 In Part 1, I introduced the Great Man Theory, Thomas Carlyle’s 19th-century argument that basically history is comprised by exceptional individuals, and that leadership is essentially a superpower you’re either born with or you’re not. John Maxwell brought it into church leadership culture with the memorable line, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” Maxwell isn’t wrong. And he does talk about teams. But the weight of his framework, the gravity of it, lands on the individual. The lone leader. The exceptional person. And when you emphasize the individual that heavily, even with a chapter on teams, you create a culture that functionally ignores the team and idolizes the leader. Maxwell isn’t wrong. It's just incomplete. And incomplete ideas, applied at scale, produce real consequences. I’ve been flying around the country (and the world for matter) for about three years, lecturing on economic development and sitting across the table from scores of pastors, and I’m seeing a pattern. And it’s ugly. Now, I’m not a leadership scholar. That’s more of my wife’s field. Jennifer flies all over the northeast training engineers who move into management and want to be leaders. I just shake my head. (Wow. OK, focus.) Look, as a researcher, here’s what I see and what the data confirms: the consequences of the Great Man theory are showing up not only in organizational charts. They’re showing up in bloodwork. Pastoral health is in trouble. Let me make the human argument first: Take a 27-year-old woman with an MBA. Sharp. Talented. She’s run an equity fund or a tech startup or something that required her to outthink rooms full of very smart people. She feels called to ministry. She reads theology for two years, does the work, earns a degree. Gold. And then a Bishop places her in a church in rural Iowa, West Virginia, an urban environment, or a church nobody wants. Typical move. Prays over her and says, “Go win. The Spirit will empower you.” And then the Bishop goes home. She’s standing in a church she’s never pastored, in a town she doesn’t know, with no network, no staff, no donors, and a $40,000 salary. The denomination has handed her a building and a benediction and called it a deployment strategy. That’s not a leadership challenge. That’s a resource failure dressed up as a leadership expectation. I can already hear the rebuttal. “Well, if she’s a good leader, she’ll know how to gather and galvanize people and resources.” Yeah. Not to be cynical, but to be cynical, here’s the thing: the person who said that probably already bought their house. They’ve got a network, a title, a salary that didn’t require them to build something from nothing in a town of 4,000 people. And if they did, that was a completely different era. That’s not leadership wisdom. That’s cost transference dressed up as encouragement. It’s Darwinian. The survival of the fittest. And if by the grace of God she actually produces something, we call it God’s blessing. What it actually is, is someone operating in an unhealthy and unsustainable structure. And frankly? It’s irresponsible. (I’m just say’n.) Here’s what the Great Man framework produces when you apply it without a support structure: it takes talented, called, capable people and quietly sets them up to fail. And then when they burn out, leave, or get sick, and the data says they do get sick, we say it wasn’t the right fit. We don’t say the system failed them. We say they failed the system.  Ok, here's the research stack:
Duke University’s Clergy Health Initiative has been tracking pastor health since 2007. What they found should stop every bishop, every superintendent, and every denominational executive cold. Compared to the general population, clergy have significantly higher rates of obesity, diabetes, asthma, and depression. Depression symptoms at nearly double the national average. Seventy-eight percent of pastors are overweight or obese. The lead researcher, Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell, identified the structural driver clearly: pastors internalize a mandate to care for others continuously, and in the absence of a co-pastor or team, they have no organizational permission to recover. No co-pastor. No team. Same thing. The Pulpit and Pew research project at Duke Divinity School, funded by the Lilly Endowment, corroborated this. Depression and obesity are two of the defining health signatures of solo pastoral ministry. Not spiritual failure. Structural failure. We built a leadership model that requires one person to carry what was designed to be carried by many, and then we’re surprised when that person breaks down. This is what incomplete ideas cost at scale. Not in theory. In physical bodies. In our leadership culture, what gets emphasized gets practiced. Which is the man. Thousands of pastors across this country absorbed the emphasis, not the footnote. They went into ministry believing that if they were exceptional enough, called enough, faithful enough, it would work. And when it didn’t, when the church didn’t grow, when the money ran out, when they woke up at 3 a.m. with their heart racing, they concluded the problem was them. It wasn’t them. It was the model. I personally walked into a church carrying a $300,000 structural deficit and no staff. I had a theory about what to do. The theory turned out to be right. But not because I was exceptional. Because I stopped trying to be the only person in the room and started building a room worth being in. That shift, from the Great Man to the Great Team, is the one that saved the ministry. And if I’m honest, probably saved me (Plus a decade of sitting in a classroom helped too). The research on what makes teams actually work, and the practical steps to build one when you have no budget, is what Part 3 is about. But I needed to say this first. Because you can’t build a team if you still believe deep down that needing one is a sign of weakness. It’s not. It’s a sign of clarity. Maxwell isn’t wrong. The theory is just incomplete. And you’re allowed to complete the sentence. Let’s create a path. I believe in you. References: Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: James Fraser, 1841). Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell et al., Duke Clergy Health Initiative, Duke Divinity School / Duke Global Health Institute, funded by The Duke Endowment, 2007–2023. Jackson W. Carroll, Pulpit & Pew: Research on Pastoral Leadership, Duke University Divinity School, funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. |
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