Polycentric Leadership

After the sitting, Paul tells the community to walk. Woodward locates the design of the masterpiece in that walk. Ephesians 4 begins with attitudes, then a common confession of one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Then Paul speaks of diverse gifts given so the church can grow into maturity and become like Christ. The gifts Woodward stresses are particular servants: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Christ gives people, he says, and not merely personal services. He understands the five, and the ministries they represent, as the mechanism for mission, ministry, and Christian maturity. Without that pattern, he writes, the church cannot mature into the masterpiece God intended. Immaturity in the Western church, and a body tossed by every wind of doctrine, is what he sees when these equippers have not been appreciated, understood, or nurtured.

The walk is polycentric. He borrows Suzanne Morse for the word: many centers of leadership that interrelate, a community that is widening its circles. Paul, he says, proposes neither a centralized structure nor a flat one. Leaders interrelate and incarnate the purposes of Christ so the entire body is activated to service and matures in love. The five together represent the full ministry of Jesus. Other gifts of the Spirit, the ones he points to in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, and 1 Peter 4, are activated along the path of these equippers. Markus Barth's line, as Woodward uses it, is that the whole church is the clergy appointed for a ministry to and for the world.

Equippers are cultural architects. Schein's distinction, printed as the chapter's epigraph and quoted again in the body, is the one he wants leaders to remember: leaders create and change culture, while management and administration act within culture. Both God and the equippers have a part. Paul planted, Apollos watered, and God gives the growth. Some things only God can do. Some things God will not do, because he has called the church to do them. Power, in Woodward's reading of the letter, is distributed. Truth is embodied in the life of the community, in front of a culture already skeptical of both.

Chapter 19 shows the walk on a calendar. He tells a team to write out the senior or lead pastor's role and share it among the equippers, three or five. Half the year can follow the Christian calendar from Advent to Pentecost. The rest teaches what the church most needs in ordinary time. One series, four to eight weeks, belongs to each equipper's concern. When the series is evangelistic, the evangelist leads and the others follow. When it is pastoral, the pastor leads. People learn to lead in the way of Christ, and leaders learn to follow. Geese share the point because one bird cannot bear the front the whole way. He has found two or three primary communicators enough for the weekly gathering. Trust, he says, takes a history. The Trinity he names as the pattern is interdependent, communal, relational, participatory, self-surrendering, and self-giving.

Emotional health belongs on this walk. Chapter 8 says genuine shared leadership can help leaders pursue wholeness, while a senior or lead pastor is isolated by authority, title, and function, whether the pyramid is drawn with that person at the top or, in the name of servant leadership, at the bottom. No one has equal authority, so there is no peer. In a polycentric community, people with equal authority and revolving leadership pursue wholeness together and become the example the church catches. Leaders need that community. They preach Christ, he says, and they live with their weaknesses in the open.

is the third word, and Woodward keeps it last. As the church lives in the world for the sake of the world, and starts to make right what is wrong, it meets the forces of darkness and the enemy of what is good. At those times, he writes, we need to learn to rely on God's power to stand. The standing is God's. The church's work is to rely.

Chapter 19 names what that reliance costs. Leading as a community within the community requires death: death to preserving the status quo, to real and imagined fears, to power, to the ability to control, to status and reputation, and to a private idea of success. He sets Jesus' words beside that cost, the call to deny oneself, take up the cross, and follow. With Christ, he says, death means new life. Roland Allen's reading of Paul, which Woodward uses here, is that spontaneous activity is a movement of the Spirit, and we cannot control the Spirit. Paul planted and Apollos watered. God causes the growth. Allen's phrase for Paul's practice is retirement: Paul released control and moved on, often within about two years, so the new believers would rely on the Spirit apart from Paul's direct hand. Woodward's lesson is that missional leadership cedes control and teaches that reliance.

Polycentric leadership, in the same chapter, is one way to teach it. It is a team of equippers, and it is more than the team. Christ is the head. The Spirit may lead through the youngest Spirit-filled person in the room as truly as through a recognized equipper. Leader and follower are set by the Spirit. The equippers demonstrate how leadership rotates. Flat leadership, he says in the same breath, often falls flat. Standing is shared reliance, with a head who is not one of the equippers.

The 2023 chapters add imitation as the form of that relinquishment. In chapter 11 he presents Timothy as someone who had learned to show genuine concern for others' welfare, living for others because he belonged to Christ. In chapter 12 he says Jesus did not empty himself of power, and did not wield it in a worldly or coercive way. The practice he names is to refuse exploited status, to empty ourselves of an identity built on titles, and to obey in humility. This page leaves the wider argument of that book in its own theme. Here the point is narrow. Standing, when control is the temptation, looks like imitation of a Lord who already has the power and uses it for others.