Your Church Needs Protection From Emotional Sabotage

At each of our monthly elder meetings, we aim to read and discuss helpful books, both ancient and modern, that will contribute to our growth and development as pastors (Prov. 1:5; 2 Tim. 2:15). We recently tackled Joe Rigney’s book, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World. 

The subtitle makes quite a claim about the book’s significance, but I’m pleased to say it lives up to the billing. Indeed, the consensus was that Rigney has accurately diagnosed a widespread problem and given us specific steps we can take to remedy it. In other words, he’s a man who understands the times and knows what God’s people ought to do (1 Chron. 12:32).

I heartily recommend every pastor in America “take up and read,” but for those who need further convincing, here’s a taste of the wisdom that awaits you. 

The Symptoms of Our Age

This book is written to address the following problem: “We live in an age of angst and agitation, marked by fierce anxiety storms that shoot through society, and reactive social stampedes that trample everything in their path. Our world demands that whole communities adapt [read: sinfully enable and accommodate] to their most reactive members” (p. 1). 

To make matters worse, “[T]he individuals and institutions that ought to act as shock absorbers in crisis are instead held hostage and paralyzed by indecision and failures of nerve” (p. 2). In other words, many of the church's leaders are not sober-minded, but are enslaved to their passions and deeply beset with the sin of people-pleasing, which is the fear of man (Prov. 29:25).

It would be tempting to blame the growing anxiety in the West on factors like increased mobility, globalization, smart phones, social media, etc. Rigney admits that these do “amplify and reinforce our spiritual and social sickness” (p. 8), but he insists these are not the cause of our problem. 

Instead, we are in the midst of a “Crisis of Degree,” a technical phrase describing disordered relationships to God, to each other, and the world. Such disorder results in “a breakdown of authority across the various spheres of society,” “a cascade of bitter rivalries and envy,” and “multiplying accusations, blame-shifting, and scapegoating” (p. 18).

Anyone with eyes wide open can see this rotten fruit everywhere the vine, even the church, which should be a bulwark against such things. The question is, How did we get here?

The Disease Causing the Symptoms

In brief, Rigney places the blame on “the abdication of leaders” (p. 19). More specifically, the failure of leaders to lead has contributed to our “chronically anxious and agitated society” which is increasingly marked by five characteristics:

1. Reactivity, or “an unending cycle of intense reactions” in which “the passions of the members govern and dictate both the mood of the body and its direction” (p. 19). 

2. Herding, or “a process where togetherness triumphs over individuality and everyone adapts to the least mature members of the community. . . The goal becomes ‘peace’ at all costs, otherwise known as appeasement.” Indeed, “anyone who seeks to take a stand will be characterized as cruel, heartless, insensitive, unfeeling, uncooperative, selfish, and cold. As a result, the most immature members of a community come to set the agenda for the whole” (p. 19–20). 

3. Blame displacement, or the emotional state of people who “focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny” (p. 20). 

4. Quick-fix mentality, or “a desire for symptom relief rather than fundamental change, flowing from a low threshold for pain” (p. 20). 

5. Failure of nerve, or “a lack of mature, decisive leadership,” a problem which “both stems from and contributes to the first four” characteristic above (p. 21). 

In all this, abdicating leaders are following their father Adam in the garden, who sinned in strikingly similar ways. (We do well to remember that Adam’s sin was not abuse but abdication, wherein he failed in his priestly role to protect Eden’s sanctuary from evil.)

The Need, Part 1: Getting Ready for the Fight

The remedy must start at the source of the problem, so that means recovering biblical standards for leaders who grasp their responsibility for the well-being of those entrusted to their care.

To do this, leaders must possess a well-ordered soul that is not enslaved to their own passions, nor the passions of others around them. But they must also be sober-minded, which entails: (1) “clarity of mind,” or the ability to see fully and assess well; (2) “stability of soul,”  or the ability to resist overreaction; and (3) “readiness to act,” or the ability to respond purposively with conviction.

These qualities (virtues if you like) do require “habitual exercise” or training (2 Pet. 1:5; Heb. 5:14); however, they spring from a leader’s deep-seated confidence in the gospel, which renews his mind and reorients his heart to God and what God says is good.

Yet godly leaders need to know that “the moment you begin to cultivate mature, sober-minded leadership, you should expect sabotage, both from within and without” (p. 39). By “sabotage” Rigney means “any attempt to steer or derail you, to take you and your people off-mission” (p. 40). Christian leaders need to know how this “works” so that they can steel themselves against it.

The Need, Part 2: Knowing How Sabotage Happens

The most common way this occurs is through the corruption of man’s natural desire to be accepted by others (John 12:42–43). What happens is this: “slander, reviling, and maligning exploit this natural desire by using insults and the threat of a bad reputation to manipulate Christians, especially Christian leaders” (p. 40). 

As Rigney explains later in the book, this often happens through other Christians. Let’s say Christian A cares far too much about what the world thinks. He’s friends with Christian B, who isn’t as worldly, but he cares about the approval of Christian A. Then something like the wildly pagan display at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympics comes along, complete with a (now-admitted) mockery of the Last Supper. Yet when you publicly objected, you were met by a chorus of Christian B types, who were “concerned” and “distressed” by either the content or the tone of your remarks. “That wasn’t very winsome of you, brother.” “I thought the kindness of God leads to repentance.” “What ever happened to being known for our love?”—and other similar objections.

The problem is that such Christians don’t realize they’ve been sabotaged in all the ways Rigney warns about. Their highly-tuned concern for what angers unbelievers leads them to pile on Christians the world is already beating down. Everything is driven by the (sometimes unconscious) desire to say, “We’re not like those Christians; we share your disgust at them” (p. 80). For “when winsomeness is elevated as the fundamental value, we become fixated on our reputation. In doing so, we cultivate cultural conditions conducive to manipulation” (p. 80). 

A similar thing happened with Peter in Galatians 2, when he was pressured to distance himself from a group of “undesirable Christians” (in the eyes of the Judaizers). This whole ordeal is the devil’s way of steering the church, and too many leaders are unwittingly giving him the steering wheel. 

The Need, Part 3: Avoiding the Sin of Untethered Empathy

Rigney has addressed this topic a good deal (see here, here, and here), so I won’t repeat all of that here—nor does he repeat all of that in this book. But for the uninitiated, the basic problem is that empathy must be “governed by what is true and what is good” (p. 42), otherwise, the call like the call “to weep with those who weep” will be turned into sympathy for the devil (or at least devilish things).

For Satan would prefer that you empathize with what is false and sinful, to the destruction of both you and the person you are “empathizing” with. As Rigney warns, this is “the means by which the most immature, reactive, and invasive members of a community hijack the agenda and derail the mission. They do this by demanding that the rest of the community adapt to them and their sensitivities” (p. 42). Think of “safe spaces,” a culture of victimhood, the infallibility of “feelings,” and the sheltering of people from maturity instead of helping them to grow into it.

Rigney knows all about Paul’s teaching on the weaker brother, of course, as well as his exhortations for the strong “to bear with the failings of the weak” (Rom. 15:1). That’s not what he is talking about here. Rather, Rigney is talking about the kind of empathizing that enables people in their sin, coddles them in their dodging of responsibility, and brings others into the vortex of the same sort of sins right along with them.

The Remedy for What Ails Us

The straightest path to meeting the needs of the hour is godly leaders with sober minds and steel spines, or as one of my fellow elders put it, “We need to stop flinching and stand flat-footed on the Bible.” After all, one of the defining marks of Jesus’s apostles—the feature that revealed they had been with Jesus—was their boldness (Acts 4:13).

To this end, Rigney lays out several steps that leaders must take if they are to become the kind of men God uses to grow the church and bless the world. They include things like: 

1. Take responsibility for yourself (including your emotions) and refuse to shift the blame, like Adam did in the garden (p. 47, cf. Gal. 6:4–5; Rom. 14:12).

2. Grow in self-awareness so that you may better control your passions with the Spirit’s help (p. 47–48, cf. 1 Tim. 4:16; Gal. 5:24).

3. Calibrate your standards by the word of God so that you define sin as the Bible does, not as the world does (p. 48, cf. Ps. 19:7–11; 2 Tim. 3:16–17).

4. Increase your tolerance for emotional pain and distress, so that you may absorb institution-destabilizing shock while still being able to (rightly) weep with those who weep (p. 48–49, cf. Ps. 16:8; Prov. 18:17).

5. Be willing to be called ugly names, to the extent that you can rejoice when slandered (p. 49, cf. Matt. 5:11–12).

6. Make sure the slanders are actually false, for, as Rigney says, “There’s no virtue in becoming the ungodly thing that your enemies think you already are” (p. 49–50, cf. 1 Pet. 4:14–19).

7. Resolve, when you are slandered, not to respond in the same way (p. 49; cf. 1 Pet. 2:23; Rom. 12:17–19).

8. Root all of your growing “resistance to sabotage” in a genuine and holy desire to please the Lord (p. 50, cf. Col. 1:10; 2 Cor. 5:9).

If the bad news of Rigney’s book is that “cowardice is contagious” (cf. Deut. 20:8), the good news is that courage is contagious, too, and Jesus Christ gives it in abundance to his followers who care about what he says more than what the world thinks.

And if the church were to be filled with these kinds of leaders, two things would happen. First, some will walk away (John 6:66; 2 Tim. 4:10), slandering the church with angry zeal. Second, the church will grow. For those who depart never really belonged (1 John 2:19), while those who remain all know that God is good, his Word is true, and Jesus is Lord. And isn’t that how the world is won?