Spiritual Leadership Versus Spiritual Abuse
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Episode Description
Join us on this week's episode of the Perry Noble Leadership podcast as Perry and Cole dig into the distinctions between Spiritual Leadership and Spiritual Abuse.
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5 Distinctions Between Spiritual Leadership vs Spiritual Abuse:
1) Leadership Is Necessary, Spiritual Abuse Is Not
Leadership is a spiritual gift. Every team needs a point leader. Someone must make the call, most often the difficult call.
Spiritual abuse is often seen when a leader isolates themselves, making decisions under the guise of “this is God’s plan” and no one else can question it. While spiritual
leadership will embrace clarifying questions about decisions or vision.
2) Leadership Seeks To Influence, Spiritual Abuse Seeks To Control
Leadership is about influence. As John Maxwell says, “people buy into a person before a position.” My personal leadership philosophy is; listen to Jesus, do what He says. When making decisions as a leader, bounce ideas off your inner circle and work your way out to the next layer of people for their objective/educational input. A spiritual abuser only cares to control their people. The abuser believes they know what is best for everyone.
3) Leadership Is Difficult, Spiritual Abuse Is Easy
When we are tired, we will often choose to do what is easy rather than what is right, which will lead to abusive behavior. Leadership is difficult work. As a leader, you must constantly cast vision providing further clarification and understanding for others to support the vision.
Spiritual abusers make way more statements. Spiritual leaders ask way more questions.
4) Leadership Lets People Weigh In, While Spiritual Abuse Expects Automatic Buy In
Spiritual leadership will seek input when making decisions from those that the decision will have the most impact on. This allows the team to provide additional insight and become bought into the decisions if they are included and their opinions are valued by the leader. Spiritual abusers make most, if not all, decisions alone. They will make demonstrative statements “that this is it,” t”his is the way we are doing it”, “now make it happen.”
Leaders will always provide the “why,” abusers will default to, “because I said so.”
5) Leadership Lasts - Spiritual Abuse Does Not
Spiritual abuse while talked more about in the news at larger churches, mostly occurs in smaller churches. Leadership builds and lasts. Spiritual abuse will eventually run off great people and great leaders.