I’ve written before about why "lone-ranger" leadership isn’t functional or helpful, and at Heartland we’ve been transitioning more and more to a team leadership model. We don’t have a "Senior Pastor", i.e. a church centered around a personality. (Incidentally, part of the reason this transition has worked well is that our services have never been overly focused on the sermon – we have tried to cultivate gatherings where people come to meet with and hear from and be sent out by God himself, not just hear from a preacher, gatherings where the sermon is one part of a shared experience of worship.)
David Fitch is a pastor/professor/blogger/author I’ve started to read regularly. His latest post on why "Senior Pastor"-type leadership doesn’t work anymore is a good one, and is full of details of how his own church has adopted a team leadership model, and how it hasn’t hurt the church’s growth one bit (he has always been bi-vocational, he now preaches half the time, and this past summer, when he didn’t preach at all, the church grew by 20%).
So not only does it make sense culturally and biblically, but it "works" too. I guess Jesus did say he was going to build his church. And I guess he did say we were to make disciples, not entertain consumers. It appears that making disciples and growing the church actually do go hand-in-hand.
those who believe in the senior pastor model, are realy locked into Christian celebraties. The idea is if you get a big name then that will pull people to the church. They think that one person will set the direction and standard of the church. Isn’t that the very thing Paul preached against in 1 Cor 1.