President's Blog

Authoritarian leadership, bullies on social media, and power-hungry politicians are on the rise.

Fellowship National Conference 2025 is Coming!

I’ve invited Dr. Raymond Chiu, Assistant Professor of Business at Redeemer University, Ancaster, ON and member of North York Chinese Baptist in Toronto, to host a workshop at FNC 2025 entitled “Faithful Leadership in an Age of Authoritarianism”. He’ll address the issue of bullies that enter politics and even our churches, and the growing concern with Christians’ hearts being captured by and aligned to the aggressive nature of these leaders. Often the witness of The Church becomes compromised.

Dr. Chiu starts with Israelite biblical history along with a decade of research to untangle the nature of true godly leadership. I believe it’s a particularly timely topic in our time.

Make sure to register for FNC 2025 and check out Dr. Raymond Chiu’s workshop among many others.

Plan to attend FNC 2025 in Toronto and be present when our churches gather to vote for the revised Fellowship National Affirmation of Faith. Don’t miss the vote on November 4, 2025 at 2:00pm.

How to Identify a Church Bully

Every church has at least one. Pastors, missionaries, and church leaders get beat up by them. They wreak havoc, cause division, distract churches from mission, and cause pastors to resign prematurely. Who am I describing? The church bully.

Dr. Thom Rainer outlines nine traits to be on the lookout for, and nine ways to deal with church bullies:

Nine Traits of Church Bullies

Church bullies typically must have an enemy to feed their insatiable appetite to fight. They are unhappy unless fighting some battle “for the Lord”. Often, we find these people in places of influence in the church.

Hopefully by investigating the traits of a “church bully”, we can recognize them before they cause dissension and damage.

1. They do not recognize themselves as bullies. To the contrary, they see themselves as necessary heroes sent to save the church from her own self.

2. They have personal and self-serving agendas. They have determined what “their” church should look like. Any person or ministry or program that is contrary to their perceived ideal church must be eliminated.

3. They seek to form power alliances with weak members in the church. They will pester and convince groups, committees, and individuals to be allies in their cause. Weaker church staff members and church members will succumb to their forceful personalities.

4. They tend to have intense and emotional personalities. These bullies use the intensity of their personalities to get their way.

5. They are known for saying, “people are saying.” They love to gather tidbits of information and shape it to their own agendas.

6. They find their greatest opportunities in low-expectation churches. Many of these church members have a self-entitled view of church membership. They seek to get their own needs and preferences fulfilled. They therefore won’t trouble themselves to confront and deal with church bullies. And the next issue is a direct consequence of this one:

7. They are allowed to bully because church members will not stand up to them. I have spoken with pastors and church staff who have been attacked by church bullies. While the bully brings them great pain, they experience even greater hurt because most of the church members stood silent and let it happen.

8. They create chaos and wreak havoc. A church bully always has their next mission ready. While he or she may take a brief break from one bullying mission to the next, they are not content unless they are exerting the full force of their manipulative behaviour.

9. They often move to other churches after they have done their damage. Whether they are forced out or simply get bored, they will move to other churches and continue the same bullying mission.

Nine Ways to Deal with the Church Bully

Thom Rainer moves from the descriptive to the prescriptive in the following suggestions. What can you do to prevent or stop bullies in YOUR church?

1. Fight bullying with the power of prayer. The most common targets of church bullies are the pastor and church staff. I encourage everyone in vocational ministry to ask humbly for people to pray for them daily. In two of the churches where I served as pastor, I had as many as 100 or more people committed to pray for me daily. They typically prayed for me for only two or three minutes each day at noon. Their intercessory prayers for me were brief, but they were powerful!

2. Seek to have an “Acts 6” group in the church. I am specifically referring to the manner in which the Jerusalem church dealt with murmuring and complaining. They appointed a group to take care of the widows who were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The seven who were appointed to the task were thus not only to do that ministry, but they were also to preserve the unity of the church. Churches need either informal or formal groups whose ministry is dealing with conflict, complaints, and dissension so that unity is preserved.

3. Have a high-expectation church. Higher expectation churches tend to be more unified, more Great-Commission-focused, more biblically defined, and more servant-oriented. Stated simply, high-expectation churches don’t offer an environment conducive to bullying.

4. Encourage members to speak and stand up to church bullies. Bullying thrives in a church where the majority remains in silent fear of church bullies. Bullies tend to back down when confronted by strong people in the church. We just need more strong people in the church.

5. Make certain the polity of the church does not become a useful instrument to church bullies. Many churches have ambiguous structures and lines of accountability. Polity is weak and ill-defined. Bullies take advantage of the ambiguity and interpret things according to their nefarious desires.

6. Be willing to exercise church discipline. Church discipline is a forgotten essential of many churches. Bullies need to know there are consequences for their actions, and church discipline may be one of them.

7. Have a healthy process to put the best-qualified persons in positions of leadership in the church. Bullies often are able to push around less qualified people who have found themselves in positions of leadership. There should be a spiritually and strategically designed process to choose and recruit people for key leadership positions.

8. Have a healthy process to hire church staff. For example, an egregious mistake would be the church’s hiring of a senior staff member without the enthusiastic support of the pastor. If the pastor and new staff member do not have good chemistry, a church bully can quickly pit one against the other. A unified church staff is a major roadblock for a church bully.

9. Encourage a celebratory environment in the church. Joyous churches deter bullies. They like somber and divided churches.

Bullies need to be confronted so their “end-runs” won’t harm church leaders in our churches.

I trust Dr. Thom Rainer’s counsel is a support to someone out there today. Hope to see you at FNC 2025 this November 3-5, 2025 in Toronto.