Christian leaders are complex human beings.
That shouldn’t need saying. But sometimes it does.
We are all shaped over time — by desire, fear, love, disappointment, trauma, hope. We change. We are never static.
And leaders, like the communities they serve, are a mixed bag. Some are being softened. Some are being hardened.
Formation in a positive direction is not automatic. Faith does not move in a straight line. Time in ministry does not guarantee depth, and proximity to holy language does not ensure holiness.
Aspiration
Language still matters though.
In church life, leaders often speak from aspiration: ‘full surrender’, ‘dying to self’, ‘faithfulness’, ‘obedience’. Sometimes this names a genuine longing. Sometimes it names an ideal we think we should want.
The difficulty is that aspirational language is easily heard as evidence of arrival. Over time, words meant to point beyond the leader begin to sound like a quiet testimony about the leader. Aspiration slips into projection.
Reflected
Psychology helps us here. We become who we are partly through what is reflected back to us.
When leaders speak the language of surrender and are met with affirmation — ‘you’re such a godly leader’, ‘so faithful’, ‘so Christlike’— it doesn’t just encourage. It forms.
Slowly, often unnoticed, it can reduce our capacity for self-critique, especially around power, motivation, and desire.
Inner conflict
What’s striking is how little patience St Paul has for the illusion of arrival. He does not present himself as someone who has finished the work but writes openly about inner conflict, contradiction, and struggle — about wanting one thing and finding himself pulled toward another:
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19)
This is not pre-conversion Paul ‘tidying up his testimony’. This is Paul as an apostle refusing to collapse complexity into spiritual certainty. Formation, for Paul, is conflict, not resolution.
Acknowledging weakness
When challenged about his authority, Paul refuses to defend himself through strength or spiritual success:
“I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)
Weakness here is not a performance. It is an acknowledgement that what is not brought into the light does not disappear — it simply gains influence in the dark. And Paul is equally clear that the journey remains unfinished:
“Not that I have already obtained this or have already arrived at my goal; but I press on…” (Philippians 3:12)
Direction without presumption. Aspiration without arrival.
Constant tension
There is a Native American proverb, The Two Wolves, that speaks of two impulses living within a person — one oriented toward life, the other toward destruction — existing in constant tension. When asked which one prevails, the answer is not the stronger, but the one that is tended, the one that is fed.
Formation is not assumed. Direction is not guaranteed. What we attend to, practice, excuse, or ignore slowly becomes who we are.
Healthy realism
The Christian tradition has often been healthiest when it has stayed close to this realism.
Conversion does not remove disordered desire; it exposes it. Augustine spoke of the divided heart — genuinely drawn towards God and yet still tangled within itself. Formation, where it happens, is slow, uneven, and unfinished.
Our shadow sides do not disappear at baptism, an altar call, ordination or when singing songs about surrender. Psychology would describe the shadow as the parts of us that remain unintegrated: unmet needs, unhealed wounds, old survival strategies that once kept us safe and now quietly shape how we lead.
Leadership tends to intensify these dynamics. Power does not create the shadow but it gives it reach.
Suspending discernment
Recent stories of abuse in the church have made this painfully clear. Leaders can end up living off an image of holiness that others help construct. And too often the communities they lead trust the rhetoric of surrender and suspend discernment.
The gap between what is preached and what is practised can grow quietly, invisibly, until it ruptures. Abuse rarely begins with cruelty. Rather, it often begins with unexamined power, spiritual idealisation, and a shared reluctance to question those who appear to have arrived.
Image or reality?
Church culture can make this easier than we like to admit. Communities often honour leaders in ways that reward wholeness rather than honesty. Praise can become insulation. Honour, detached from truth-telling, can dull discernment.
Over time, leaders may be shaped more by affirmation than by repentance, more by image than by reality.
This is rarely about deliberate deceit. More often, it is about formation.
Resisting spiritual flattery
Cruciform theology offers another way — but only if we refuse to turn it into performance. The cross is not a badge or a credential. It is a place we return to. Again and again. It undoes us. When cruciformity is spoken of as something leaders possess rather than something they keep consenting to, it loses its edge.
This places a responsibility on leaders. Faithful leadership is not only about naming Christ as the horizon, but about interrupting the illusion of arrival — especially when it gathers around us. It means resisting spiritual flattery. Naming complexity without drama. Choosing practices and relationships that tell us the truth, not just the parts we like hearing.
Vocation does not resolve complexity. It gives it somewhere to surface.
Holding complexity
Perhaps true honour in the church isn’t about denying complexity, but about holding it: Desire and distortion. Calling and compulsion. Love and self-interest — all within the patient, unsettling mercy of God.
The question isn’t whether leaders have a shadow. The question is whether we are willing to lead as if that were true.
Leadership shaped by the cross will always feel unfinished.
That is not a problem to fix, but a truth to stay faithful to.
Rev’d Jon Swales is an ordained C of E Priest who heads up Lighthouse, a fresh expression of church for adults battered and bruised by the storms of life. See his Cruciform Justice website and the Mission, Theology and Ministry on the Margins course he leads.
Jon will also be leading a seminar at the Hope into Action conference on 20 May 2026 Rooted: Homelessness Ends in Community
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