“…Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.”
-Ephesians 5:23
Head coach is the most crucial position for any sports team. A coach establishes the culture, develops the strategy, and unifies the players to perform their best as a cohesive unit. These leaders are vital to how members of the team relate to one another, how they prepare for challenges, and how they play the game. The head coach designs the playbook—the tactics and methods that ensure players on the field are all on the same page. Without the playbook, even a team of individually talented athletes would be unable to prevail over a well-coordinated opponent. A great coach matches each player to the position for which he or she is best suited and equips each of them by all means possible. The goal? To create a team that is stronger than its individual parts. A football roster full of quarterbacks or a base-ball dugout stacked with only pitchers would not be a winning formula.
Like sports teams, every family, every non-profit organization and business, every city, state, and nation have a head. You can discover who that person is in any relational system when a question comes up, a decision needs to be made, or people need cues for how to react in times of uncertainty. In these moments, all one has to do is watch the room. The head of the organization (either formally or informally) is the person to whom everyone instinctively looks.
The head of the church is not a pastor or the board of elders or the staff or volunteers. While these leaders are important and vital to the life of the church, they have delegated authority given to them as they seek to follow the true Leader of the Church. Jesus has been and will always be THE Head of the Church.
As the Head of the Church, Jesus establishes the culture of His Church. Through the incarnation, Christ embodied a life lived in perfect relationship with God. His prayerful, faithful, grace-filled, Spirit-led, and loving life provides the mold into which a Christian life is to be pressed and formed.
During the final night that Jesus spent with His disciples, He told them, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). In other words, when people see Christians shaped by the life and love of Christ, they will recognize the Head of the Church by us, the Body of Christ.
Jesus’ leadership also provides the playbook that keeps Christians aligned with His play-calling on the (mission) field. Do you ever find yourself in need of direction or guidance for important decisions? Do you ever experience uncertainty? Our instinct as Christians is to look to Jesus. The Scriptures uniquely bear witness to Jesus and provide us with God’s playbook for living. This is one of the reasons that First Church is calling 2021, The Year of the New Testament. More than any other book, the New Testament guides and aligns us with God’s direction. When all Christians know the playbook and live by it, we are a well-coordinated, in sync body, and this makes us a positive witness to the world.
Finally, Christ as Head of the Church means that each of us is individually selected for a particular position on God’s team. Each of us has different gifts and talents, but we are unified and aligned by God’s Spirit (Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12). Not everyone is a pastor, not everyone is a teacher, not everyone is called to foreign missions, but each of us is called to faithfully use the unique gifts and skills that God has bestowed on us. Each person in the church is part of the body, has a unique and important role, and is necessary for the body to be whole. The body needs all members to be working under the direction of the Head to accomplish God’s purposes.
Our Lord Jesus provides the culture and the playbook, and He assembles the team. As Christians, we are part of something bigger than ourselves. God alone can take the broken and flawed individuals that we all are and form us into a team that is greater than the sum of our individual parts. Like all great coaches, Jesus spurs us on, challenges us to be better, and wants us to become the best we can possibly be. That is a Head I want to follow. How about you?
by Pastor Brad Rogers
