ‘Founding President’ and held on for what he said were just a few more years.

I was so proud in 2009 when a story in Christian Today titled “No pedestal for Mal Garvin AM”^[3] told its readers that my father had just been made a member of the Order of Australia.

The truth is, though, Dad was on a pedestal in the eyes of many, and the pedestal came crashing down later that year.

Dad was attempting to support a young woman whom others had given up trying to help and, in the process, made serious errors of judgement, which meant that he needed to step down from leadership.

The trust that had been the organisation’s mainstay evaporated instantly, and those of us who tried to hold it together at that time found ourselves battered, bruised and misunderstood.

My dad was remarkable, and I am so proud to be his son. It is clear to me that he wasn’t motivated by a desire for a pedestal. However, as most strong leaders do, he ended up on one.

I was speaking with missiologist Michael Frost at a conference for Baptist Pastors in Tassie in 2017 about the journey with Fusion, and he pointed out that most of the leaders who were at the forefront of mission in the 1960s and 70s were strong like my dad had been strong because they had to be. They were motivated by a vision of Jesus that people in the church didn’t understand, so they often had to forge ahead when people with control of the church’s resources wanted to keep things safe and comfortable. Michael pointed out that people like my Dad and John Smith[4] needed self-sufficiency because the church wasn’t ready for them. It was a helpful insight, and I think there is a lot of truth to it.

My dad’s strength of character allowed him to do things that others thought were crazy, but the problem was that while strong people focused on Jesus can do a lot of good, they can also make mistakes. Without other strong people around them who see the world differently, those mistakes can be catastrophic.

Another reflection I had in hindsight is that part of the reason we put people on pedestals is that we are lazy. We want people to make the world safe, neat, and tidy for us rather than doing it for ourselves. Whether or not a leader wants a pedestal, we build it for them because we want someone we can admire rather than trust ourselves. It allows us to avoid the responsibility of growing up.

When I read these words written by leadership researcher Simon P Walker, I was stopped in my tracks. It felt like he was naming the social dynamic I experienced in Fusion and with Dad:

Many followers need their leaders to be everything they themselves struggle to be: they need to believe in someone who doesn’t doubt, who is never defeated, who doesn’t fall for the same routine petty temptations that they do.

As followers, we need to see someone who is ‘other’ than us, different and, often, more powerful. We need a superman or superwoman who is strong enough to protect us, to defend us and our way of life against the battering that all of us take. And so we idealise ordinary people who have taken up the burden of leadership and we turn them into the ideal heroes we need them to be.

By doing this, we ‘deal’ in a way with our deficiencies. We don’t deal with them properly or honestly, within ourselves: we deal them through a kind of proxy. The leader lives out our life for us. He embodies all we would hope, but cannot manage, to be. This is at its most basic a strategy to abdicate responsibility—it lets us off the hook and allows us to carry on dallying with the compromises in our lives rather than dealing with them directly.

So, a kind of transaction takes place in which we allow the leader to become the person we need him to be. At the same time, the leader, gratified by the attention and, indeed, adulation, seeks to achieve the standards we are unconsciously setting for him.

When this occurs, a collusion is established in which both parties meet their needs through the other.

This can result in a kind of paralysis. For the followers, it may lead to dependence; for the leader, it may lead to isolation, loneliness and intolerable strain. He cannot share any of the issues he is struggling with inside, because no one will allow him to.^[5]

A child should expect the parent figures in their lives to make the world safe and comfortable for them, but eventually, we need to grow up and stop seeking the parent who will save us from the complexity of real life. The Apostle Paul defined the outcome of Christian discipleship as maturity,^[6]precisely the opposite of what is produced by Christian churches and organisations that put their leaders on pedestals.

The whole of Matthew 18 is Jesus’ “community prescription.”^[7] It is his outline for the life his followers would need to live if they sought to be the kind of ‘one-but-not-the-same’ community he prayed for in John 17.

The Christian church, and the world generally, put strong leaders on pedestals, but that is precisely what Jesus was warning against in the first few verses of Matthew 18, which starts with the disciples asking Jesus, “Who then is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?”[8]

They’re starting to get excited because their picture is that the Messiah will come and bring a political kingdom. They expect Jesus to be the most powerful person on the planet and want some of the action.

The disciples are asking Jesus for status. They want to be up near the top of the ladder. It’s normal, but it’s not what Jesus was looking for.

The image of a ladder is a good one, as there is only ever room for one person on one rung of a ladder at a time, and it is abundantly clear that Jesus never wanted to see one of his leaders enjoying the view from the top by themselves. He has an entirely different social dynamic that he is trying to model and implant into the DNA of his church.

Jesus is looking for a different kind of leadership, but if we are to be honest, we are more interested in the type of leadership the disciples are after. We build our churches and Christian organisations around status ladders, and our leaders can enjoy the view from the top of the ladder too much.

When I surveyed our church about what they saw as the things that get in the road of the church being one, two of the most common responses were pride and ego. It’s perhaps not a surprise that those are the first things that Jesus tackles in chapter 18.

Jesus doesn’t let us get away with either seeking the pedestal or avoiding responsibility by handing responsibility to others. Instead, he calls a child to him and says:

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”^[9]

It’s important to note here that Jesus isn’t discussing how we treat children but instead says his adult followers must become ‘like’ children.

This seems at complete odds with what I have just said about discipleship being about maturity, but Jesus does not mean that his followers should be immature.

What does it mean to be like a child? My immediate thoughts turn to my children when they were smaller, and one characteristic of children stands out as a personal challenge for me. Children live in the moment. Adults tend to live either in the past or worrying about the future.

I hate that my children often experienced me as preoccupied. My youngest daughter, Sophie, would see that I wasn’t paying attention and come right up to me, her deep blue eyes locked on mine, and she would reach up and grasp my head between her two small hands and turn my head so I was now gazing into her eyes. As she did it, she would declare, “Look at me, Daddy.”

I do have a sense that often, that’s what Jesus wants to do to us, too.

It is so easy to live a distracted life. The Kingdom of God is continually unfolding in the present moment. Grace means that yesterday is over, and there is nothing you can do about tomorrow, which is why Jesus tells us not to worry about it.^[10] God invites us to be present in the moment with him.

I like to think that is at least part of what Jesus meant when he said we need to become like little children. However, there are historical circumstances that more fully make sense of what he is saying.

In the first century, children had no rights. They were the human beings with the least personal power. It makes sense, then, in the context of disciples seeking personal advancement, that Jesus would use a child as an example to demonstrate that if they were seeking influence, they were focused on the wrong thing.

Jesus was saying that we shouldn’t seek pedestals for ourselves or make them any other of his followers.

In every other kind of kingdom, including the kingdom of Australia in the 21st century, the people considered great are the ones with the most influence, which also means they have the most money and the most power. The same thing is true in every kingdom of the world – except the Kingdom of God.

The only way the kind of one-but-not-the-same community that Jesus prayed for in John 17 works is if there are enough mature people who are not seeking power, who are not seeking influence, who are not looking for a parent to tell them what to think and are accepting the weight of responsibility for their own lives. This is the kind of humility that Jesus is trying to illustrate with the living parable of the child.

Jesus is naming what ‘normal’ leadership looks like and contrasting it with the leadership he is trying to establish in his church. He is concerned about anyone who wants to climb a status ladder and instead wants his disciples to be fighting to get to the bottom of the ladder.

Jesus is inverting the whole concept of leadership.

The Apostle Paul also called for a church where the status ladder is upended, pointing to Jesus’ pattern of leadership as our model:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! ^[11]

Paul understood the temptation to seek status and put leaders on pedestals, and he refused to play that game. Just as Jesus did, he sought to contrast what the world considers good leadership with what leadership in the Kingdom of God is to be:

You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building. ^[12]

If Jesus truly believed that the oneness of the church would be the strongest argument for the truth of his divinity (as he declares in John 17), then both he and Paul understood that oneness begins by turning the whole ‘normal’ approach to leadership on its head.

St. Vincent De Paul may have seen why Jesus and Paul were so focused on status when he pointed out that the kind of leadership they were advocating for and the kind of church it produces would be the most effective antidote to the corrupt power systems of the world:

“The most powerful weapon to conquer evil is humility. For evil does not know at all how to employ it, nor does it know how to defend itself against it.” ^[13]

Perhaps it’s time to recalibrate our expectation of leadership in the Christian church.

---

This is a draft chapter from one of two books I am working on. The first, based on John 17, unpacks Jesus’ remarkable vision of the church, and the second, based on Matthew 18, explores what it means to live the kind of life he prayed for.

I will continue to post parts as they come together.

---

[1]Hugh Chilton,Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Religion, Australia, and the Crises of the 1960s (2020) P157

[2] Fusion Australia Team members handbook (1989)

[3] https://christiantoday.com.au/news/no-pedestal-for-mal-garvin-am-fusion-australias-founding-president.html

[4] Evangelist and Founder of the “God Squad”

^[5] Simon P. Walker, Leading Out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership (The Undefended Leader Trilogy Book 1) (p. 28). Piquant Editions. Kindle Edition.

^[6] Ephesians 4:13 & 15

^[7] Michael J. Wilkins Matthew NIV Application Commentary, Introduction to chapter 18.

[8] Matthew 18:1

^[9] Matthew 18:3

[10] Matthew 6:34

^[11] Philippians 2:3-8 NIV

^[12] 1 Corinthians 3:3-9 NIV

[13] As quoted in Everett L. Worthington Humility the Quiet Virtue (2007) page 26