Toxic Leadership by Thom Rainer

Repost from OCTOBER 1, 2014 

FOURTEEN SYMPTOMS Of Toxic Church Leaders

By THOM S. RAINER

Most church leaders are godly and healthy. A toxic church leader, one that is figuratively poisonous to the organization, is rare. But it is that church leader who brings great harm to churches and other Christian organizations. And it is that leader that hurts the entire cause of Christ when word travels about such toxicity.

In my Monday post, I noted the traits of long-term, healthy pastors. I now travel to the opposite extreme and provide symptoms of the worst kind of church leaders, toxic church leaders.

1. They rarely demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit. Paul notes those specific attributes in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control. You won’t see them much in toxic leaders.
2. They seek a minimalist structure of accountability. Indeed, if they could get away with it, they would operate in a totally autocratic fashion, with heavy, top down leadership.
3. They expect behavior of others they don’t expect of themselves. “Do as I say, not as I do.”
4. They see almost everyone else as inferior to themselves. You will hear them criticizing other leaders while building themselves up.
5. They show favoritism. It is clear that they have a favored few while they marginalize the rest.
6. They have frequent anger outbursts. This behavior takes place when they don’t get their way.
7. They say one thing to some people, but different things to others. This is a soft way of saying they lie.
8. They seek to dismiss or marginalize people before they attempt to develop them. People are means to their ends; they see them as projects, not God’s people who need mentoring and developing.
9. They are manipulative. Their most common tactic is using partial truths to get their way.
10. They lack transparency. Autocratic leaders are rarely transparent. If they get caught abusing their power, they may have to forfeit it.
11. They do not allow for pushback or disagreement. When someone does disagree, he or she becomes the victim of the leader’s anger and marginalization.
12. They surround themselves with sycophants. Their inner circle thus often includes close friends and family members, as well as a host of “yes people.”
13. They communicate poorly. In essence, any clarity of communication would reveal their autocratic behavior, so they keep their communications unintelligible and obtuse.
14. They are self-absorbed. In fact, they would unlikely see themselves in any of these symptoms.

Yes, toxic leaders are the distinct minority of Christian leaders. But they can do harm to the cause of Christ disproportionate to their numbers. And they can get away with their behavior for years because they often have a charismatic and charming personality. Charming like a snake.

Do you know of any toxic church leaders? Do these symptoms seem familiar?

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

Good Friday reflection... USA Today Opinion re-post

Photo: World Relief 

OPINION

This Good Friday, remember the Christians who aren't allowed to take refuge in the US

---

This Good Friday and through the year, we must be advocate for those who are powerless in the face of torture and persecution because of their faith.

TIM BREENE  |  OPINION CONTRIBUTOR

5:00 a.m. CDT Apr. 19, 2019

Today, as Christians remember the torturous crucifixion of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Roman empire, we should also be mindful of the many around the world persecuted for their Christian faith.

Tragically, 245 million Christians — one out of every nine Christians globally — live in countries where Christians face persecution, usually at the hands of governments. Last year, an average of eleven Christians were killed daily for their faith in the fifty countries on Open Doors USA’s World Watch List for high levels of persecution for Christians.

As someone who grew up in Belfast in the ’60s and early ’70s, violence motivated by religion is something I am all too familiar with. And it’s one of the reasons why, as CEO of World Relief, I advocate for the persecuted on a daily basis. 

Last year, the Trump Administration held the first Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, which convened a broad range of stakeholders, including foreign ministers, international organization representatives and religious leaders, to identify concrete ways to combat religious persecution. Secretary of State Pompeo, who hosted the event, called the protection and promotion of international religious freedom “a top foreign policy priority.”

It’s inexplicable, then, that the State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program has all but shut the door on persecuted Christians and other religious minorities from several of the countries where they face the most severe restrictions on religious freedom.

Last year, the administration set the refugee ceiling for FY 2019 for an all-time low of only 30,000 refugees. This is less than half the cap of 70,000 set by President George W. Bush following the September 11 attacks. And it is significantly less than the admission rate under President George H.W. Bush, who set the ceiling between 125,000 and 142,000 each year of his administration. 

The cuts come at a time when the number of refugees around the world is at an all-time high of 25.4 million.

Our proud history means nothing now

At the mid-point of the current federal fiscal year, just 12,151 total refugees have been admitted into the U.S. for resettlement. This includes only five self-identified Christian refugees from Syria and only 41 from Iraq – countries where Christians are at risk of genocide. From the fifty countries on Open Doors’ World Watch List for persecution of Christians, just 2,263 Christian refugees were allowed to arrive in the first six months of the fiscal year, on pace for a decline of 73 percent compared to just three years ago. In FY 2009, the last year George W. Bush established the refugee ceiling, more than 30,000 Christian refugees came from the fifty countries on that year’s Open Doors World Watch List; this year, if nothing changes, the number of Christian refugees from countries on the current list for countries where Christians face persecution is unlikely to reach 5,000. 

And while the State Department’s Refugee Admission page continues to boast that “The United States is proud of its history of welcoming immigrants and refugees” and will “continue to prioritize the admission of the most vulnerable refugees while upholding the safety and security of the American people,” other wills seem to be prevailing. In particular, the administration’s policies seem to be largely influenced by the views of Stephen Miller, whose reported response to concerns from others within the administration about the decline in the resettlement of persecuted Christians was that he “would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.”

We need to advocate for the powerless

Surely there are more than 12,151 vulnerable refugees whose admission to the U.S. would not put Americans’ safety in jeopardy. You have to go all the way back to the 1970s, in fact, to the era when I was still in Belfast, to come up with a single case of an American citizen who was killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone who came to the country as a refugee.

It’s not just Christians who are being shut out, of course: Just nine Yezidis had been allowed in at the midpoint of the year, and no Jewish and Zoroastrian refugees fleeing the brutal government of Iran had been allowed to the U.S. It’s hard to be sure if these dramatic shifts are the intentional result of a policy to limit all refugees, or collateral damage in an equally troubling effort to particularly restrict Muslim refugees.

What is clear is that, on this Good Friday and throughout the year, we should be advocating for those who are powerless in the face of torture and persecution because of their faith. We must insist that the U.S. once again offer safety and religious freedom to some of the globe’s most persecuted religious minorities.

Tim Breene is CEO of World Relief.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributorsand other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.