Staring back at the abyss: The need for depressed leaders

So much of America’s culture, bathed in capitalism as it is, is about selling ideas. 

Corporate advertisements depict smiling, laughing, jubilant people enjoying the newest product on sale, enticing us to spend our money so that, we, too, might be smiling, laughing, and jubilant.

We are so oversaturated with this kind of messaging – be it through television ads, billboards, radio spots, social media posts – that it infects every aspect of our lives to the point that our organizations operate with this same kind of fake enthusiasm, and it’s even how we present ourselves to the world.

So often what we choose to share on social media are the same kinds of smiling, happy, picture-perfect images that portray us as some fake version of ourselves that matches the faux zeitgeist instead of what’s often the reality – we’re struggling.

And when it comes to our organizations, whether they’re corporate or even non-profit such as churches, the people we so often turn to as our leaders are those who are able to put on a smile and sell us on everything being positive even if the world is burning around us.

As someone who has dealt with major depression since childhood, I’ve long had some form of a sixth-sense, so to speak, when it comes to picking up on people being fake, and few things irritate me like nails on a chalkboard as people trying to pretend everything is hunky-dory (and try to sell that perception to groups of people) when things are far from it.

And let’s be real – corporate America and sadly even the church has been plagued by hucksters blowing sunshine while either ignoring or covering up abuses.

For all these reasons, I think it’s past time that we redefine what a good leader is and begin looking in some unlikely places, namely among those people who have struggled with darkness and can claim some level of victory.

I’ve long wrestled with whether God has called me to leadership because of my battle with depression – I don’t look like typical cheery leaders waiving pom poms, and despite generally holding depression at bay, I still have moments of weakness where I find myself having a difficult time: there are days I can’t get out of bed and seasons where it’s a fight to see the proverbial glass as half full.

I’ve convinced myself that my reality is disqualifying, but instead I’m now seeing it may be desperately needed: leaders who are genuinely human and authentic.

We don’t need more leaders pretending that they have everything figured out and under control.  We need people who have failed, who can admit when they are wrong, who value different and opposing opinions, and who have real empathy with the majority of humanity who don’t have it all together and need help.

It was that type of genuineness I’d hoped I was tapping into when I tried launching a church a few years ago, an attempt at starting a community that wasn’t about glitz and pomp but about tapping into a version of deeply authentic Christianity.

The problem with that?  Well, in the richest and most affluent society in the history of humanity where comfort and splendor is the default expectation, it’s an especially tough sell to lean into the teachings of a guy whose core philosophy was self-denial and self-sacrifice, to truly engage with what Jesus taught instead of a sanitized version that comes with lights, fog machines, and a rock concert.

But our world is starved for both non-superficial Christians and leaders who are conversant with the reality that life is difficult and filled with injustice, unfairness, cruelty, and pain – and that needs to be confronted.

Especially in predominantly white evangelical churches, so much of our rhetoric is either sanitized so as to attempt to be inoffensive or ignore uncomfortable issues, or alternatively it’s radicalized by political partisanship (both liberal and conservative) that has lost the plot of Jesus’ Kingdom.

Christians need more prophetic voices calling the church into account for how it’s lost touch with who Jesus was and is, and all our organizations need more authentic leadership that can relate to the vast array of experiences of different people and different life situations.  We don’t need professional marketers as leaders with glued-on smiles and fake enthusiasm – we need wounded and genuine leaders. So if you’ve wrestled with whether you can be used to help guide people in life because of your weaknesses and the ways you may continue to struggle, don’t write yourself off.  The ways in which you’ve been broken and continue to keep on living may be exactly what others need.