My Dear Kickstaff,
The amateurish way in which you dismiss my suggestions regarding the connotations of "leader" and "pastor" cause me great concern. Did you learn nothing at the College of Mismanagement regarding the powerful tool of philology? Indeed, the work of our Language Department was one of the great triumphs of the last century, work which has only increased in both pace and quality since then. To take perhaps the most important example, consider what we have done with the word "leader."
At one time, this word defined a function. The person in charge of a given endeavor was the leader. Children played a game called "Follow the Leader" which required all participants to mimic the actions of a single player and this role as "leader" rotated among all participants. Thanks, however, to the invaluable work of the publishing industry and the psychologists, we have now made "leader," not a function, but a quality, and an exalted quality at that. A "leader" is no longer someone who happens to occupy a particular role at a particular time, but a superior and heroic sort of individual who, not by virtue of any specific knowledge or experience, but by mere personal charisma, takes charge of any situation, whether he possesses any actual competence or not. The potential for this kind of thing in destroying morale is virtually limitless!
I know your organization is not a specifically religious one, but I saw most of my field service among churches and the principles transfer nicely to other organizations. Indeed, we have so succeeded in getting churches to think of themselves in secular terms - even to strive for secular parity - that very little difference now remains, at least in the American sector. Very well then: Our first triumph was in getting the Christians to value mere size for its own sake. A big church was by definition a good church, a bigger church a better church. Thus a church needed to "grow." Of course, that word has various shades of meaning but we managed to reduce it to the mere idea of a headcount. Once the humans had made this move, it was child's play to convince them that the pastor of a "big" and "growing" church was an example to follow and thus a "leader." We further abstracted this quality into a noun, "leadership," and convinced the humans that it existed as a thing in itself, apart from a given situation. So the goal became, not to train pastors in any New Testament sense, but to create "leaders" in the exalted sense.
We have done so well with this that one very large church, which otherwise does a great deal of harm, hosts an annual "leadership conference" attended primarily by pastors. Its organizer said at one such event, "Leaders are just different from other people." Well, they will be if we have anything to say about it!
Next, we introduced the idea that, in order to grow, the churches needed to downplay their specific features and instead become as similar to the secular world as respectability permitted. Well, of course a churchy term like "pastor" just wouldn't do so the term "leader" became its synonym. Do you see the trick? A term that denoted care for individuals was now replaced by one that referred largely to getting a group of people to do what one person wanted. To a great extent, we have obliterated any distinction between the words "leader" and "pastor," not by conflating their meanings, but by colonizing the care-based word "pastor" with the connotations of the control-based word "leader." Indeed, we have done so well with this that the "leaders" of churches now read books by "leaders" with little or no understanding of the Christian faith, attend their conferences and even invite them to fill their pulpits!
This tied in nicely with the rise of the factory and the corporation in which individuals became ciphers, replaceable cogs in a machine. We have so far succeeded that I recently read an article in which one human claimed that offering pastoral care to church members was a bad idea for a pastor because such work "doesn't scale" and would prevent numerical growth!
Even where the humans retain the term "pastor" we teach them to add qualifiers to it, such as "senior pastor" and the delightful "executive pastor." These adjectives imply that the term "pastor" simply has insufficient panache and needs terms from the business world if it is to carry any weight. If there are "senior" officers in a corporation and "executives" are important people, then pastors gain respectability by aping these titles. It is an old method and dates at least as far back as that jolly fellow Constantine, but it remains as potent as ever.
Think, for instance, about literature. We have practically extinguished the reading of old authors like Gregory the Great and Richard Baxter. They addressed themselves specifically to "pastors" and encourage the reader to treat individuals in the congregation as distinct souls with unique strengths and weaknesses requiring personal care. But thanks to the excellent work of our philology and public relations departments, no one reads them but dusty specialists who would never think of their "subject" as anything to be applied to actual practice. Our modern writers however, encourage pastors to think of all churches as alike and all members (and non-members) as representatives of some designated demographic group. There is a troublesome fellow named Peterson crying out against all this but we have pretty much limited his market.
You will say that this is all very well for those working to sow discord in the church, but that you are dealing with a secular institution. But this makes your task all the simpler: Your man lacks even the vestige of religious tradition which might faintly haunt his mind regarding the new "leadership." Encourage your boss to think of himself, not as someone who happens to have a particular job that brings with it particular responsibilities, but as a "leader," an exalted type required not merely to give orders and see that they are carried out, but to galvanize his underlings to achieve greatness.
If you manage things properly, he will be unable to leave well enough alone when his organization is running smoothly and talented, hard-working employees are carrying out their assignments. He will feel the need to "lead," by which he will mean, not supplying whatever resources the employees require and seeing that they perform as well as possible, but coming up with new ways to "motivate" and "inspire" them. He will begin playing about with all sorts of new "programs," which basically consists of coining new names for old tasks. In a well-managed business, you can have employees regularly called away from productive work in order to attend seminars on how to be more productive!
Of course, once a boss becomes convinced that she must be a "leader," another helpful consequence follows: She adopts a role and ceases to be herself, to be a natural person. The humans have a term (I think that Jesus fellow popularized it): "hypocrite." Of course, they use it to mean anyone who upholds any sort of moral standard (the triumph of philology again!), but it originally referred to an actor who wore a mask that expressed a particular character or emotion. You can lure a "leader" into putting on such a mask without even knowing it. To the extent that she does so, her language, intonation, her very facial expression and bodily posture, become an affectation. The employees will sense this duplicity and resent it. The "leader" will sense the resentment and regard it as a rebellion against her "leadership," and the game is afoot.
You, of course, can see the delightful past results of exalting the idea of a "leader," but you don't want them to. Not to worry. Since we have virtually eliminated the study of languages and history from what they call an education, no one will notice that the German equivalent of "leader" is "führer."
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwover
