Two Ways of Assigning Leadership

Common models of leadership appointment and the Adventist model: who does what in an Adventist church, and why the member is missing from the model most of us inherited

Introduction

Models of leadership appointment, the processes by which organizations identify, choose, and position their leaders, are never merely administrative procedures. They embody an organization's deepest convictions about the nature of authority, the purpose of leadership, and the relationship between leaders and those they serve. In the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the model of leadership appointment rests on a theological foundation distinct from the business, political, and academic models that dominate contemporary organizational culture. It is grounded in servant leadership, spiritual gifts, representative governance, and missionary purpose.

This essay compares common models of leadership appointment with the Adventist model, examining their foundations, processes, strengths, and weaknesses. The aim is not to dismiss secular models, many of which make valuable contributions, but to bring out the theological convictions that shape how the Adventist Church understands leadership, and to identify where its practice needs to come into closer alignment with its principles. That last point matters more than it may seem. A change of culture does not show up in statements. It shows up in who does what. Two churches can sign the same mission statement and operate in opposite ways, and the difference becomes visible the moment one asks a simple question of each office: what is this person expected to do?

1. Common models of leadership appointment

In many organizations, leadership follows models shaped by management theory, by structures of political government, or by academic hierarchies. Their concrete forms vary, but they share some characteristic features. Peter Northouse's widely used textbook defines leadership as "a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal," a definition that is useful precisely because it says nothing yet about character, calling, or the purpose of the group.¹

Merit-based selection

In most organizational settings, leadership roles are assigned mainly on the basis of qualifications, professional experience, demonstrated competence, and measurable results. The basic criterion is performance: the leader is the one who has proved able to deliver. The approach has the real advantage of rewarding competence and creating clear paths of advancement. Its limitation is that it judges candidates almost exclusively by functional capacity, what they can do, and gives relatively little weight to the quality of character, the depth of relational integrity, or the capacity for moral and spiritual formation that the New Testament treats as the primary qualification for church leadership (1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9).

Hierarchical structure

Common organizational models usually work within a vertical structure in which decision-making authority is concentrated at the top and passed down through chains of command. The approach produces clarity, efficiency, and speed of decision. It also creates a structural distance between leaders and the communities they serve, and it can produce cultures of compliance rather than cultures of genuine participation and ownership.

Strategic, performance-oriented focus

In business and institutional settings, leadership success is measured mostly by quantifiable results: revenue, growth, market share, efficiency ratios, and other metrics that can be tracked, compared, and reported. Accountability for measurable results has its place. Reducing leadership effectiveness to quantifiable metrics, however, can hide the dimensions that matter most: the formation of character, relational depth, spiritual discernment, and the cultivation of communities that embody values beyond the measurable. Avery Dulles, describing the institutional model of the church, distinguished between accepting the institutional element, which the church cannot do without, and institutionalism, in which the institution becomes primary.²

An individual-centered approach

In many organizational settings, leadership is highly personalized, defined by the vision, charisma, and directive authority of individual leaders who exercise significant influence over the organization's direction and culture. The approach can produce dynamic, visionary leadership. It can also produce authoritarian cultures, institutions dependent on personalities, and the dangerous concentration of authority in individuals who answer to no one.

2. The Adventist model of leadership appointment

The Adventist model is rooted in the biblical principles of servant leadership, spiritual gifts, and collegial governance. It was designed to serve the church's missionary purpose and, at the same time, to protect the church against the concentration of power that the movement's founders, guided by Ellen White's prophetic counsel, identified as one of the greatest threats to ecclesiastical integrity.

Calling and spiritual gifts

In the Adventist model, leadership roles are not assigned primarily by professional credentials or organizational achievement but by spiritual gifts, demonstrated character, and evidence of a divine calling. The theological foundation is the New Testament conviction that the Holy Spirit distributes gifts to every member of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:4–11; Ephesians 4:11–13) and that leadership is one gift among many, given for service and not for status. The church's statement of belief describes the gifts as given "for the common good of the church and of humanity."³

Collegial decision-making

One of the most distinctive features of the Adventist model is its commitment to collegial, committee-based decision-making. Unlike hierarchical models in which authority descends from a single leader, the Adventist representative system distributes decision-making authority across several levels of governance, from the local church board to conference and union committees to the General Conference Executive Committee. The Church Manual describes the church's form of governance as representative, one which "recognizes that authority rests in the membership and is expressed through duly elected representatives at each level of organization."⁴

That system was deliberately designed to prevent the concentration of power in individual hands. Ellen White's intervention at the General Conference session of 1901 was a prophetic call for structural reform.⁵ She later wrote: "God has not set any kingly power in the Seventh-day Adventist Church to control the whole body or to control any branch of the work. He has not provided that the burden of leadership shall rest upon a few men. Responsibilities are distributed among a large number of competent men."⁶ The representative system that came out of that reform, imperfect as its application has been, embodies the conviction that church authority belongs to the community rather than to individuals, and that decisions affecting the community should be reached through collective discernment.

Focus on mission

In the Adventist model, every leadership appointment is oriented to the church's eschatological mission, the proclamation of the three angels' messages and the preparation of a people for Christ's return. Leadership is not an end in itself; it is a means of advancing the mission. Every appointment should therefore be judged not only by the candidate's administrative competence but by his or her capacity to advance the church's missionary purpose. George Knight argues that a movement which loses its apocalyptic vision loses its reason to exist as a distinct body, and that conviction applies to its leadership choices as much as to its preaching.⁷

Accountability to the community

Adventist leaders are not accountable to a superior in a chain of command but to committees and constituency sessions that represent the church community as a whole. That structure of accountability, set out in the Church Manual and in the church's working policy, was designed to ensure transparency, prevent abuse, and keep institutional activity aligned with the church's missionary purpose.

Service-oriented leadership

The Adventist model understands leadership as fundamentally diaconal, an expression of the servant posture of Christ himself. Jesus said, "whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant" (Matthew 20:26). Ellen White, commenting on that scene, observed that in the kingdoms of the world position meant self-aggrandizement, and that Christ set a different standard for his followers.⁸ The principle is constitutive, not merely aspirational. The leader who uses position for personal advantage, political maneuvering, or the accumulation of power has departed from the model Christ established and the Adventist tradition affirms.

3. Who does what: the model we inherited and the model we were

The principles are clear on paper. The test is what each office actually does.

The model that has become common among us distributes the work roughly like this. The deacon cares: helps the needy, maintains the building, collects the offering, opens and closes the church. The elder maintains: organizes the platform, the ceremonies, the schedule, visits the sick, and leads meetings. The pastor strengthens: visits, preaches, plans the work, and builds up the church. And the conference expands: trains, equips, plants churches, and takes the church into mission.

Two things have happened in that arrangement. The member has disappeared from it; he is the audience, not an agent. And expansion has become the task of a distant office. The local church cares for itself, and growth is something the conference does somewhere else.

The model more consistent with the origins of the movement moves every role one level up, and gives each the same final responsibility.

The member supports the work and disciples others. He is the agent, not the public.

The deacon cares for the needy, the building, the offering, and the place of worship, and disciples others.

The elder truly shepherds: visits, leads the platform and the ceremonies, cares for the sick, leads meetings, and disciples others.

The pastor strengthens and expands: trains, equips, plans the work, takes the church into mission, plants churches, and disciples others.

The conference supports: it backs the work, promotes good practices, channels resources, multiplies districts and institutions, and above all removes the obstacles that keep everyone else from making disciples.

That last line is the most exact description I know of what a conference is for, and it inverts the usual administrative logic. The organization does not exist to carry out the mission on behalf of the churches. It exists to remove what prevents the churches from carrying it out. Every time a denominational structure becomes the executor, it puts the members out of work. The counsel Ellen White gave about ministers, that they "should not do the work which belongs to the church," applies with even more force to the offices above them.⁹

The New Testament model can be stated in three lines. The function of the church is to prepare the believer for ministry. The function of the member is to carry out the ministry. The function of leaders is to guide and equip for the ministry. Paul says it in one phrase: Christ gave leaders "for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry" (Ephesians 4:12).

4. Comparative analysis

The two models can be set side by side on six dimensions.

Basis of selection. Common models give priority to qualifications and performance metrics. The Adventist model gives priority to spiritual gifts, divine calling, and demonstrated character, while recognizing competence as a legitimate secondary criterion.

Decision process. Common models tend toward vertical structures. The Adventist model uses collegial processes that distribute authority and ensure broad representation.

Primary focus. Common models are oriented to organizational goals and efficiency. The Adventist model is oriented to the fulfillment of the mission and the spiritual growth of members and communities.

Accountability. Common models emphasize individual accountability to superiors. The Adventist model emphasizes collective accountability to committees and constituencies.

Leadership style. Common models tend toward directive, hierarchical leadership. The Adventist model affirms servant leadership and collaboration as the normative posture.

Measures of success. Common models measure success by quantifiable results. The Adventist model, without discarding quantitative data, gives priority to spiritual and missionary outcomes that are hard to measure: the transformation of character, the depth of discipleship, the multiplication of communities.

5. Strengths and weaknesses

Common models

The strengths of common models include efficiency, clarity of authority, and a focus on measurable goals that allows objective evaluation. Their weaknesses include the risk of disconnection between leaders and the grassroots, the reduction of leadership to functional competence, and the possibility of authoritarian cultures that smother participation and creativity.

The Adventist model

The strengths of the Adventist model include its theological grounding in servant leadership, its structure of collegial governance, its missionary orientation, and its safeguards against the concentration of power. Its weaknesses include slow decision-making when committees become cumbersome, diffuse accountability when responsibility is spread too thin, and the danger that the collegial process is captured by political dynamics that reproduce, in ecclesiastical form, the very structures of power the system was meant to prevent.

George Knight has been one of the most candid voices on this point. Surveying Adventist organization at the beginning of the twenty-first century, he asked whether the church's structure remains "missiologically viable," and warned that "too much organization could actually frustrate the mission of the church."¹⁰ The danger is not unique to the Adventist model. But the church's theological commitment to prophetic self-criticism, its willingness to evaluate its own structures in the light of its founding vision, provides the resource for continuing reform.

An objection: does this not undermine the representative system?

A reader committed to Adventist governance may object that the redistribution described in section 3 blurs lines the church has deliberately drawn. Elders, deacons, pastors, and conferences have defined roles in the Church Manual and in policy. To speak of the conference as a remover of obstacles, and of every office as a discipling office, might sound like a flattening of structure, the kind of anti-institutional rhetoric the Adventist pioneers rejected when they organized in the 1860s.

The objection is right to defend the structure, and wrong to see this model as an attack on it. Nothing here changes who is elected, who is ordained, who votes, or who is accountable to whom. It changes what each office is for. The representative system was itself created for mission. Knight, tracing the organization of the 1860s, shows that its pressures were practical and missionary: how to hold property, pay and assign preachers, and carry a growing work, which is why he titles that stage of the story "organizing for mission and growth."¹¹ A conference that removes obstacles is not a weaker conference. It is a conference doing what organization was meant to do. The flattening happens in the other model, where the member has no role at all.

The budget tells the truth

There is a budgetary consequence, and it can be checked. "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21). When the pastor is the caretaker, the money goes to programs and weeks of preaching. When the pastor is the trainer, the money goes to equipping people who go out, preach, serve, and bear witness. One only has to look at last year's spreadsheet to know which model a church has actually adopted, whatever its minutes say.

Conclusion

The Adventist model of leadership appointment reflects the church's deepest convictions about the nature of authority, the purpose of leadership, and the primacy of mission. It contrasts sharply with the hierarchical and merit-based models that dominate secular organizational culture, and its emphasis on spiritual calling, collegial governance, servant leadership, and collective accountability is meant to keep leadership appointments oriented to the church's eschatological mission rather than to the perpetuation of institutional power.

The differences between the models are not merely organizational. They are theological. They reflect different answers to the question of what leadership is for. The Adventist answer, that leadership exists to serve God's redemptive mission and to equip his people for the work of the kingdom, is rooted in Scripture and confirmed by prophetic counsel. Whether it is also confirmed in practice is a question each church can answer for itself.

A church board can test itself by writing the two models of section 3 side by side and marking, for each office, which description matches what that office actually spent its time on in the past twelve months. The column where the member appears, or does not, is the diagnosis.

---

Notes

1. Peter G. Northouse, Leadership: Theory and Practice, 7th ed. (SAGE, 2016), 6.

2. Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, expanded ed. (Image/Doubleday, 2002), chap. 2, "The Church as Institution."

3. General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual, 2022 ed., Fundamental Belief 17, "Spiritual Gifts and Ministries," 173–74.

4. Church Manual, 2022 ed., 28–29.

5. Richard W. Schwarz and Floyd Greenleaf, Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, rev. ed. (Pacific Press, 2000), 195–96.

6. Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 8 (Pacific Press, 1904), 236.

7. George R. Knight, The Apocalyptic Vision and the Neutering of Adventism (Review and Herald, 2008), chaps. 1–2.

8. Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Pacific Press, 1898), 550.

9. Ellen G. White, Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists (Imprimerie Polyglotte, 1886), 291.

10. George R. Knight, Organizing for Mission and Growth: The Development of Adventist Church Structure (Review and Herald, 2006), chap. 7, "Organization Is the Answer."

11. Knight, Organizing for Mission and Growth, chaps. 2–3.

Bibliography

Dulles, Avery. Models of the Church. Expanded ed. Image/Doubleday, 2002.

General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual. 2022 ed.

Knight, George R. The Apocalyptic Vision and the Neutering of Adventism. Review and Herald, 2008.

———. Organizing for Mission and Growth: The Development of Adventist Church Structure. Review and Herald, 2006.

Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. 7th ed. SAGE, 2016.

Schwarz, Richard W., and Floyd Greenleaf. Light Bearers: A History of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Rev. ed. Pacific Press, 2000.

White, Ellen G. The Desire of Ages. Pacific Press, 1898.

———. Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists. Imprimerie Polyglotte, 1886.

———. Testimonies for the Church. Vol. 8. Pacific Press, 1904.