It's been a while - I'm glad to be back in a headspace to write for my personal page again. Welcome here, and I hope this piece gets you thinking and praying =)
Around this time last year I watched the show ‘House of David’, and as I did I had a profound realisation (revelation… really… thank you Holy Spirit).
The realisation was this….
We are not much different to the Israelites from thousands of years ago
We too have a tendency to want a king.
Here’s the backdrop.
In 1 Samuel chapter 8 it records the elders of Israel going to the Prophet Samuel saying…
“Look, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint us a king to judge us [and rule over us] like all the other nations.” (verse 4)
It says that Samuel was displeased with this request and prayed to the Lord about it, and the Lord responded with this:
“Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being King over them. (verse 7)
It also records in verse 9 that the Lord says “only solemnly warn them and tell them the ways of the king who will reign over them.” It then continues to paint a picture of what earthly kingship would produce - worth the read!.
This is a BIG moment in Israelite, and thus, Christian history. And it is a major theological turning point. It marks the moment where there is a shift from theocratic identity (God as king and leader) toward monarchy (a system where one human king or queen rules over a nation), eventually leading to kings like Saul and David in the Bible.
What I realised as I watched the show's portrayal of this moment is that God’s people still have this same lean and desire.
Today, though....
we make pastors kings.
I know that sounds brutal. I was once a pastor and I know that pastors reading this may get offended. But hear me out and read to the end.
Until this point in Israel’s history, as the people of God, they had a decentralised, multi-layered structure of leadership and functioning that looked very different from a monarchy.
They had prophets (God’s voice to the people - see Deut 18:18–19; 1 Sam 3:20), they had Priests (religious and sacrificial leadership - see Exod 28; Lev 1–9), they had Elders and tribal leadership (local governance - see Exod 18:21–26; Deut 1:13–15).
In the typical church model of today, the structure and culture we see can reflect more of a monarchy than a community living under the kingship of God like the picture just painted. I said CAN… not always.
The risk is that the pastor of the church becomes the sole leader that has sole control of the community, functioning like a king where authority, influence, and direction are concentrated in the one central figure.
Problems arise as Christians can drift toward placing disproportionate weight on a pastor’s personality, charisma, or authority, rather than on God. Leadership becomes embodied in a person rather than rooted in God’s presence and Word.
This can often parallel what we see happened with the Israelites - looking to a human fo kingship rather that God.
Christian, in your heart of hearts, don’t make your pastor your king. There is one King, His name is Jesus.
There are 2 major things that strike me from the story recorded in 1 Samuel 8 that I want to unpack:
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‘Appoint us a king’
This is a very human desire (which you’ll see later in this writing again). We naturally want a king, especially a visible, human one. It can feel easier to place trust in someone we can see, hear, and follow than in an unseen God who requires ongoing faith, discernment, and personal responsibility. A human “king” gives clarity, direction, and a sense of security, and it relieves us of the weight of having to wrestle constantly with dependence on God and shared responsibility within a community. This is why the desire in 1 Samuel 8 is so powerful: it is not just political, but deeply human… Which is why it was familiar to me all these years after that historical moment happened.
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“like all the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5).
Israel explicitly says they want to be “like all the other nations”. And we are no different today, whether we like it or not. Our humanness leans and longs for commonality with those around us even though consistently in both the Old Testament and New Testament God’s people are asked to operate differently (see Exodus 16-17; Judges 21:25; Romans 12:2; John 17:14-16) .
For example, the temptation today can be for churches to adopt corporate, celebrity, or influencer models of leadership which are “like all the other nations”. This can subtly reshape pastors into CEO-like or celebrity figures, kings, if you will, rather than shepherds.
This isn’t all on pastor’s though, a lot of this culture can be perpetuated by the Christian community putting pastors on a pedestal. Over time, this can create a feedback loop where pastoral authority is elevated, questioned less, and centralised not only because leaders claim it, but because people encourage it, prefer or expect it.
In this sense, the culture of “pastor as king” is often co-created. It is not only produced by leaders, it is often sustained by a congregation that prefers centralised spiritual authority over shared responsibility. On a personal level, there can be an over-reliance on that one pastor to hear God for us and everyone else, to make major decisions for not only us as individuals but for the community and to carry the spiritual responsibility for the whole community. This risks outsourcing our personal discipleship to Jesus and discernment.
BIG SIDE NOTE:
Don’t fill in the gaps here and make up a narrative of the things I’m NOT saying. I am NOT saying that there shouldn’t be functions or structures in a church body or gathering. What I AM saying is that perhaps this model we have inherited places too much weight on the one person in the church we call ‘pastor’ and have maybe unintentionally even made them a king of the people. In some circles, they are indeed even treated like kings.
It is obviously important not to swing too far the other way. Scripture still affirms leadership, authority and honor of elders in the church (read Eph. 4:11-12; 1 Tim. 3:1-7; Hebrews 13:17; 1 Thess. 5:12-13, 18). The issue isn’t having leaders, it’s how they’re positioned, perceived and treated.
Moving right along…
Fast forward with me to one morning in recent weeks where I was reading 1 Corinthians chapter 3, when I had somewhat of the same realisation…
We are also not all that different from the people of God in the New Testament!
In this chapter Paul is rebuking the Corinthians for their spiritual immaturity and divisions, reminding them that leaders are merely servants, and that God is the true source of growth, Christ of which is the foundation of it all.
In verse 4 and 5 Paul says:
For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each
Then in verse 21 he says
So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.
2 things stand out to me here, also:
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“are you not being merely human?”
Paul saying this seems to the fact that when we seek to follow and identify with a person rather than Christ, that this is HUMAN ambition not spiritual. These Corinthians were literally arguing about which leader was their leader - committing themself to the kingship of a person rather than Jesus. Sound familiar?
One scholar (Anthony C. Thiselton) notes that the word ‘boast’ in this passage specifically reflects status-seeking behaviour, likely influenced by Greco-Roman patronage culture. Meaning that in aligning with Paul, Apollos, or Cephas in those times functioned more like social positioning, not just theological preference. And that, my friends, is a significant message to us today too.
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“For all things are yours”
Paul says at the end of the chapter “for all things are yours”. This seemed like a really odd ending to the chapter for me in this instance of reading it and I had to read a few commentaries, referring to the original Greek text also in order to really grasp what Paul was saying. And I’m so glad I did because what came of it was so profound and only emphasised and confirmed what the Lord had showed me that night I was watching House of David.
When Paul says, ‘all these things are yours’, one of those things he is referring to is the Christian leaders that the Corinthians were identifying themselves with. This is profound, stick with me here. Remember earlier in the chapter Paul says that he and Apollos are only “Servants through whom you believed” (verse 5)? He is re-emphasising that exact point, he’s telling the Corinthian people, hey, these leaders, you don’t exist for them, they exist for you (see Eph. 4:11-12). They are framed as literally being their servants. This completely flips the script in their minds from this status seeking obsession of ‘belonging’ to one of these leaders as if they are the servant, to, actually, that leader you have on a pedestal and seeking social status as a result of being tied to, yeah, they are actually yours, they are commissioned by God to be your servant! How’s that for an upside down kingdom?
There is therefore a radical reversal of status. Where the Corinthians sought status through leaders, Paul says: you already possess everything in Christ and we are given to you by Christ as servants. This emphasises that pastors and church leaders are resources for the church, not objects for allegiance. It also reveals that the solution to division is not better organisation but rightly ordered belonging. This completely dismantles any “pastor-as-king” model.
I’ll end with this….
I personally believe that there is an undercurrent of a major wave forming that is a call to the Body of Christ to move away from a monarchy mentality to an outworking and organisation of the people of God based on spiritual gifts and biblical functions like in the times before Israel pleaded for a mortal king and like that of what we observe in the New Testament church.
The responsibility of this culture shift is on church leaders and congregants alike. Leaders must deny the temptation to act as a king (or CEO, or celebrity!) of their congregation and to adopt Christ’s mind for understanding this unique position of servanthood that they have in the Body of Christ - whether that is as an apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd (pastor) or teacher) or as an elder, deacon etc (1 Peter 5:2-3; Mark 10:42-45; Hebrews 12:17; 1 Corinthians 3:5). For the rest of us, we must in our hearts resist the urge to desire a moral king, making our pastor just that. King treatment is reserved for the One true King. AND, we are to realise that we are ALL members of the one body, all of which have different functions (Rom. 12:4-5), and none of which are more important than the other (1 Cor. 12:4-27). We each have our work to do to build the church (Eph. 4:16). Together, and individually, we are a holy temple of God (Eph. 2:19-22), ‘living stones’, a ‘holy priesthood’ (1 Pet. 2:4-5).
Some food for thought... and prayer.
