Chapter One

Glance through today's newspaper and chances are good you will find another story of leadership breakdown. In my native state of Texas, thousands of Enron Corporation employees face financial ruin as a result of poor-even corrupt-leadership. They trusted their leaders to properly steward the money they had invested with their employer for retirement, literally banking on their leaders. However, even as one popular financial news magazine named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" several years in a row, executives and accountants were busy using "creative accounting" tricks to inflate the company's assets while shifting debts to offshore subsidiaries. When the financial shell game was over, Enron's loyal employees came out the losers. Bottom line: Enron's failure was the result of a complete breakdown in leadership.

A similar scene exists today in many churches, Christian organizations, and educational institutions. Although things may appear smooth and stable on the surface, beneath the thin veneer it is not unusual to find internal strife or organizational confusion. Too often the standards of ethics and practice that define secular money-and-power organizations are cleverly sanctified and adapted to the spiritual realm. It's always a bad fit, and never something that should characterize the Christian leader, regardless of what kind of enterprise he or she leads.

So much of our personal frustration in daily living comes as a direct result of faulty leadership-personality conflicts, communication breakdowns, incompetence, power struggles, poor management of time an