What can Protestant leaders learn from Pope Francis?
He didn't lead our churches, but his legacy can help us frame how we might do so.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio died like a pope. After declaring the resurrection of Jesus and greeting crowds in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday, he went home to die.
Not sure there’s a better way to go out as the Bishop of Rome.
More striking than how Pope Francis died was how he lived. Stories abound about the “people’s pope” who took the bus, stayed in humble quarters instead of the royal residences, and washed the feet of the poor. We don’t need another Substack post about this. His life was remarkable.
What I’ve been reflecting on since Monday is Pope Francis as a leader. I’ve been thinking and writing about him since his election twelve years ago, when I began seeing him as a new kind of leader of which the world was in desperate need. Since then, I’ve watched Francis a lot and read a ton about him.1 I just love reading about him, and his work on climate change set the stage for my second book, Less of More: Pursuing Spiritual Abundance in a World of Never Enough. That book just does not exist without the ministry of Pope Francis. And still, what has fascinated me most about his life has been his leadership.
We are in a leadership crisis—both in the church and out of the church. Particularly, the Protestant Evangelical movement of the last 100 years in America is wrought with abusive, celebrity-obsessed, image-managing hot shots who can hype up a crowd but are deeply uninterested in shepherding a flock. But it’s the same on Wall Street, or in education, politics, medicine, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, law enforcement, non-profit leadership, content creation, tech, multi-level marketing, financial management, and any other field on the face of this earth. This should not be an offensive or surprising sentence. Our world needs leadership.
And while the more anarchist among us will call for no leadership and a flattened, deconstructed institutional landscape, I am of the persuasion that the answer to poor leadership is not no leadership, but better leadership. And I think Francis is one of our best global examples of what I mean by this. He was an extraordinary leader.
How did the pope lead and what might Protestants take from it? Here are five leadership lessons from Francis that I’ve been thinking about since Monday:
1. Silence
Francis rarely replied to his critics. When he did, he said things like “I don’t lose sleep over it,” and that was it. Even in the conservative backlash to him early in his pontificate, he used silence as a tactic. After receiving the famous Amoris Laetitia, a clergy letter expressing grave concern over Francis’ theology and practice, Francis simply never replied to it.
Think about this. A large number of influential clergy write to you, criticize you, and leverage multiple public statements after the letter for a reply…and you never say a word. Francis just let the criticism have its moment, and his lack of response was the response, in the end.
I’ve been thinking a lot about criticism lately. We are in a time of an over-abundance of those claiming they are helping us “discern” the church, false teaching, and leadership. A small portion is good and helpful. Mostly it’s gossip. And a lot of it is worse—it’s slander.
“Do not answer a fool according to his folly,” Proverbs warns us, “or you yourself will be just like him” (Proverbs 26:4). The New Testament is rife with warnings about avoiding all kinds of conversation. Christians are not always supposed to “weigh in.”
Evangelicals love to “weigh in” and “share their thoughts.” We like to do “reaction” videos or “responses” to comments made by other pastors. When I see this or participate in it myself, I tend to walk away with a similar conclusion: no one cares. Sure, the person you’re “responding to” may respond back, but I often find pastors talking about things only pastors care about, and more often get upset at things only because they know it’ll signal moral virtue to another pastor they want to be in company with. It is very dumb and usually a waste of time.
2. Offending both liberals and conservatives
For the progressives, Francis never delivered on the revolution they thought he might bring to Rome. For the conservatives, Francis was never clear enough on doctrine and not passionate enough about the holiness of the Latin Mass. And this is just the Catholic stuff. Francis was even more divisive in his political comments, denouncing both Biden and Trump on the Israel-Gaza conflict, just to name one of his many addresses.
One thing I learned from Francis was his absolute disgust for ideologically bound thinking, which ended up inspiring my most recent book (yes, if you’re keeping count, my last two books have some serious Francis influence). He hated what he called a faith that had “a certain legalism, which can be ideological….It’s either black or white [to them], even if in the flow of life you have to discern.”
Spoken like a true Jesuit.
He was often criticized for being ambiguous, but that’s the same thing as being accused of being a Jesuit. They can never really be pinned down. Their strong doctrinal commitments are few, it often seems, because they are so obsessed with the mission of the church. To care for the flock, care for the poor, and reach the lost is the obsession of Francis. That’s what makes him a Jesuit. And that’s what leads me to the next lesson I got from him.
3. A Missional, Pastoral Theology
Before he was the Pope, the then Cardinal Bergoglio gave a brief address to his fellow Cardinals at the 2013 Conclave. Many Cardinals do this. He wrote his notes on a scratch piece of paper, emphasizing the “theological narcissism” and “self-referential” tendencies that had invaded the church. The Catholic Church had become insular, obsolete as it drifted from its mission: to serve and reach the world. He was right.
He saw a Church that had abandoned people. “The church is called to go outside of itself and go to the peripheries, not just geographic but also the existential peripheries…Those of the mystery of sin, of pain, injustice, ignorance, spiritual privation, thoughts and complete misery.”
This is the kind of talk that gets you elected pope. It’s also the kind of talk that gets you hated by two groups that are bound more by political ideology than missional, pastoral theology.
I think this is one of his aspects of leadership that is both good and bad. Nevertheless, it can be learned from. On the one hand, his lack of doctrinal clarity led to confusion, particularly amongst the Catholic LGBTQ+ community. His disinterest in sparring with his theological enemies sometimes worked, and sometimes didn’t.
But, as I said, this is his Jesuit style of theological leadership, something Evangelicals can take in and consider. Jesuits practice “casuistry,” a line of theological ethics that “descends into the particulars” of any given situation. They hesitate to make large, sweeping dogmatic statements on “abortion” and much more interested in sitting with the pregnant woman to help her discern what’s best. That works great in that scenario, but it’s weak and hurtful when we’re talking about if divorced Catholics can receive the Eucharist or if gay people can become priests. Not everything can be a theological statement or paper, but also a lot can…and should. Clarity, after all, is kind.
We need to figure out a way of communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ that is free from political ideology. I want to give my life towards this, among other things. Francis’ missional and pastoral edge helped give moral clarity to politically charged “issues.” It also reminded us that all theology is personal. Our work in the next generation, now that Francis has died, is to develop language that is clear, compelling, convicting, and kind…which is to say we need to learn to speak the truth. Truth will always offend you—this is something a Democrat is repulsed by. And truth will always liberate you—which is something a Republican cannot stomach. Sounds like good news to me.
4. The long game of the church
This leads me to the other thing I watched with Francis. He seemed to have an understanding of the long road of the Church. Yes, the Catholic Church, but also the global ecumenical movement. He appointed 4/5s of the current Cardinals that are about to Conclave in about a week. Many of his appointments were from the global south, where Christianity is exploding in record numbers—both Protestant and Catholic alike.
Francis seemed to be wise enough to know his moment. He lived the history being the first Jesuit Pope and the first from Latin America. But he also knew he was never going to see a Black Pope or an Asian Pope. He could, however, set up the Church in that direction.
I think that’s the same approach with his doctrinal work around the climate and the ordination of women. He was smart enough to know he wasn’t going to be the one to change the Church’s view on women, much to the disappointment of progressive Catholics. But he knew he could make comments, put together Synods, draft documents, that could inch the church forward a bit. If the days of massive Catholic Church reform really come in the next 200 years, the history books will put the pontificate of Francis as chapter 1.
Evangelicals—especially pastors—are a very “right now” bunch. We like to plant churches, market to the moment, reach “the next generation” as we ignore the elderly, and stockpile language that works for this year’s book sales and viral videos. Count the baptized and neglect the formation of them. We rarely consider what we’re leaving behind. Our Reformation tendencies push us to change the church now instead of patiently wait for its ferment.
Will our church plants last for ten years, let alone 200? Our lack of denominational affiliation makes many evangelical churches far more susceptible to complete disappearance than historical significance. In a Protestant culture of “five year vision strategies” and capital campaigns that “envision the next 10 years as a church,” I’ve been challenged by Francis. His vision has caused me to think about our local church not just in the next 300 days, but in the next in 300 years.
5. Celibacy
I think people forget that Francis never married, never had children, and, as far as we know, never had what we Americans prize and call “a sex life.” Perhaps this is a surprising way to end, but I think it matters that the most compelling moral voice of the last 25 years has been a celibate man from Argentina.
In America, we are told that if we are not able to live the sexual life we desire, we will not have a life worth living. We think if you don’t have a sex life, you don’t have a life. This is not only hurtful and damaging to everyone from the religious single to the young to the elderly to the disabled—it’s also profoundly stupid. Life is meaningful because God gives it meaning, not because we do. Therefore, not living the sexual life we desire, but living the one God desires, can still saturate our existence with profound purpose. Just look at Francis.
But Protestant Evangelical Christians capitulate to this foolishness. If your pastor is not married, that’s weird, we think. If we call single folks who are outside of an orthodox Christian vision of marriage between one man and one women…that’s a lot. Too much. We can’t do that!
Maybe it’s because I grew up surrounded by a bunch of happy celibate Jesuits, but I would like to see celibacy normalized in Evangelical circles, especially among pastors. The celibate vision of life is a beautiful vision. I’m not saying it’s easy—most who live it will tell you flatly of its challenges. But Francis’ celibate life should be a witness to us that leadership is not limited to the married. And if it is, we are caving to the very culture that centralizes sexual experience as the only way to life a real life.
As Francis would say: God have mercy; Christ have mercy.
My favorite biography is from Austin Ivereigh and is called The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope and my favorite work of Francis’ own writing is either LAUDATO SI’ and Let Us Dream.
Beautiful 👏🏾
Wow! Well stated summary of Pope Francis.