Houston, We Have a Problem

During the Sunday morning worship service on May 26, 2024, Ed Young, Sr., retiring Senior Pastor of Second Baptist Church, Houston, Texas, introduced his son Ben as the church’s new Senior Pastor. The announcement came as a surprise to many church members because like the great majority of Baptist churches, Second Baptist Church’s bylaws called for a congregational vote on major issues such as hiring a new pastor or approving the annual budget.

At least, the old bylaws did. What many in the congregation didn’t realize was that a bylaws change the previous year had removed their voting rights and put into place a Ministry Leadership Team empowered to make all church decisions. The Senior Pastor was authorized under the new bylaws to appoint the members of the MLT and serve as its chairman. It was under the new system that Ed Young, Sr. was able to handpick his successor.

Now, a group of disgruntled present and former church members calling themselves the Jeremiah Counsel has filed a lawsuit against the church’s leadership. They claim that the bylaws change in 2023 was done in a deceptive way and are asking the court to return the church to its previous rules of governance. According to the lawsuit, the new bylaws fundamentally altered the church:

What had once been an exemplar of transparency, accountability and genuinely-held Christian conviction for Houston’s faith-based community was thus to be transformed into a business controlled by a small and self-interested group of people motivated largely by their own financial gain. Second Baptist’s founding principles of shared governance, trust, and service to the faithful were to be abandoned in favor of a “megachurch” autocracy more concerned with the getting of dollars than the teaching of charity and goodwill. As a result of the Defendants’ self-interested acts, and their attempted takeover of Second Baptist’s governance, properties, and financial assets, it has become necessary to file this action.

This isn’t a garden variety church fight. Second Baptist is the nation’s 17th largest congregation with almost 20,000 in weekly attendance across six satellite campuses, over 90,000 members, $1 billion in assets and an annual budget of $84 million. However the lawsuit works out, its impact will be felt in the larger Houston community, the Southern Baptist Convention of which the church is a leading part and churches of all sizes around the country.

But what’s happening at Second Baptist Church goes beyond who’s in charge and what voice the congregation has in making church decisions. The greater issue has to do with vision.

The new leaders view leadership as the authority to direct the church as they alone see fit. On the other hand, the Jeremiah Counsel sees leadership as vested in the congregation. The difference between the two groups—and the main point of contention between them—goes back to the Ministry Leadership Team, the administrative group that installed Ben Young as Senior Pastor last year.

The Jeremiah Counsel points to two major problems with the MLT. First, it allows for almost unlimited power to the Senior Pastor to control the MLT and through it the entire church:

…the Senior Pastor is the only person who can appoint board members. And the Senior Pastor cannot be removed from the MLT at any time, for any reason. Who sits on the MLT? The church leadership also keeps that information concealed, with no listing on the website or in any other church publication. The likely reason for the secrecy is that, as of this writing, the overwhelming majority of the MLT are family members of the Senior Pastor or employees/service providers who are paid by the church. Of note: the majority of the MLT are not even members of Second Baptist Church.

But it’s the second problem that should be more concerning to the people of Second Baptist Church; and beyond them to the many other churches that may be influenced by their example. As the quote above points out in its last sentence, the majority of the MLT members aren’t members of the congregation. That means that most of the people now leading Houston’s Second Baptist Church—a pace-setting church in the Southern Baptist Convention, a template for church growth in many denominations and one of America’s best known churches of any kind—aren’t part of the church they lead. The rationale for the new leadership team in all likelihood is to improve administrative effectiveness. People from outside the organization can bring their expertise and experience to the church with more objectivity since they aren’t encumbered by personal relationships.

For me and many others, though, personal relationships aren’t an add on to church leadership but fundamental to it; and handing over control of a local church to people without personal connections to that church represents a seismic shift in how churches are governed. It not only changes the vision for church leadership, it also changes the nature of church leadership itself.

Every church has a leadership structure, a method of governance. Some congregations, particularly smaller ones, work well by involving the entire membership and holding open meetings in order to make decisions.

Other churches govern themselves with small groups of elected lay leaders that work alongside the ministerial leadership. In many churches the lay leaders are called deacons while other churches know them as elders. While the two categories of lay leaders aren’t exactly alike, they both serve similar functions in church leadership.

Some larger churches today have adopted a hybrid approach to governance in which the Senior Pastor leads an administrative team elected by the congregation. The team is charged by the church to make most of the normal leadership decisions while the congregation reserves to itself the major decisions.

Many liturgical churches follow a different approach altogether by placing a great deal of authority in bishops. Catholic and Anglican churches are examples. But even with an upper tier of ministry leadership, there remains a high level of communication and cooperation with local congregations.

Of course, in every size and tradition of local churches there are examples of individuals—usually pastors but not always—who because of tenure, talent or circumstances accumulate such credibility with the congregation that they’re able to influence the church according to their own sense of direction. As is the case with bishops, though, a high level of trust between the leader and the congregation is essential for the system to function.

Whatever system of governance—congregational, deacon and elder, pastor, administrative group, bishop, charismatic leader—it’s the personal connection between leadership and congregation that makes it work. It’s the glue that holds the church together. Any other vision for pastoral leadership makes no sense in light of the biblical teaching regarding the church as the body of Christ. That’s precisely Paul’s point in his letter to the Roman church. I highlighted the gift of leadership to show how it doesn’t stand alone but fits in with the other gifts; in fact, it’s not even listed first.:

…so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. (Romans 12:5-8)

If Second Baptist’s leadership is able to defeat the legal challenges posed by the Jeremiah Counsel, the new style of leadership may succeed in making the church more organized and efficient. It may even lead to numerical growth. But there may be a heavy price to pay. What once was a church may come to be regarded as a business. What once was a community of believers may come to look more like a base of consumers. What once was a witness to the Kingdom of God may start to resemble the kingdoms of this world.

Eugene Peterson was one of the few voices of sanity in America’s religious landscape, and his books early on in my ministry saved my ministry and my soul. One quote in particular from his last book, “The Pastor: A Memoir,” stuck in my mind since first reading it. I think it has even more resonance for church leaders today, caught as many of us are between competing visions of leadership:

“The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Any kind of continuity with pastors in times past is virtually nonexistent. We are a generation that feels as if it is having to start out from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly nuanced and all-involving life of Christ.”