Jesus as a failed leader

I don't often do the meme thing and blog about other blogs, but Ruth Tucker has a nice post recently about Jesus as a Failed Leader. That's not to say that Jesus failed at anything (many of the blog comments miss the point), but rather that according to 20th/21st century ideas of what makes a good leader, Jesus is a failure.

It seems to point to something deeper: is the very idea of "leadership" (at least, as conceived in our society) at odds with the new testament? As I remarked in my comment on Ruth's blog, I’m not competent to analyse the Greek NT, but in translation (TNIV), there are almost no “leaders” in the church in the NT: there are lots of “Jewish Leaders”, one reference to leaders of the Church in Jerusalem (Gal 2:2), and several references to leaders in Hebrews (interesting; c.f. those of the Jewish kind).

And that’s it.

Reference was made to 1 Timothy 3. I don’t know what the Greek of the time meant by episcopos, but the translation as “overseer” doesn’t immediately imply “leader” to me.

[I acknowledge the weakness of arguing this from a translation, not from the original text. But hey, this is a blog, not a theology essay. I'm also aware of a peculiar apparent (and perhaps actual) fallacy in my first paragraph. ]

I guess I had this in the back of my mind all along (hence my ambivalence about a certain Senior Pastor from Seattle), but Ruth Tucker's blog seems to put it into words nicely.