Are You Killing Your Church?

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The senior pastor had led the church for eleven years. During that time, attendance had grown, giving had increased, ministries had multiplied, and the staff had become considerably larger. He worked hard, preached faithfully, loved the church, and believed deeply in its mission. He was not a man who woke up in the morning wondering how he might hurt someone.

Nathan had served alongside him for years. He respected his gifts, appreciated much of what God had accomplished through his ministry, and had defended him more than once when criticism seemed unfair. That history was part of what made the conversation so difficult.

“Pastor, I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear the whole thing before you answer.”

The pastor nodded.

“People are afraid of you.”

There was a pause. “Afraid of me?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

Nathan hesitated. “Several people.”

The pastor leaned back. “Nathan, you know how this works. People get frustrated when they’re held accountable. We’ve raised expectations, and some people don’t like that. I’ve never expected everyone to agree with every decision.”

“I know.”

“I’ve told the staff repeatedly that my door is open.”

“I know that too.”

“Then I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

Nathan took a breath. “I’m saying that people don’t experience you the way you experience yourself.”

That sentence landed differently.

The pastor’s expression changed. “Give me an example.”

Nathan did, and the pastor explained what had happened. Nathan gave another, and there was an explanation for that one too. Then another—more context. Another—a misunderstanding. Another—that employee had been underperforming for months. Another—the pastor had already apologized for his tone. Another—that person had left out what happened before the meeting.

The conversation lasted nearly two hours. When it ended, the pastor could explain virtually every incident Nathan had raised, and much of what he said was true.

That was the problem, because it is entirely possible to possess a truthful explanation for every incident and still remain blind to the pattern those incidents create.

Brother, Would You Be Willing to Ask?

Brother, before you identify everyone else who is hurting your church, would you be willing to ask whether some of the damage might be coming from you?

I am not asking whether you love your church. You probably do. I am not asking whether you work hard; you may work harder than almost everyone around you. Nor am I asking whether God has gifted you, whether people have been saved, whether the church has grown, whether ministries have flourished, or whether you have made difficult decisions that genuinely needed to be made. All of those things may be true.

I am asking something harder: What has your leadership actually taught people to do around you? Have they learned to tell you the truth—or to manage your reaction to it? Have they learned that disagreement is useful—or dangerous? Have they learned that questions are welcome—or that questions had better arrive with the conclusion you already prefer? Have they learned that admitting a mistake is safe—or that mistakes will be remembered and used later? Have they learned to bring you bad news quickly—or to soften it, delay it, route it through somebody else, or quietly solve it before you discover it? Have they learned that your authority exists for their good—or that they exist to carry out your authority?

You may have never asked anyone to fear you, yet they may have learned to fear you anyway. That distinction matters because Scripture does not evaluate shepherds merely by what they intended to do; God repeatedly evaluates shepherds by how they actually shepherd His people. Acts 20:28 begins the work of shepherding in a striking place: “Keep watch over yourselves and the entire flock.” Yourself first, then the flock. Before Paul tells an elder to watch everyone else, he tells him to watch himself.

That is where I want us to begin.

The Redwood in Your Eye

Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:1–5 are sometimes reduced to “Don’t judge.” That is not what Jesus taught. Jesus prohibited hypocritical judgment and then commanded something much more demanding: remove the beam from your own eye so that you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. John 7:24 reinforces the point by commanding us to judge with righteous judgment.

Notice what Jesus does not say: He does not say the speck is imaginary.

That matters enormously for leaders because your employee may actually be wrong. He may be careless, communicate badly, resist accountability, miss deadlines, become defensive, gossip, lack competence, exaggerate what happened, or need correction, discipline, reassignment, or even termination. The man with the beam may be absolutely correct about the speck.

That is one of the most dangerous realities in leadership because being right about someone else’s problem can make it much easier to remain blind to your own. You corrected him because he was late—and he really was late. You confronted her because her work was inadequate—and it really was inadequate. You became frustrated because he failed to follow through—and he really did fail. You terminated her because the position was no longer working—and perhaps that decision was completely justified. None of those facts answers Jesus’ question about your eye.

Were you harsh? Did you humiliate rather than correct, or assume motives you could not know? Did you listen before answering? Did you use positional authority where persuasion, patience, or a conversation would have served better? Did you make disagreement personally expensive, punish the person for the problem, or keep increasing pressure until compliance became the only emotionally safe response? Did you speak to someone made in the image of God as though efficiency mattered more than dignity?

Brother, their speck does not make your redwood disappear.

Matthew 7 is therefore not merely a warning to critics; it is a leadership discipline. Before I use authority to address what is wrong in you, I must become willing for God to expose what is wrong in me. Jonathan Edwards saw this danger centuries ago when, in his discussion of spiritual pride, he described our remarkable capacity to perceive faults in others while remaining strangely blind to our own, even invoking Christ’s image of the mote and beam.¹ A pastor can become an expert in everybody else’s sanctification while remaining an amateur in his own, and that possibility should frighten us—not into paralysis, but into humility.

Domineering Is Not a Personality Type

We also need to remove an escape hatch. When some pastors hear the word domineering, they imagine its most extreme forms: screaming in meetings, pounding a desk, threatening employees, publicly humiliating people, demanding unquestioning loyalty, or ruling the church like a dictator. Because they do none of those things, they conclude the warning cannot possibly apply to them.

That is too easy.

Domineering is not a personality type. It is a misuse of authority, and misuse of authority exists on a continuum. A naturally forceful leader is not necessarily domineering. A high-D personality can be direct, decisive, courageous, efficient, and extraordinarily protective of people while using authority faithfully. Likewise, a soft-spoken leader can dominate an organization without ever raising his voice.

Domineering behavior can include obvious intimidation, but it can also appear through controlling information, repeatedly interrupting people, deciding before asking, subtly punishing disagreement, excluding dissenters from meaningful conversations, withholding opportunities, using access as leverage, demanding excessive deference, spiritualizing personal preferences, withdrawing warmth when challenged, surrounding yourself with people who rarely disagree, selectively enforcing policies, making examples of dissenters, using private information strategically, repeatedly overruling others in areas you supposedly delegated, or creating a culture in which everyone knows that the safest answer is the answer you already want.

Not every occurrence proves a domineering pattern because every leader has sinned with authority at some point. Every leader has been impatient, defensive, too forceful, insufficiently attentive, or simply wrong. The better evaluation looks at the whole picture: frequency, severity, power differential, consequences, whether the behavior is corrected, whether it becomes a pattern, and especially what happens when someone confronts you about it.

Perhaps, then, the least useful question is “Am I a domineering pastor?” That question invites a verdict, and most of us know how we would like the trial to end. A much better question is, “Where, when, with whom, and to what degree am I tempted to domineer?”

Now we have a mirror instead of a label.

God Specifically Warned You About This

Peter did not merely tell elders to shepherd God’s people. He identified a particular corruption of shepherding authority:

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you… not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.
—1 Peter 5:2–3

The language echoes Jesus’ own contrast between worldly and kingdom leadership. The rulers of the Gentiles “lord it over” others, Jesus said, “But it shall not be this way among you.” Greatness in Christ’s kingdom takes the form of service because the Son of Man Himself came not to be served but to serve and to give His life for others (Mark 10:42–45; Matthew 20:25–28).

Domineering leadership, then, is not merely an unfortunate management style. It contradicts the shape Christ explicitly gave Christian authority.

The qualifications of an elder reinforce the same pattern. He must be self-controlled, respectable, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not arrogant, and not quick-tempered (1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9). Paul tells Timothy that the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind, able to teach, patient when wronged, and gentle in correction (2 Timothy 2:24–25).

Notice the standard: God does not merely care whether the pastor is right. He cares how the pastor handles being right. You may have the correct theology and the wrong manner, the correct policy and the wrong spirit, the correct diagnosis and the wrong treatment, or the correct authority and the wrong use of it.

Being right is not a license to be unrighteous.

Power Makes the Mirror Harder to Use

Authority creates another difficulty because it changes the information environment around the person who possesses it. That is not merely cynical observation; organizational research has been examining versions of this problem for decades.

In a series of four experiments and a correlational study, Adam Galinsky and colleagues found power associated with reduced perspective-taking and poorer recognition of others’ emotional expressions.² That finding does not mean every powerful person becomes unempathetic or that authority inevitably corrupts perception. It suggests something considerably more modest—and useful to us here: possessing power can make deliberate perspective-taking particularly important.

Leadership research also repeatedly finds imperfect agreement between how leaders rate themselves and how others experience their leadership. A 2018 meta-analysis found leader-observer correlations generally moderate rather than perfect, with leaders tending to rate some relationship-oriented behaviors more favorably than observers did.³ Earlier research involving 2,056 managers likewise examined meaningful differences between self-ratings and subordinate ratings, while importantly cautioning against the simplistic conclusion that disagreement alone proves ineffective leadership.⁴

That qualification matters because your staff can misread you, your critics can be wrong, a disgruntled employee can distort events, and a group can reinforce a false narrative. I have personally watched multiple people become convinced that a senior pastor needed to be removed when, after examining the situation, I believed the accusations against him were profoundly unjust. Group agreement is not inspiration, and consensus is not inerrancy.

Yet neither is your self-perception.

Other people are not infallible witnesses to your leadership. Neither are you.

That is why wise leaders actively seek what I call Corroboration of Reality—the disciplined practice of testing our perception of events against independent evidence, trustworthy witnesses, Scripture, consequences, and people who are sufficiently free to disagree with us.

Experience may tell me where to look. Scripture must tell me how to look, how to judge rightly, and what to do with what I find.

What Happens When Someone Tells You?

Perhaps one of the most revealing moments in a leader’s life occurs immediately after someone says, “Pastor, the way you handled that hurt me.” What happens next may tell you more about your leadership than the original incident.

Do you become curious—or become an attorney? Do you ask, “Help me understand,” or immediately begin assembling evidence for your defense? Do you listen for truth—or primarily for inaccuracies? Do you try to understand the person’s experience—or rush to explain your intention? When an apology is appropriate, can you say specifically, “I was wrong,” or does the apology become, “I’m sorry you experienced it that way”?

There is an enormous difference between those responses. Proverbs says that a fool’s way is right in his own eyes, while a wise man listens to counsel (Proverbs 12:15). The one who listens to life-giving correction dwells among the wise, while rejecting discipline ultimately harms himself (Proverbs 15:31–32). Proverbs also warns against answering before listening and reminds us that the first account can sound convincing until another perspective is heard (Proverbs 18:13, 17).

Those warnings are especially important for leaders because your position makes it easier to answer first. Everyone else knows you are the pastor, and they know you have authority. They may also know that you can influence assignments, access, compensation, advancement, reputation, or employment. You may therefore believe you are having a candid conversation between two Christians while the other person is calculating the cost of every sentence.

If People Are Afraid to Tell You the Truth, You Have Lost Access to Reality

Organizational research becomes particularly useful here—not as authority over Scripture, but as corroboration of something Scripture has been telling us about human beings for a very long time. Elizabeth Morrison’s extensive work on employee voice and silence describes voice as voluntarily communicating concerns, suggestions, problems, or work-related opinions upward, while silence involves withholding information that might be useful to the organization.⁵ The distinction matters because silence cannot automatically be interpreted as agreement.

In a study involving 23 neonatal intensive-care units, Ingrid Nembhard and Amy Edmondson found that leader inclusiveness—leaders’ words and actions that invited and appreciated others’ contributions—predicted psychological safety, which in turn was associated with greater engagement in improvement work.⁶ Other research has found that abusive supervision can contribute to employee silence through emotional exhaustion,⁷ while Morrison’s later review of the greatly expanded voice-and-silence literature again shows that speaking upward is affected by both individual and contextual factors, including people’s expectations about what may happen when they speak.⁸

So when a pastor says, “Nobody has told me there’s a problem,” I want to ask one more question: Would they?

Your staff knows things about your leadership that you may never see. They know what happens in their stomach when your name appears on their phone, whether “Tell me what you really think” is an invitation or a trap, which subjects are safe, and how much disagreement you tolerate before disagreement becomes disloyalty. They know whether bad news should be delivered immediately, softened first, or quietly buried. They know whether your questions are genuine questions or instructions wearing question marks, whether you can change your mind without losing face, whether an apology from you sounds like “I was wrong” or “I’m sorry you experienced it that way,” and what happened to the last person who challenged you.

They know whether candor travels upward in your organization—or dies somewhere below your office. And, brother, you may be the last person to know.

That is the paradox. If your response to difficult truth repeatedly makes truth expensive, people eventually stop purchasing the privilege of telling it to you. Silence follows, and eventually you may interpret that silence as confirmation that everything is fine. Sometimes silence means peace, sometimes it means trust, and sometimes there really is nothing significant to say. Sometimes, however, silence means the organization has learned that truth is expensive.

If your leadership style makes honest counsel dangerous, you are gradually disabling one of God’s ordinary means of protecting you from yourself.

How Many People Would It Take?

So let me ask you a difficult question: What would you need to hear before you became willing to seriously consider that the problem might be you? Would it take one person, two, three, five, or ten? Would you listen differently if it came from a longtime elder, your executive pastor, your assistant, your spouse, several former employees, an outside consultant, one resignation, or several?

How many?

Please hear the qualification carefully: numbers do not establish guilt. One person can be wrong. Five people can be wrong. Ten people can repeat the same false assumption. Churches can develop factions, employees can coordinate stories, people can misinterpret strong leadership, and a pastor can become the target of unjust criticism precisely because he did the right thing.

Scripture knows that, which is one reason Paul commands Timothy, “Do not entertain an accusation against an elder except on the testimony of two or three witnesses” (1 Timothy 5:19). That protection matters, and I would not weaken it by one inch.

Yet the same Bible that protects an elder from irresponsible accusation tells that elder not to domineer over God’s flock. We obey both. The protection against false accusation and the prohibition against domineering are not competing Scriptures from which we select whichever one is most convenient to our position. The witnesses may be wrong, and you may also be wrong.

A godly shepherd should not require a guilty verdict before becoming deeply curious about his own heart. If five people tell you that you are domineering and your first instinct is to explain why all five are wrong, your explanation may itself be something you need to examine. All five could indeed be wrong; the question is whether your heart remains genuinely willing to discover that they might be right.

Your Explanation May Be Completely True

This may be the hardest part because you know things your critics do not know. You know what happened before the meeting, how many times you already addressed the problem, what confidential information you cannot reveal, how much patience you exercised before finally becoming firm, what the employee said privately, what financial pressures exist, what the board dynamics are, what would have happened if you had done nothing, and—perhaps most powerfully—you know your intention.

When someone describes your behavior, therefore, you can often supply context that makes your actions look considerably more reasonable, and the context may be completely true.

Explanation is not exoneration.

Adam explained, “The woman You gave me…” There was truth in the sentence; God had given him the woman. Saul explained that the people spared the best animals for sacrifice, and there was enough truth in his explanation to make it sound almost spiritual.

Then Nathan confronted David.

David could have explained Bathsheba. He could have explained the political circumstances surrounding Uriah, questioned Nathan’s information, challenged his standing, investigated who had been talking, or reminded everyone that he was the Lord’s anointed king. Instead, when God finally broke through David’s defenses, David said simply, “I have sinned against the LORD” (2 Samuel 12:13). There was no qualifying clause, counteraccusation, explanation of Bathsheba’s behavior, discussion of Uriah’s limitations, or reminder of everything David had accomplished for Israel.

There was simply ownership.

Brother, that is where I hope this article eventually leads—not to humiliation for humiliation’s sake, institutional panic, or a predetermined verdict against you, but to ownership.

Humility Is Not Thinking Poorly of Yourself

Spurgeon described humility in wonderfully useful terms as thinking rightly of ourselves.⁹ That matters because humility does not require you to agree with false accusations, pretend you lack gifts God has plainly given you, become weak or indecisive, or live in endless self-doubt.

Humility wants an accurate view.

If the accusation is false, humility wants to know it is false. If it is partly true, humility wants the true part. If it is devastatingly true, humility still wants truth.

Spurgeon also warned that those who imagine themselves free of pride may be among those most endangered by it,¹⁰ while Edwards made essentially the same observation from another direction: genuine humility becomes increasingly sensitive to remaining pride, whereas counterfeit humility can become strangely impressed with itself.¹¹ That is a frightening possibility for pastors because spiritual vocabulary can conceal spiritual pride.

“I am simply protecting the church.” “I have to lead.” “Someone has to make the hard decisions.” “They don’t understand the pressure.” “I can’t let a few unhappy people control the organization.”

Every one of those statements could be true.

They can also become hiding places.

Your Church May Be Growing While You Are Killing Something Inside It

Attendance is growing, giving is strong, buildings are full, people are being baptized, new ministries are launching, the preaching is effective, and the church has influence. Surely those outcomes prove that God is pleased with the leadership.

Scripture will not allow that conclusion.

God accomplishes His purposes through deeply flawed people, and His sovereignty is not an endorsement of every behavior of the instruments He uses. Christ’s messages to the churches in Revelation 2–3 are particularly sobering because He sees things church dashboards cannot measure. A congregation can have reputation without corresponding reality, possess doctrinal strengths while tolerating serious sin, or be busy and yet spiritually endangered.

Christ sees churches differently than dashboards do.

A church can therefore be growing numerically while trust is dying relationally. It can be financially strong while candor is disappearing, add members while losing faithful staff, celebrate baptisms while employees learn to survive leadership rather than flourish under it, and preach grace from the platform while people experience fear in the conference room.

That does not make growth suspicious. Growth can be a wonderful mercy of God. It means only that success is not self-authenticating. The fruit God produces through your ministry does not certify every feature of your leadership.

They Are God’s Sheep

Peter’s wording matters enormously because the flock is God’s. Paul tells the Ephesian elders that the Holy Spirit made them overseers to shepherd the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood (Acts 20:28).

You did not purchase these people; Christ did. You did not die for them; Christ did. They are not your human resources, machinery for accomplishing vision, obstacles standing between you and organizational effectiveness, or pieces on a ministry chessboard.

They are Christ’s sheep.

Pastoral authority is therefore always stewardship. Jesus gives shepherds genuine authority, and genuine authority brings genuine responsibility, yet authority never converts stewardship into ownership.

Ezekiel 34 contains one of Scripture’s most terrifying indictments of shepherds because they began consuming what had been entrusted to them rather than strengthening the weak, healing the sick, binding the injured, bringing back the strays, and seeking the lost. Instead, God says, “You have ruled them with force and cruelty” (Ezekiel 34:4 BSB). The sheep scattered, God saw what happened, and He held the shepherds responsible.

James therefore warns that teachers will receive stricter judgment (James 3:1), which turns one common instinct about leadership upside down. Leadership does not give you greater protection from accountability; leadership gives you greater accountability. The sheep did not volunteer to bear your pastoral authority. You volunteered to bear responsibility for how you use it.

That asymmetry matters.

What About False Accusations?

We protect an elder from false accusations because God cares about truth—not because pastors belong to a privileged class whose reputations matter more than everyone else’s, but because false witness is evil regardless of its target.

Deuteronomy 19:15–21 required careful inquiry when serious accusations were made, while Matthew 18:16, 2 Corinthians 13:1, and 1 Timothy 5:19 reflect Scripture’s repeated concern for corroborated testimony. So investigate carefully. Listen. Test accounts. Seek witnesses. Distinguish firsthand knowledge from rumor and interpretation from observable behavior. Look for corroboration, allow the accused leader to answer, refuse to confuse emotional intensity with factual reliability, and do not mistake multiple repetitions of one source for multiple independent witnesses.

Do not destroy a man’s reputation because somebody used a powerful word. Protect the innocent leader from false condemnation. If the accusations are false, say so clearly and restore what was damaged. If the allegations prove substantially true, however, do not use the biblical protection of elders as a shield against the biblical accountability of elders.

Confront the guilty leader with enough truth and love to call him to genuine repentance.

Above all, protect the sheep—because the shepherd was given authority for their good; the sheep were not given to him for the preservation of his authority.

But What Happens While Everyone Is Deciding?

There is another stewardship question churches sometimes miss. An accusation has been made, it is credible enough to investigate, and guilt has not yet been established.

What now?

Too often churches behave as though only two categories exist: guilty, therefore remove authority; or not yet proven guilty, therefore change nothing. There is a third category: credible allegations are being investigated, and wisdom requires proportionate interim protection while truth is established.

That is not punishment; it is stewardship.

Depending upon the allegations and circumstances, wise interim measures might include changing reporting relationships, temporarily removing personnel authority, requiring independent supervision, limiting certain decision-making powers, or placing a leader on administrative leave. The appropriate response will vary dramatically with the facts because an accusation of occasional impatience is not an accusation of sustained intimidation, and a disagreement over leadership style is not the same as a credible allegation of retaliation. Wisdom requires proportion.

Yet one principle remains: the time required to establish guilt must not determine the time required to establish protection. A church can sin by judging an elder too quickly, and a church can also sin by protecting an elder too long.

Investigation is not the same thing as inaction. A church may conduct a careful investigation while simultaneously leaving vulnerable people exposed to the very authority whose use is being investigated. In that situation, the investigation may be proceeding properly while the interim stewardship is proceeding terribly.

Biblical protection against premature judgment must never become institutional permission for prolonged exposure to possible harm. The church must be slow to condemn and quick to protect. Those responsibilities are not contradictory; they are different.

The Cost Eventually Appears Somewhere

Leadership behavior has consequences even when those consequences are difficult to trace. A 2022 meta-analysis found a positive association between workplace incivility and employees’ intentions to leave.¹² Research on destructive and abusive supervision has likewise reported numerous undesirable employee and organizational correlates, although an important 2021 systematic review cautions that this literature has significant conceptual, measurement, and causal limitations.¹³

That qualification matters because we should never take a secular workplace study, paste the word church over company, and pretend we have proved what happened in a particular congregation. Research corroborates patterns; it does not adjudicate your case.

Still, if staff turnover increases, trusted people begin leaving, information becomes increasingly filtered, former employees independently describe similar experiences, and current employees become less candid, wisdom should not ask merely, “Can I explain each departure?” Wisdom asks something harder: “Is there a pattern I am refusing to see because I can explain every individual piece of it?”

A mosaic is made of individual pieces, and you can describe every tile accurately while still missing the picture.

Humility Makes Truth Less Expensive

There is encouraging research here as well. A 2022 meta-analysis synthesizing 84 correlations from 53 independent studies involving 16,534 participants found humble leadership positively associated with outcomes including affective trust, engagement, job satisfaction, leader-member exchange, and employee voice.¹⁴ A separate 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis drawing from 212 unique studies likewise found significant relationships between leader humility and numerous follower and team outcomes, while importantly calling for stronger experimental designs and greater attention to causal questions.¹⁵

Research is not Scripture, yet I find the correspondence beautiful.

Peter tells believers, “Clothe yourselves with humility toward one another” (1 Peter 5:5), immediately after instructing shepherds not to lord authority over the flock. That proximity is worth noticing because humility changes what authority feels like in the hands of the person who holds it.

A humble leader can still make a hard decision, terminate someone, confront sin, correct poor performance, say no, disagree, and lead decisively. Humility does not remove backbone; it removes the need to prove that the backbone is yours.

A humble leader can say, “I may be missing something. Tell me more.” He can acknowledge, “I interrupted you. Please finish,” or simply say, “I was wrong.” He can tell someone, “My decision may still stand, but the way I treated you was not acceptable.” He can ask forgiveness and ask for help seeing what he cannot presently see.

Those sentences do not weaken authority.

They sanctify it.

Brother, I Am Not Trying to Get Rid of You

If you have made it this far, perhaps you feel accused, but that is not my purpose. I am not trying to build a case for removing you. I am trying to help you see.

I want your wife to receive the best of the man God is making you, your children to experience your strength without fearing it, your elders to be able to counsel you without calculating the political consequences, and your staff to tell you the truth before the problem becomes a crisis. I want younger leaders to learn courage from you without learning intimidation, and I want your congregation to receive the benefit of your gifts without paying the price of your unexamined weaknesses. Most of all, I want you to stand before Christ having shepherded His people faithfully.

So I am not asking you to begin by agreeing that you are domineering. I am asking for something smaller—and perhaps harder:

Become willing to know.

David prayed, “Search me, O God, and know my heart… See if there is any offensive way in me” (Psalm 139:23–24). That is a dangerous prayer if we mean it, because God may answer it through Scripture, your wife, an elder, an employee whose personality irritates you, somebody who explains the problem badly, or even a critic who is partly wrong.

The instrument does not have to be perfect for God to use it.

What Would You Have to Hear?

So I return to the question: What would you have to hear? How many people would have to say it? What kind of evidence would count? Is there anyone in your life who could tell you that you are using authority sinfully and receive something other than an immediate defense?

If not, brother, that may already be an answer.

Maybe you are not domineering, in which case honest examination will not harm you. Maybe you occasionally misuse strength without recognizing it, in which case seeing it is mercy. Maybe there is a significant pattern that others have seen for years and you have not, in which case seeing that is mercy too.

The catastrophe is not discovering sin. For the Christian, Christ has already provided for sinners. The catastrophe is loving blindness because sight might cost too much.

There Are No Maverick Molecules

One more thing: you do not need to panic. There are no maverick molecules, and God is not hiding behind a bush wondering what happened to His church.

If someone has falsely accused you, God knows. If people have misunderstood you, God knows. If an investigation has treated you unfairly, God knows. If you have been faithfully leading and people have punished you for it, God knows. If, however, you have hurt His sheep while convincing yourself that you were merely leading strongly, God knows that too.

His sovereignty is therefore not permission for passivity; it is permission for honesty. You do not have to manipulate the outcome, control the narrative, destroy your accusers, recruit allies, explain yourself to everyone, or win.

You need truth.

If the accusations are false, truth is your friend. If they are partly true, truth is still your friend. If they are devastatingly true, truth is still your friend, because the Christ who exposes sin is the Christ who died for sinners.

John tells believers that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive and cleanse us (1 John 1:9), while Proverbs says the one who conceals sin will not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces it finds mercy (Proverbs 28:13). That is where this article is trying to lead you—not to image management, explanation, institutional survival, or destruction, but to mercy.

Perhaps the answer to the question Are You Killing Your Church? is No. Perhaps it is, Not intentionally, but there are things you desperately need to see. Perhaps the answer is more painful. Perhaps it is Yes.

Then, brother, praise God that He loves you and His sheep too much to leave you blind.

Maybe repentance begins not with a resignation letter, a public statement, an investigation, or a defense. Maybe it begins alone before God with five words:

“Lord, I am willing to know.”

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Summary

Domineering leadership is not a personality type or a single dramatic behavior; it is the misuse of authority, and it exists on a continuum. A pastor may genuinely love his church, preach faithfully, work tirelessly, make correct decisions, and accurately identify problems in others while remaining blind to ways his own leadership is harming the people entrusted to him. The speck in someone else’s eye does not make the redwood in yours disappear.

Scripture simultaneously protects elders from unsupported accusations and commands elders not to domineer over God’s flock. Faithful churches must therefore pursue both truth and protection: investigate carefully, refuse premature condemnation, protect innocent leaders from false accusation, confront guilty leaders toward repentance, and protect the sheep while credible allegations are being examined.

Because authority can distort the flow of information upward, the absence of complaints does not necessarily establish the absence of problems. A wise leader deliberately seeks Corroboration of Reality, listens to people who can disagree with him, examines patterns rather than merely explaining individual incidents, and remains willing to discover uncomfortable truth.

The goal is not the destruction of the pastor. It is truth, repentance, protection, reconciliation where possible, and faithful stewardship of Christ’s people. The beginning may be as simple—and as difficult—as becoming willing to know.

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Five Coaching Questions

1. What has my leadership actually taught people to do around me? Have people learned to speak candidly, or have they learned to manage my reactions?
2. When someone tells me that I hurt them or misused authority, what happens inside me first—curiosity, defensiveness, explanation, irritation, compassion, or a desire to understand?
3. Where, when, with whom, and to what degree am I most tempted to domineer, and what patterns would the people closest to my leadership identify that I may not see?
4. What evidence would I actually accept that my perception of myself may be incomplete? Who in my life possesses both enough knowledge and enough freedom to tell me something I do not want to hear?
5. If God showed me that a significant part of these concerns were true, what would repentance require of me—not merely in words, but in confession, restitution, changed behavior, accountability, repaired structures, and the protection of people I may have harmed?

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Detailed Endnotes

1. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, Part III, particularly his treatment of evangelical humiliation and spiritual pride. Edwards repeatedly contrasts genuine humility with the peculiar blindness of spiritual pride, including Christ’s image of the mote and beam. His argument is especially useful here because pride can become highly perceptive concerning another person’s deficiencies while remaining remarkably poor at perceiving its own.

2. Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H. Gruenfeld, “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (2006): 1068–1074. Four experiments and a correlational study found power associated with reduced perspective-taking, heavier anchoring in one’s own privileged knowledge, and less accurate recognition of others’ emotional expressions. The article does not establish that every person possessing authority necessarily becomes less empathic; its findings support the narrower claim used here that power can create conditions in which deliberate perspective-taking becomes especially important.

3. Angela Lee and Nichelle C. Carpenter, “Seeing Eye to Eye: A Meta-Analysis of Self-Other Agreement of Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2018): 253–275. The meta-analysis found leader-observer correlations generally moderate and found that leaders tended to report lower or similar levels of task-oriented behavior but higher levels of relationship-oriented behavior than observers reported. The results reinforce the value of multiple perspectives without treating observer judgments as infallible.

4. John W. Fleenor, Cynthia D. McCauley, and Stéphane Brutus, “Self-Other Rating Agreement and Leader Effectiveness,” The Leadership Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1996): 487–506. The study examined self- and subordinate ratings involving 2,056 managers. Importantly, the findings do not support using self-other disagreement alone as proof of ineffective leadership. That limitation is important to the argument of this article: neither the leader’s self-perception nor another person’s perception should be treated as automatically definitive.

5. Elizabeth W. Morrison, “Employee Voice and Silence,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1 (2014): 173–197. Morrison defines upward voice as voluntarily communicating suggestions, concerns, information about problems, or work-related opinions to someone in higher organizational authority; withholding such potentially useful information constitutes silence. Her review is especially relevant to the danger of interpreting a lack of upward criticism as evidence that no problem exists.

6. Ingrid M. Nembhard and Amy C. Edmondson, “Making It Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 27, no. 7 (2006): 941–966. Survey data from 23 neonatal intensive-care units supported the authors’ hypotheses concerning leader inclusiveness, psychological safety, and engagement in improvement efforts. The setting is healthcare rather than church ministry, so the research is used here as organizational corroboration rather than direct evidence concerning pastoral leadership.

7. Angela J. Xu, Raymond Loi, and Long W. Lam, “The Bad Boss Takes It All: How Abusive Supervision and Leader–Member Exchange Interact to Influence Employee Silence,” The Leadership Quarterly 26, no. 5 (2015): 763–774. Using two-wave data from 152 service-industry employees, the authors found support for a model in which abusive supervision predicted employee silence through emotional exhaustion. As with other workplace studies cited here, this research illuminates a possible organizational mechanism rather than proving the cause of silence in any particular church.

8. Elizabeth W. Morrison, “Employee Voice and Silence: Taking Stock a Decade Later,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 10 (2023): 79–107. Morrison’s later review surveys the greatly expanded literature concerning when and why employees speak upward or remain silent and how individual and contextual factors influence that choice.

9. Charles H. Spurgeon, “Pride and Humility,” sermon on Proverbs 18:12. Spurgeon’s treatment of humility emphasizes accurate self-knowledge rather than artificial self-deprecation. That distinction is important for leaders: humility does not require accepting a false accusation; it requires preferring an accurate view of oneself over a flattering one.

10. Charles H. Spurgeon, “On Humbling Ourselves Before God,” sermon on 1 Peter 5:6 (1883). Spurgeon warns, “None have more pride than those who dream that they have none.” The warning is particularly relevant to leaders because confidence that one is immune from a particular sin can itself interfere with serious self-examination.

11. Edwards, Religious Affections, Part III. Edwards distinguishes genuine humility from counterfeit forms of humility that can paradoxically become occasions for spiritual pride. Genuine humility does not admire itself for being humble; increasing spiritual sight tends instead to make remaining pride more visible.

12. Boshra H. Namin, Torvald Øgaard, and Jo Røislien, “Workplace Incivility and Turnover Intention in Organizations: A Meta-Analytic Review,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 1 (2022): 25. The random-effects meta-analysis reported a positive association between perceived workplace incivility and turnover intention, with an estimated effect of 0.31 (95% CI 0.26–0.33). The finding should not be used to infer that incivility caused any particular person’s departure from a church; it corroborates the broader proposition that interpersonal treatment can matter to people’s intentions to leave.

13. Thomas Fischer, Amy Wei Tian, Allan Lee, and David J. Hughes, “Abusive Supervision: A Systematic Review and Fundamental Rethink,” The Leadership Quarterly 32, no. 6 (2021): 101540. This critical review is included intentionally because it complicates rather than merely strengthens the article’s case. The authors identify conceptual confusion, measurement difficulties, low base rates, and heavy reliance on research designs that often cannot establish strong causal conclusions. Leadership research should help us ask better questions, not provide scientific-sounding ammunition for prematurely convicting a particular person.

14. Yifei Luo, Zeyu Zhang, Qishu Chen, Kairui Zhang, Yijiang Wang, and Jianfeng Peng, “Humble Leadership and Its Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022): 980322. The authors synthesized 84 correlations from 53 independent studies involving 16,534 participants. Humble leadership was positively associated with affective trust, engagement, job satisfaction, leader-member exchange, organizational identification, employee voice, and several additional outcomes. Because many underlying studies are observational, these relationships should not automatically be interpreted as proof of causation.

15. Jeffrey A. Chandler et al., “A Meta-Analysis of Humble Leadership: Reviewing Individual, Team, and Organizational Outcomes of Leader Humility,” The Leadership Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2023): 101660. The systematic review and meta-analysis incorporated 212 unique studies and identified numerous relationships between leader humility and individual, team, and organizational variables. Importantly, the authors also call for stronger experimental designs and better treatment of endogeneity and causal questions. That caution is consistent with the approach throughout this article: research should corroborate reality without being asked to prove more than it can.

16. No pastors were physically harmed in the preparation of this article. Several became extremely uncomfortable. This was intentional.

17. Biblical confrontation aims at repentance, restoration to fellowship with God, protection of others, and increasing conformity to Christ; see Galatians 6:1, 2 Corinthians 7:9–10, and Hebrews 12:10–11. Restoration to Christian fellowship and restoration to pastoral office, however, are distinct questions. Repentance should be welcomed immediately; qualification for renewed pastoral authority must be evaluated separately under the biblical standards governing shepherds.

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Scripture References

Genesis 3:12 — Adam’s explanation after the fall.

Deuteronomy 19:15–21 — Corroborating testimony and careful investigation.

1 Samuel 15:13–24 — Saul’s explanations and failure to take immediate ownership.

2 Samuel 12:1–13 — Nathan confronts David; David responds, “I have sinned against the LORD.”

Psalm 139:23–24 — “Search me, O God, and know my heart.”

Proverbs 11:14 — Safety in an abundance of counselors.

Proverbs 12:15 — The wise listen to counsel.

Proverbs 15:22 — Plans succeed with many advisers.

Proverbs 15:31–32 — Listening to life-giving correction.

Proverbs 16:2 — A person’s ways may appear pure in his own eyes.

Proverbs 18:13 — Answering before listening is folly.

Proverbs 18:17 — The first account appears right until another examines it.

Proverbs 21:2 — A man’s way may seem right to him, but the LORD weighs the heart.

Proverbs 28:13 — Confession, renunciation, and mercy.

Ezekiel 34:1–10 — God’s indictment of shepherds who fail or mistreat the flock.

Matthew 7:1–5 — Remove the beam so that you can see clearly to remove the speck.

Matthew 18:16 — Establishing a matter through witnesses.

Matthew 20:25–28 — Kingdom leadership contrasted with lording authority over others.

Mark 10:42–45 — “It shall not be this way among you.”

Luke 12:48 — Greater entrustment brings greater accountability.

John 7:24 — Judge with righteous judgment.

Acts 20:28 — Keep watch over yourselves and the entire flock.

1 Corinthians 13:1 — Establishing a matter through witnesses.

2 Corinthians 7:9–10 — Godly sorrow and repentance.

2 Corinthians 13:5 — Examine yourselves.

Galatians 6:1 — Restoration in a spirit of gentleness.

Philippians 2:3–8 — Humility patterned after Christ.

1 Timothy 3:1–7 — Qualifications for overseers.

1 Timothy 4:16 — Watch your life and doctrine closely.

1 Timothy 5:19 — Protection of elders from unsupported accusation.

2 Timothy 2:24–25 — Kindness, patience, and gentleness in correction.

Titus 1:5–9 — Qualifications for elders, including freedom from arrogance and quick temper.

Hebrews 12:10–11 — Discipline producing righteousness.

James 3:1 — Teachers receive stricter judgment.

1 Peter 5:1–6 — Shepherd willingly, do not lord authority over the flock, and clothe yourselves with humility.

1 John 1:9 — Confession, forgiveness, and cleansing.

Revelation 2–3 — Christ’s evaluation of churches beyond their outward reputation or apparent success.

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LMAMD

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