Leithart on Leadership

I really like what Peter J. Leithart has to say at the end of this meditation on leadership:

"Leaders must regularly transgress settled boundaries because churches (and schools) constantly redefine themselves in ever new circumstances and in response to ever new challenges, in a way that is faithful to Jesus and His Word. Official leaders might be the ones breaking barriers. If they are not, then the real leaders of the church are the ones who do. If no one is breaking through old boundaries, the church is implicitly claiming that it has reached the eschaton and that it has no more growing to do. It might as well shut its doors, because it is dead.

Yet leaders that don’t love their people, who don’t plow the ground they want to plant, who give no indication of which direction they’re headed, who head this way and that way without warning or reason, will fail. They may be blazing ahead down a new and promising path, but no one will follow. And without followers, no one can be a leader."

Good stuff, Maynard.