Followership

On a spring day during my junior year of high school my father dropped dead at work while fixing a radio. His last words reflected his cheerful stoicism: “Oh, it must have been something I ate.”

That was a Thursday. On Sunday the pastor of our church lauded Dad in the sermon, and revealed something that surprised me. “Whenever we took nominations for elder,” said Pastor Hutt, “Lowell Lundquist was at the top of everyone’s list.” But when he asked Dad to serve as elder, Dad would demur, saying, “I’m not a leader.”

Dad never told us that everybody wanted him to be an elder. That’s not the kind of thing he would have placarded. But I think he was wise to decline the honor of eldership. He wasn’t a natural leader. Control, influence, and power did not appeal to him, and he had little instinct for wielding authority. He could take orders but fumbled at giving them. He kept busy working and serving and lending support with diligence and goodwill and an easy smile. To lead effectively you may need to be a jerk sometimes, and Dad didn’t know how to be a jerk.

If you were a humble pastor trying to shepherd a church in good faith, you would kill to have Lowell Lundquist in your congregation.

Dad is my personal answer to the Leadership epidemic that has so enthralled the heart of evangelicalism in the last 30 years. I must step lightly here, because some of my best friends are leaders. And several colleagues whom I hold in high regard actually found value in those Willow Creek leadership extravaganzas that always made me want to barf. So, with a respectful nod to leadership-haunted friends, I just want to say, look, enough is enough. “Leadership” in the evangelical world has so exceeded its rightful bounds of emphasis and value relative to other Christian themes that it’s high time to rein it in. Boo leadership. Hooray followership.

We can’t all lead. Many of us are either morally or temperamentally unfit for it. It’s no shame to be temperamentally unfit for leadership. It is a shame to be morally unfit for anything.

Among the things that Willow Creek did wrong over the last few decades was to make an idol out of leadership. By 2000 the idolatry was so blatant that disgraced sexual predator Bill Clinton was invited to address leaders and wannabe leaders at the annual summit in Barrington. (Well, he’s a lying cad, but the important thing is, Oh, what a leader!) Founding Pastor (and similarly disgraced sexual predator) Bill Hybels caught flack for inviting Clinton then, and many godly people left. One who didn’t leave was co-founder (and, yes, again, disgraced sexual predator) Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian - the Steve Wozniak to Hybels’ Steve Jobs – whom Hybels elevated to sainthood status by unfurling a huge Bilezikian banner and leading a thunderous standing ovation for the scholar/pervert at the United Center in 2015 at the church’s 40th anniversary celebration.

Clinton, Hybels and Bilezikian are all despicable men who, for decades, thrust their middle fingers in the face of God and despised the call to holiness. But they were leaders, you see. You have to give them that, right? They sure could lead! And I respond with a paraphrase of St. Peter’s words to Simon the Sorcerer in Acts 8:20, “To hell with you and your leadership.”

At the "No More Silence" Conference in September 2019, former Willow Creek staff member Scott Dyer outlined in painful detail the strategy by which Hybels sought to pry Scott’s wife Vonda away from him. “He called me a B player and told her that she was an A player,” Scott said. Hybels suggested “She was a leader and I wasn’t, which at Willow Creek was about the worst thing that you could say about someone.”

Exactly. Scott Dyer understood all too well the culture of that place. The great sin was that of being perceived as having failed to lead. The disordered love and thirst for leadership poisoned the spiritual air of Willow Creek like mustard gas. I imagine that in such a setting a humble man like Lowell Lundquist would have been regarded as potential cuckold fodder.

After telling us on that Sunday of mourning in March of 1980 that Dad didn’t regard himself as a leader, Pastor Hutt continued, “Actually, Lowell knew what real leadership was all about. Jesus said, 'Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.' Lowell was everyone’s servant. So he was greatest leader of all.”

There it is. Do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not. Blessed are those who, like my father, quietly follow, and follow, and follow, and never have the faintest clue that they are leading all the way.