The Gift

Chris Green on pizza and pastoring

Don’t be put off by the fact that Chris Green enjoys olives on pizza. Olives aside, The Gift is a clear, helpful and challenging book on church leadership. And, even better, it has absolutely no endorsements. Not a single one.

So, here’s my endorsement.

The book divides into two parts. In the first seven chapters, Mr Green highlights the importance of right leadership in the local church. “For a church to flourish as God intends, it needs to be led as God intends” (9). Ultimately, this means leaders who serve like Jesus.

In the second half of the book, Chris unpacks what biblical church leadership actually looks like. He serves up for us a twelve-slice pizza of pastoral ministry, with Prayer and Word sprinkled across the pizza like olives. (This is his analogy, which obviously falls apart when you remember how disgusting olives are on pizza).

The whole book is filled with biblical wisdom, clearly written and incisively applied, with “process questions” (whatever that means) at the end of each chapter. And there are three thoughts in particular that stuck with me after my first read.

A living Leader

Spoiler alert for Easter: Jesus didn’t stay dead. And that’s a precious truth that should shape our pastoring. “Never again will we have to plan in his absence” (53). He’s our living Leader.

As leaders, we’re called to imitate the servant-hearted leadership of Jesus. But this doesn’t mean we replace Jesus, as if we’re filling in leadership gaps in his absence, or taking over as his successors. He’s alive and active: ruling through his Word, equipping through the Spirit, and leading through gifted servants.

When we forget this, we can become cynical CEOs, “running church as [we] would any other business” (54). We can focus our attention on metrics, platforms and personal advancement. We can reach the point where, in Jesus’s absence, “church has become a religious product” (55).

Now, I can’t remember the last time I woke up thinking, “Jesus isn’t alive today.” But I am very capable of going through my to-do list without being gripped by the glorious truth: “Jesus IS alive today!” Chris mentions some warning signs — the Bible becoming a mere work tool, for example, or prayer being just a public display. I need to be alert to these, and look again to the living Leader who is present with me as I teach and lead week by week.

A deadly ambition

Bad teaching leads to bad discipleship. Bad discipleship leads to bad teaching. But there’s another dangerous pattern we need to be aware of. A church can “have the true message, but have sinful practices and habits” (92).

Chris Green uses the example of Diotrephes, who loved to be first (3 John 9), to show how church life can be ruined by a leader with right doctrine but wrong ambition. Much damage can be done by confessionally orthodox ministers with an unorthodox love of power and status. In fact, this love to be first is “sufficiently deadly that it should disqualify from leadership those who show it” (90). And we need to be alert to the reality of this deadly ambition, in our churches and in our hearts.

In conservative evangelicalism, we can have the attitude that “teaching the Bible is all that matters”, and so we can overlook various abuses “for the sake of the truth” (89). We make excuses for people because they’re such a good teacher. Recent well-known stories of abuse show the devastation that can come in this kind of environment.

But the issue is not just other leaders somewhere else — I need to be alert to the traces of ungodly ambition in my own heart and ministry. And I’m thankful that as Chris highlights this “love to be first,” he honestly outlines how we might resist the temptations to become Diotrephes. “Be a member before you are a leader… consistently commend other Christian leaders and churches… Love to be the least and last…” (90-92).

A helpful definition

If you pick up this book expecting Chris Green to give you a short and snappy definition of Christian leadership in just a few words, you’ll be disappointed. Until you get to page 125, at which point he gives us a short and snappy definition of Christian leadership in just a few words:

“Corporate application.”

I like this as a summary. What does it mean? “Leadership is applying God’s Word to a church, to its habits, plans, resources, weaknesses, dreams, strengths and patterns” (80). Leadership is discerning God’s message to the specific church where he has called you to be a leader. Leadership is corporate application.

At a basic level, this reminds me to reflect on corporate application when I’m preparing this week’s sermon on John chapter 7. Our tendency as Western Christians is to focus on individualised application. That’s not always wrong, of course. But as a pastor, I also have a responsibility to ask corporate questions, and to think about the bigger picture.

And this definition also reminds me that church leadership involves putting olives all over the pizza (to use Chris Green’s nauseating image). We need to “embed the Bible properly throughout what we do” (125). Before our next elders’ meeting, various spreadsheets and PDFs and scanned accounts pages will be circulated among our inboxes. But none of these things are the defining features of our discussions. Rather, “the heartbeat is that God’s good and healthy plan for his church has been fully expressed in his Word, and our task is to put it into practice together” (133).

Some final words

If I was writing a cover endorsement for this book, I would probably make some kind of clever comment about how “The Gift” is a gift to give as a gift. It’s definitely a helpful book that I hope will be widely read (and that I plan to re-read). Some of the text assumes the reader is a full-time church leader, but it’s applicable to any leader (or prospective leader) who picks it up. It also applies to a wide variety of church contexts, as Chris doesn’t get into polity questions — although this does mean there is perhaps more to say about inter-leader relationships, or member-elder dynamics.

But to close, I’ll give the last words to Chris “Olives” Green, quoting his final sentence of the book, which I think sums up things nicely:

A pizza.

The Gift is published by IVP, and is available from 10ofthose or the publisher.