Today’s post is a rough follow-up to yesterday’s. It involves one topic I talk a lot about and another I’ve found I must talk more about: building and authority.
As a first-generation Christian, I think and write a lot about building a Christian household. As a church planter and churchman, I think and write a lot about planting healthy churches and building healthy ecclesiastical organizations. As someone who has been a hiring manager and now heads people and culture at a mid-sized company, I think a lot about hiring and developing employees and maintaining a company culture. My life has been dedicated to building things, usually as the senior leader or part of the leadership team.
While your experience may be different from mine, most of us will eventually find ourselves responsible for building something at some point in our lives. We each have our capacities and opportunities and should seek to make the most of them, whether small or large. My early ministry responsibilities were setting up and tearing down chairs and teaching four-year-olds about Jesus. Never did I imagine I would be where I am. But I digress.
Building and authority are intimately interrelated. Think of Nehemiah. He’s most famous for rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He was able to accomplish that because God gave him favor with the king, who entrusted him with the authority to get the job done. Right at the beginning of the book, enemies of God challenge whether he actually has that authority because they don’t want to see him successfully strengthen Jerusalem.
These were external enemies: men like Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. And when we’re building something, these are the threats we tend to think about most. People trying to corrupt your household from outside. Competitors trying to take your business down. Spiritual forces and false teachers trying to pollute and undermine the work of your church. Those are real threats, and we must be aware of them. But I want to talk about an internal threat that every Christian builder should expect to face, especially if he builds well.
I would summarize this threat as those who want the benefits of what’s been built and is being built without any regard for, or submission to, the authority that makes it possible.
A few examples.
A husband and wife are both literally and metaphorically building a Christian household. Under their roof are safety, comfort, and provision. If they’re doing a good job, there is no place like home. Their children have clothes, warm meals, and, in this modern age, all sorts of fun, such as video games and so forth. If Dad is a good head of his household and Mom is a good helper, the home is a place of discipleship and true biblical peace.
Yet many children, especially in their teens, challenge the authority of their mother and father while wanting all the benefits of living under their roof. It is easy to raise entitled kids, especially if you refuse to discipline them in a Hebrews 12 sort of way. If you tolerate their disregard for the God-given authority from which they benefit, they can tear down from the inside what you have built. Instead of the peaceful fruit of righteousness cultivated through discipline, you will experience the chaos of unruly, rebellious children.
The best companies hire, fire, and promote based on core values. They understand that even a wonderful product or service producing healthy profits won’t sustain a business that cannot attract and keep quality people. So you must build an environment where those people want to work: good pay, good benefits, and quality people working alongside them, whether in the office or on the shop floor. You must look for people deeply aligned with your mission and the way you conduct business.
One distinction I’ve used in my years of hiring, including the last 400-plus people I’ve been involved in hiring, is something I think I picked up from recruiters at Amazon. I ask: Is this person more missionary than mercenary?
The missionary cares about the mission of the business. He loves the space it’s in and the work it does. He doesn’t just want to benefit from it; he wants to contribute to it. Working alongside like-minded people doing quality work is something he wants to be part of.
A mercenary, generally speaking, is primarily attracted to the benefits. He may think the mission is nice and be happy to contribute, but his loyalty is pay-to-play. Like a mercenary willing to fight for either side in a war, it comes down to who pays best. Obviously, we all work for pay, and there’s no shame in that. This is just a simple paradigm for considering where a person’s primary motivation rests.
I would argue that our social media environment has trained much of this generation to think almost entirely like mercenaries. People come into a business wanting its benefits while deeply resenting the processes and practices that make those benefits possible. If that mindset isn’t corrected, they will undermine the very culture that produces what they came for.
You see this in churches, too. If the elders and deacons do a good job, the church will form a community of different sorts of people around the Word of God. In hard times, people will have support, whether relational or financial. Their children will have friends. Their wives will have friends. Their souls will be nourished. There are incredible benefits to being part of a healthy church, and people will stay in a church for a long time because of them.
I remember being at a church where a friend disliked the senior pastor. I would say he even despised him. I asked why he stayed, and he said he loved the music, all his friends were there, and so forth. I was quite close with the senior pastor and knew he had been instrumental in making almost all of that possible. That was when I began to understand that people can want the benefits godly authority brings without any submission to it.
Back to Nehemiah. In the first six chapters, he deals repeatedly with external threats. But in chapter 5, you see an internal threat: nobles and officials exploiting their own people through interest and debts that cost families their land and brought their children into servitude. Nehemiah has to confront them.
Then, in chapter 6, you see nobles corresponding with one of the chief external enemies, Tobiah. He had married into a Jewish family, his son had done the same, and many in Judah were bound to him by an oath. By chapter 13, Tobiah, who had opposed the work from outside, has been given a room in the temple courts by Eliashib the priest. Verse 28 also tells us that a grandson of the high priest had married Sanballat’s daughter.
Nehemiah had rebuilt the walls, but his enemies found their way inside through relationships, particularly marriage and family ties. These compromises violated the covenant commitments of chapter 10, including the explicit vow against intermarrying with the surrounding peoples. In chapter 13, Nehemiah confronts these breaches and holds the people to their vows.
The wall addressed an outside problem, but walls can’t keep out what the people inside invite in. Some of the gravest threats to Nehemiah’s work came from compromise within Jerusalem.
So it is with any builder, whether he is building a Christian household, a business, a church, or anything else. The more significant the benefits of what you’ve built, the more important it is that those living under its roof preserve the culture that makes those benefits possible. That will always require some degree of submission to the authority over it.
And as an authority, you must practice godly, benevolent discipline. You’ll have to say no. You’ll have to confront entitlement. If you’re a parent, that may mean one of your teenagers screams that he hates you, that you don’t understand his life, and all the other nonsense foolish kids say. If you’re an employer, you may have to fire a manipulative employee who is at odds with the core values and live with the nasty review he posts on Glassdoor. If you’re a pastor, elder, or deacon, you’ll have to deal with people who claim you’re a tyrant, that you’re power-hungry, or that your church is a cult.
This is the cost of leadership. Sometimes it’s steep. But it is never as steep as the cost of abdicating God-given leadership.
I see this “wanting benefits, resenting authority” in all sorts of places and people. Example: they want liturgics, the calendar, prayer book, smells and bells, but they reject or resist episcopacy and priesthood. They cling to autonomous individualism above all else. They want what seems like the beauty innovation and novelty, but they resent the tradition and antiquity that developed and handed it down.