What makes this language funny is the way “leader” and “leading” keep surfacing (providentially they avoided the dreaded “servant-leader” construction). It is as if putting the word “leader” before “church” automatically makes it so, as if the PCA, with roughly 300,000 members, is on the precipice of becoming one of the most visible and highly respected denominations. As the NTJ has remarked in the past, this kind of rhetoric is a form of Presbyterian self-delusion, one to which the much smaller Orthodox Presbyterian Church (25,000) might be prey if she ever broke six figures. It is so because, to use one example, the PCA is 100,000 members smaller than the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a church that most inhabitants of the United States have never heard of.

Truly innovative leadership development might address the problem of how few Presbyterians there are in the United States compared to Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostals, and might involve adopting a strategy for a limited range of targets....