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Leadership: Empowerment or Subordination?

Leadership: Empowerment or Subordination?

Last updated on: October 30, 2026 at 9:49 am by Herb Montgomery

Leadership: Empowerment or Subordination? 2026-10-30T09:49:19-04:00 Herb Montgomery

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This criticism has profound implications right now. Religious institutions and people can be more concerned with appearing righteous than with confronting the conditions that produce poverty, inequality, and exclusion. Churches may celebrate their generosity while remaining silent about economic systems that exploit workers. Religious leaders may preach love while condemning marginalized communities or defending policies that deprive vulnerable people of safety and dignity. And communities may display symbols of faith while refusing to challenge the injustices happening in their own neighborhoods. Jesus invites us to ask whether our religious practices are helping people flourish or merely helping us maintain a respectable public image.

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This is Part 2 of the series When Leadership Becomes Self Serving

(Read this series from its beginning here.)

Jesus’ criticism of leaders’ love for honor and respect exposes another dimension of injustice: the human tendency to organize society around status and privilege. In Jesus’ time, the most important seats at banquets and in synagogues were more than comfortable places to sit. They communicated who mattered, whose voices deserved attention, and who occupied the highest positions in the social order. Such arrangements reinforced distinctions between the honored and the overlooked, the powerful and the powerless.

Here, Jesus challenges systems that assign human worth according to wealth, influence, education, religious/political authority, or social standing. When leaders become preoccupied with protecting their positions, they can lose sight of the people their leadership should serve. Those who are poor, excluded, or marginalized often pay the price when institutions prioritize the preservation of privilege over the pursuit of justice.

Jesus’ words also challenge our motivations for doing good. Acts of charity, advocacy, and service can become opportunities to build reputations rather than expressions of genuine solidarity. The question is not whether our work is visible, but whether recognition has become more important to us than the people we claim to serve. Justice requires us to listen to marginalized communities, share power, confront harmful systems, and pursue meaningful change even when doing so brings neither applause nor public approval.

Ultimately, our story this week calls for a kind of Jesus-following that is measured not by the size of its symbols, the prominence of its leaders, or the respectability of its public image, but by the quality of its relationships and its commitment to human flourishing. Authentic leadership does not seek the highest seat at the table for its own sake but works to ensure that everyone has a place at the table. Leadership can make it possible to expand options for others. It does not demand admiration from the community; it listens to the community, especially those whose voices have been silenced.

The call, then, is to stop elevating ourselves and start embodying an ethic that lifts others. When we become more concerned with recognition than liberation from oppression, more invested in prestige than compassion, and more protective of privilege than committed to justice, we have lost sight of the very transformation Jesus calls us to pursue. True Jesus-following is not a performance for the powerful to applaud. It is a commitment to building a world where dignity, justice, and belonging are available to everyone, a world that is a safe, compassionate, just home for all.

Lastly in our reading this week, Jesus challenges the titles, privileges, and hierarchies that distinguish religious leaders from the people they are called to serve. He declares, “You are not to be called ‘rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers.” He continues, “Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.” Jesus concludes with a radical reversal of conventional power: “The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

These words are more than instructions about religious vocabulary. They challenge the social arrangements that allow some people to claim superior authority, status, and privilege over others in the name of God.

In the world of Matthew’s Gospel, titles such as rabbi, father, and teacher could communicate honor, authority, and social standing. Religious leaders occupied influential positions in communities shaped by religious tradition, economic inequality, and Roman imperial rule. Jesus criticizes leaders who enjoy public recognition and elevated status while imposing burdens on others. His concern is not simply that they receive honor, but that their honor becomes a means of reinforcing unequal relationships. When religious authority elevates its possessors above the community, it risks contradicting the very teachings it claims to represent.

Jesus’ prohibition against calling anyone “father” must be understood within this larger critique. In the ancient world, fatherhood carried associations with household authority, inheritance, social identity, and patriarchal power. A father was not merely a biological parent but could also represent the authority of the household. By reserving ultimate fatherhood for God, Jesus challenges the assumption that human beings could occupy unquestionable positions of spiritual superiority. His declaration that his followers are “all brothers” (blinkered as that label is in relation to women) imagines a community in which belonging to God establishes a shared dignity that no religious title can override.

Yet Christianity eventually developed the practice of addressing priests as “father.” Early Christian communities had various ways of describing spiritual leadership, and the New Testament itself occasionally uses familial language for spiritual relationships. Paul, for example, refers to himself as father to communities he has nurtured in faith (1 Corinthians 4:15). Over subsequent centuries, the language of spiritual fatherhood became increasingly established in Christian monasticism and ecclesiastical life. Monastic spiritual guides were addressed as fathers, and the practice eventually became especially prominent among Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Today, the title “father” remains customary in many Catholic, Orthodox, and some Anglican traditions, although its use varies.

This history presents an important interpretive question: Does Jesus prohibit every use of these titles, or does he instead challenge the hierarchical status and unquestioned authority that titles can reinforce? Christians disagree. Some understand Jesus’ words as a direct prohibition against all religious honorifics. Others interpret them as warning against treating any human leader as the ultimate spiritual authority in God’s place.

From a justice perspective, the essential question is whether religious leadership empowers people or subordinates them. A title becomes problematic when it shields leaders from accountability, discourages questions, silences marginalized voices, or allows spiritual authority to be used for exploitation. No title, tradition, or institution should place its representatives beyond criticism and accountability when their actions harm others.

Jesus offers a radically different definition of greatness: service rather than superiority, humility rather than prestige, and solidarity rather than domination. Religious leaders are not called to stand above the community but to participate in its shared work of healing, liberation, and justice. Their authority should be measured not by the honor they receive but by the burdens they help remove and the dignity they help restore.

Ultimately, Jesus’ teaching invites Christianity to examine not merely what it calls its leaders but how those leaders exercise power. If God alone is the ultimate spiritual authority, no human being should use religious status to claim unquestionable control over another. The test of spiritual greatness is not how many people call us “father,” “teacher,” or “leader,” but whether our lives help create a community where everyone is treated with dignity, no one is excluded from belonging, and those who have been burdened by power are finally able to flourish.

Begin each day being inspired toward love, compassion, justice and action. Free.

General Christian

Politics and Religion

About Herb Montgomery

Herb Montgomery, director of Renewed Heart Ministries, is an author and adult religious re-educator. For over twenty years, Herb and his wife, Crystal, have shared Jesus’ teachings with others. Herb’s presentations are transparent, relevant, relationally responsible, and intellectually honest. He has an unusual gift for making complex theological and sociological concepts accessible for the people he speaks to. He especially enjoys sharing with groups possessing wide and diverse “belief” spectrums yet with a common focus on compassion and justice. Herb resides in West Virginia with Crystal and their three children, Alexis, Emarya, and Christian. You can read more about the author here.

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October 29, 2026

When Leaders Don't Practice What They Preach

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