Those who know me personally are aware that our church went through a difficult season a few years ago—pastoral transition, rebuilding of our elder team, and reshaping of a local church culture that was somewhat cold to one of vitality and warm fellowship.
Due to my work with ABWE, I was often asked about our church’s approach to church planting and local missions during that season. It’s a vitally important question. Yet, for that period of time, I would answer—not feeling very good about it—that we were in a rebuilding and revitalization period, and we weren’t yet ready to think about growth or multiplication.
My missionally-oriented friends might be tempted to say that this answer, on my part, was something of a cop-out. Perhaps they’re right. After all, a case can be made that, even in the midst of revitalization or renewal, the DNA of mission must be injected into a local church at its very nascent stages, or else stagnation is sure to occur later after the period of crisis has passed.
Nevertheless, anyone who has served in or around pastoral ministry knows that some situations are so divisive, convulsive, or toxic that they simply must be addressed first. We must, after all, have our own house in order before we seek to reproduce ourselves in disciple-making.
The fact is that church leadership is not a constant push towards multiplication, process improvement, or explosive growth, despite what the elites of the church growth movement have promised us. While many organizational leaders concern themselves with balance sheets, souls hang in the balance. And it’s in the messy interplay of personalities, foibles, and sins that real leadership proves its mettle.
In this vein, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World is a crucial volume worthy of placement on the shelves of church leaders and leaders in general. Why? In short, because Joe Rigney, a fellow at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and former president of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, diagnoses a host of infections festering within many families, churches, and organizations in general that not only distract from the mission but threaten the vitality and integrity of any institution in which they manifest. But he does more than diagnose; he offers solutions which, if we will but attempt to put them into practice, could frankly save many a household, congregation, business, or even government from the chaotic disarray of toxic personalities gone wild.
Rigney’s Insights
For someone accustomed to leadership books built atop pithy, banal aphorisms, and exaggerated anecdotes from the business world, Rigney will delightfully subvert your expectations. Rigney’s sources include not the usual business world suspects like Carnegie or Covey but the likes of Shakespeare and Edwin Freeman (the noted rabbi and family therapist). It’s the latter whose notable business fables end up forming the backbone of the book, providing peculiar parables from which Rigney is able to launch and with which he is able to connect biblical insights.
Borrowing Freeman’s categories, yet with Freeman’s idiosyncratic terminology replaced with biblical language, Rigney endeavors to biblically diagnose the many common personal and relational problems that surface in any social unit. He does this also operating within the framework of “degree,” or that of natural hierarchy, or ordered power structures—drawing initially from Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, retelling the story of the Trojan War. Needless to say, the idea of power as hierarchical and ordered is anathema to the modern egalitarian mind—one which affects the evangelical world itself to a considerable degree—yet its intrinsic place within God’s natural design for the world is key for us to understand, Rigney argues, as leaders. Our contemporary moment, he maintains, represents a crisis of degree, and with it, our challenge as believers in a negative world is to demonstrate the requisite nerve.
Whereas the default factory setting of modern managerial bureaucracies is one of contempt, envy, and pervasive anxiety, Rigney proposes sober-mindedness as the biblical ideal of the leader’s character, influenced by Freeman’s concept of “non-anxious presence.” A sober-minded leader is one who characteristically rules not only over the externals of a situation but who habitually masters his own passions and those of others. Any model of leadership that fails to tame the passions of the flesh is doomed to undergo, well, emotional sabotage.
Christian leaders, Rigney argues, are uniquely vulnerable to such attacks because of our commitment to love and compassion. Emotional sabotage or hostage-taking “works by exploiting the Christian desire to be a good witness to the gospel” (37). Exploring this dynamic further, Rigney dusts off his well-known critiques of the modern concept of “empathy,” which, far from denying the Christian obligation to show sympathy or compassion, is an attempt to diagnose the contemporary ill of untethered co-emoting with those ruled by passion or vice: “[W]hen we’re under the influence of untethered empathy, we get drunk on other people’s passions. In fact, that’s what a social stampede is—a bunch of people who are drunk on each other’s passions” (38).
The thoughtful reader will conclude that the heat Rigney took a few years ago for his anti-empathic public statements is undeserved and, in some cases, proves his very point: that today’s evangelical leaders are far too easily swayed by group displays of emotion, sincere or otherwise.
Application of Principles
Having laid these foundations, Rigney endeavors to apply these principles to various episodes (again, drawing from Freeman’s fables) in the home (chapter 4), church (chapter 5), and world (chapter 6). Each of these chapters could easily spawn libraries of deeper treatments of the issues at hand—far more than what Rigney could ever attempt within a short, 90-page volume (according to the Kindle edition). Nevertheless, these sections are worthy of even brief consideration.
That any church designed for leaders of institutions would start in the household is itself instructive. Far too much mayhem in evangelicalism has been wrought by unqualified men who fail to master their domestic domain in Christlike ways, carrying their failure out into their broader mission. A man who cannot patiently discipline his small children, care for his family, or stomach an uncomfortable, confrontational conversation with his wife is wholly unfit to lead in today’s tempestuous, passion-driven cultural milieu. A Christian leader who is fit to engage the broader world is one who, at home, follows the advice Rigney cites from King Lune of Archenland in The Horse and His Boy:
For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land. (C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 223; cited in Rigney, 56)
Turning to the church, Rigney uses Paul’s conflict with Peter in Galatians 2 as a case study. This is crucial because Peter’s compromise appears to have been motivated by, you guessed it, empathy. His desire was to accommodate the Judaizers—one could even call his approach winsome. Yet Paul maintains that he lost the gospel itself in the process. Rigney pulls no punches with respect to the modern application. Christian leaders must be bold in confronting problems in their midst, seeing through the guise of compassion-soaked language:
This underscores that the kind of sensitivity leaders need is a sensitivity to their own passions and reactions. We must be able to name the pressure, to identify its source, to see how it travels in our community, and how it justifies itself. Recent years have provided ample opportunities to examine these dynamics. Think of the controversies in the church over COVID restrictions, over the COVID vaccine, over race, gender, and sexuality, over political philosophy and cultural engagement. Each of these careened through congregations and schools, provoking reactions and magnifying divisions. The particulars may have varied, but the reactive dynamics were the same, as worldly pressures were laundered through Christian rhetoric and brought to bear on Christian leaders around the country. (65)
The Call to Sober-Minded Leadership
Rigney reminds us of the great task before us in his chapter exploring sober-minded leadership in the broader world. He is not content with applying these lessons neatly to the marriage bed, church office, or cubicle. He reminds us that mastering our passions, maintaining sober-minded judgment, and leading in an antifragile manner in a flammable world are all necessary preconditions to completing Christ’s global mission. Analyzing Paul’s behavior before the mob in Acts 21, he calls us to boldness—the sort of boldness that evangelizes in the face of mob violence and arrest (75).
Here again, we have much to learn. Pastors and church leaders, while avoiding quarrelsomeness, must learn how to be godly controversialists, and this partly means recognizing that the battles worth fighting will often go beyond the hermetically sealed theological scuffles over forensic justification; they will usually touch at other finer points of applied theology like gender roles, inclusivity policies, and corporate budgets.
To be clear, Rigney does not advocate for a tone-deaf, single-channel pugilism. He argues that we must know when to de-escalate and when to provoke, appealing to Paul’s example once more (84). Those narrow-minded readers tempted to dismiss Rigney because of his associations will instead find him to be a helpful sum of various influences, writing boldly while aware enough to avoid the pitfalls of one rhetorical approach or another.
Conclusion: Leadership and Mission
Whenever I think about my family, church, and broader engagement in the world, I remember that my impact for the Lord and his kingdom is inversely proportionate to the amount of relational conflict I’m willing to tolerate in each of those spheres. In turn, anyone who cares about missions and church planting must also care about sober-minded leadership that cannot be swayed by sinful passions. Rigney’s work provides the tools and insights needed to navigate these turbulent waters, reminding us that antifragile, dignified leadership is crucial for the health and mission of the local church.
Every pastor, church planter, missionary, and leader in any kind of evangelical space should carve out the time to read or at least listen to this volume. Perhaps you even gifted a copy for free, as many have been. Regardless, tolle lege—pick up and read!
Joe Rigney, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023), Kindle.
