Leadership That Changes Things (and why it’s rarely easy to live with)

From Gospel of Luke 6:26:

“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Many years ago, I worked for someone who was widely regarded as difficult. She was direct to the point of brusqueness, unimpressed by status, and unwilling to waste time appeasing institutions. She was also fair-minded, deeply principled, and seemed utterly unafraid of intimidation. Looking back, I realise that I learned more about integrity and leadership from her than I ever did from many smoother, more admired figures.

We often speak warmly about leadership that “changed the world.” We celebrate the outcomes, quote the speeches, and commemorate the anniversaries. But we are usually far less honest about what it was like to live and work alongside such leaders at the time.

The leaders who genuinely shift the moral or spiritual weather are rarely easy people.

Their difficulty did not arise from temperament alone, but from the clarity of what they saw—and the urgency they felt to confront it. Each was forced to name and resist evils that were deeply embedded in the moral fabric of their time: slavery woven into the history of civilisation; racism so normalised it scarcely registered as injustice; totalitarian tyranny advancing under the guise of order and national pride. These were not consensus issues. To oppose them meant swimming against the tide, often in isolation, and accepting ridicule, resistance, and hostility long before public opinion began to turn. In each case, anger played its part—not the corrosive anger of ego or resentment, but the moral anger that arises when love refuses to accommodate injustice.

William Wilberforce.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Winston Churchill.

All were relentless. Demanding. They had no time for polite compromise. Frequently exhausting —even to those who believed in the cause. History remembers the fruit; contemporaries endured the cost!

It is also striking—and worth naming—that many of the leaders we instinctively reach for as examples are men. If we widen the lens, we see the same pattern among women whose leadership was no less transformative and no less disruptive: Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, Simone Weil, Esther, and countless unnamed women in Scripture who were “out of order” long before they were recognised as prophetic.

The point is not gender. It is something deeper.

Why real change is uncomfortable

Leadership that brings about lasting change almost always involves disturbance. It disrupts settled arrangements, challenges comfortable assumptions, and refuses to leave things as they are. It requires a willingness to be misunderstood and a tolerance for conflict that most institutions are trained—quite understandably—to avoid.

With our necessary emphasis on process, consensus, safeguarding, reputational management, and emotional safety, we have allowed the deeper work of truth-telling, moral courage, and prophetic imagination to be sidelined in favour of institutional self-preservation.

Safeguarding matters enormously. Accountability matters. Emotional safety matters. But procedural goodness is not the same thing as moral courage, and confusing the two can leave us with leaders who seem to be impeccably compliant but are spiritually timid.

It is not unreasonable to notice that being “a nightmare to work with” and being institutionally acceptable are often, in practice, mutually exclusive.

One reason leadership that changes things is so fiercely resisted is that it confronts not only injustice, but delusion. Every age has its “common sense,” and that common sense is often morally blind. Slavery was once normalised, segregation woven into social order, and appeasement of tyranny defended as prudence. The tragedy is not simply that these views were wrong, but that those living within them rarely recognised their blindness at the time—and often resented those who did.

Transformative leaders are not mere dissenters; they are disruptors of illusion.

They speak with a clarity that others experience as aggression, not because it is harsh, but because it refuses to collude with what has been made respectable. Such leaders are rarely polite in the ways society prefers, because politeness often functions as a shield for comfort. Their determination is not driven by ego, but by the burden of seeing clearly—and knowing that once something has been seen, it cannot be unseen.

Leadership in an age of contempt

There is another factor that makes genuine leadership increasingly rare, and it is seldom named honestly. We live in a culture that has learned to treat anyone in a position of leadership or authority as fair game for relentless scrutiny, suspicion, and attack. Politicians, church leaders, and even members of the Royal Family are subject to constant judgement—not conscientious accountability, but a kind of permanent cross-examination in which every word, gesture, or decision is mined for hidden agendas and potential failure.

We should also be wary of the casual claim that our institutions are “broken”. The NHS, politics, and public life are under immense strain—but they continue to function because countless people still show up and carry responsibility. Declaring systems “broken” is merely catastrophising: it can sound radical, but this supports a ‘fantasy reset’ and simply disguises a refusal to engage in the slow, costly work of repair.

The time has surely come to confront this culture directly:

What passes for vigilance too often slips into meanness; what claims to be moral seriousness collapses into contempt. Such gratuitous criticism shows little regard for the basic respect owed between human beings, and still less for the fragility and cost of leading well.

It does not purify public life; it corrodes it.

A culture that cannot distinguish between accountability and humiliation will find itself unable to nurture leaders of integrity—and repeatedly surprised by the kind of leadership that fills the vacuum.

Criticism, of course, is necessary. Power must be questioned. Leaders must be held to account. But something has gone badly awry when criticism becomes relentless, thoughtless, performative, or hateful—driven less by concern for the common good and more by a desire to tear down. When contempt is licensed in the name of accountability, moral seriousness quietly evaporates, and the very civic and spiritual life people claim to defend is quickly eroded.

One has to ask, honestly:

Who in their right mind would choose to lead under these conditions?

The emotional and psychological cost is immense.

Those who possess integrity, empathy, and self-doubt—often the very people we most need—are precisely those most wounded by constant attack. Many retreat into caution, managing institutions defensively, with risk avoidance becoming more important than leading them creatively, simply in order to survive.

The irony is painful. When good people withdraw, the vacuum is filled not by saints but by those thick-skinned enough—or morally insulated enough—to withstand criticism because they have little to lose. Indeed, some of the most destructive leaders appear almost to thrive on verbal warfare, using outrage and hostility as cover for behaviour far more nefarious than their critics could have imagined.

In politics, we increasingly end up with the leaders we reward.

In the Church, we often end up with leaders forced into a holding operation—managing decline, avoiding offence, and hoping to pass through unscathed—rather than offering the kind of courageous, imaginative leadership the moment demands.

From silencing to agency

In pastoral work, I have encountered people a number of times who saw clearly what was wrong long before others were willing to name it—but who were gently discouraged from speaking because it might “cause difficulty.” True leadership, in such moments, does not look like certainty or authority, but shows the willingness to speak truth even when it costs belonging.

I do not write this as an abstract observer. For much of my life, as a gay man within the Church, I was formed far more by accusation than by encouragement—repeatedly told, implicitly and explicitly, that I was disordered, dangerous, heretical or morally suspect. That experience does not produce confident leadership. It produces caution, deference, and a habit of self-silencing.

It has taken most of my life to reach the point where I feel I have something worth saying, and the freedom to say it without being ruled by the fear of disapproval. I care far less now about how I am perceived, and far more about whether I am being truthful. In the language of our time, I have discovered agency—and I intend to use it, and to encourage others to do the same.

Healthy leadership requires communities that can both challenge and sustain their leaders; that can hold them accountable without annihilating them; and that understand the difference between prophetic critique and corrosive contempt. Much everyday criticism does real damage because it erodes the credibility and moral authority required for leadership to function at all. It diminishes rather than corrects.

God’s prophetic critique works differently:

It names what is wrong clearly and truthfully, yet does so in a way that restores dignity rather than stripping it away—as if to say, You have lost your way here, but you are still called, still trusted, and still capable of doing what is right and good. That is the kind of critique that strengthens leadership rather than paralysing it.

Where we fail to name and resist the toxic climates that make courageous leadership almost impossible, we should not be surprised when good leaders withdraw or wither. Without such attentiveness, we will continue to lament the absence of good leaders while helping to create the very conditions in which they cannot flourish.

Jesus, leadership, and discomfort

This is where Jesus’ warning about the cost of discipleship becomes crucial. When he speaks of taking up the cross, he is not threatening his followers with religious punishment or coercing them through fear. He is describing, with unsparing realism, what happens to those who commit themselves to courageous love in a hostile world.

To live truthfully, to resist intimidation, to refuse falsehood, and to act with integrity will inevitably attract resistance, misunderstanding, and sometimes great suffering. The cross names that cost—not as something to seek, but as something to be ready to bear when love refuses to retreat.

The cross is not the price of being allowed to exist; it is the cost of loving courageously in a world that prefers silence, compliance, and fear.

And that warning is not abstract. It is rooted in Jesus’ own way of being and leading.

This is why it matters to look carefully—and honestly—at Jesus himself.

It is hard to read the Gospels attentively and conclude that Jesus would have been an easy person to work with. He refuses to explain himself on demand. He ignores sensible advice. He provokes confrontation rather than smoothing it over. He seems remarkably unconcerned with how his actions will land institutionally. Again and again, he draws people to the edge—and then steps over it himself.

The religious authorities found him infuriating. His disciples were frequently bewildered. Even those closest to him did not feel reassured.

The idea that Jesus would have made a pleasant colleague or a manageable bishop is almost certainly a projection—a way of domesticating him so that his authority does not threaten our structures.

I can name that experience personally. There have been many moments when I have felt frustrated with Jesus—as though he does not understand the urgency of the situation, or why nothing seems to change. But that frustration has never been a sign of distance; it has arisen precisely because I care. To be annoyed with Jesus, even in prayer, is not irreverent. It is deeply biblical. The Psalms are full of people arguing with God precisely because they care about what God is doing in the world. Engagement without illusion is not rejection; it is a form of faithfulness.

Integrity, vision, and resolve

What distinguishes leadership that actually changes things is not charisma or dominance, but integrity—the costly alignment between what one sees, what one says, and how one lives. That old boss of mine, who I referred to in the beginning, a fierce and principled woman, once put it this way: “If you are on the side of what is right, you can take on anyone.” She meant the kind of resolve that refuses intimidation—the determination to stay truthful, clear-headed, and unflinching even when the cost is high. That kind of strength sits far closer to Jesus than to the cult of dominance we so often mistake for leadership.

Integrity of this kind is never abstract.

Such leadership requires vision: the ability to imagine a world other than the one we have inherited.

It requires honesty: refusing to deny what is plainly destructive, even when denial would be more comfortable.

And it requires resolve: not merely seeing what needs to change, but staying with the long, frustrating work of making change possible.

There is a form of criticism that costs very little—commentary from the sidelines that diagnoses problems while assuming that someone else will do the difficult work of repair. Leadership begins precisely where that posture ends: in shared responsibility and a willingness to contribute, however imperfectly, to the common good.

And it requires imagination—not only to envision a different future, but to invite others into it. The leaders we remember did not change the world alone. They found ways to inspire, persuade, provoke, and carry others with them, even when doing so came at great personal cost.

Courage and care held together

None of this is an argument for reckless or abusive leadership. “Therefore anything goes” is not the conclusion. The challenge is subtler and harder than that. When leadership is experienced as powerful, formative, or spiritually authoritative, communities can find themselves paralysed—mistaking loyalty for faithfulness, silence for humility, and endurance of harm for discipleship. Neither serves the Gospel well.

The Church has not yet learned how to hold courage and care together without sacrificing one to the other. We oscillate between tolerating harm in the name of boldness, or silencing conviction in the name of safety. In such moments, loyalty can become a trap: demanded rather than offered, enforced rather than discerned. Faithfulness, by contrast, remains answerable to truth—and that makes it far harder to exploit.

The difference matters. Abusive leaders tend to be domineering precisely because they fear challenge; their authority (and ego) demands control rather than conviction. Truly serious leaders—those grounded in integrity and vision—do not need unquestioning compliance. They can tolerate, and even welcome, disagreement, because truth is not threatened by scrutiny.

If we miss this distinction, we risk confusing strength with threat and courage with danger. But once we see it clearly, a different pattern of leadership emerges—one that has been present all along, though we have often failed to recognise it.

It is leadership that does not dominate a room, but endures across decades. Not explosive, but faithful. Not heroic in the cinematic sense, but quietly transformative in the lives of real people.

This is where Jesus finally becomes our measure. Jesus changed the world, yes—but he also trusted leaven more than spectacle, and growth more than control: the slow, hidden work he likened to the Kingdom itself, working patiently through ordinary lives.

To remain with him—still questioning, still arguing, still wanting the world to be different because of what we have glimpsed in him—is not failure. It is discipleship of a deep and costly kind.

And so the question we most need to ask is no longer whether we can tolerate leaders like this, but whether we are willing to become the kind of people—and the kind of communities—who can recognise them and survive their presence without silencing them.

That is a conversation the Church cannot afford to avoid. And what is true for the Church cannot be sealed off from the wider world it inhabits.

A crisis of leadership

All of this brings us to the wider moment we are now living through.

It is impossible to reflect on leadership at this moment without acknowledging the wider crisis we are living through. Nationally and internationally, many of the most prominent leaders before us appear driven less by integrity than by ego, less by service than by self-interest, less by truth than by the need to dominate or to win.

In such a climate, many people feel disoriented and demoralised. Some grow cynical, assuming that this is simply how power works. Others grow fearful, mistaking strength for righteousness and certainty for truth. And many thoughtful, faithful people feel a deep grief—sensing that something vital has been lost, but unsure how to name it.

This is precisely why Jesus’ warning matters: “Woe to you when all speak well of you.” Not because good leadership must be abrasive or unpopular for its own sake, but because leadership shaped by truth, justice, and compassion will inevitably unsettle vested interests and disturb comfortable illusions.

If Jesus remains our measure, then the question we need to recover is not:

Who sounds confident?

Or who promises security?

But:

Who acts with integrity?

Who tells the truth when it is costly?

Who resists the seduction of power for its own sake?

And who bears fruit that is recognisably life-giving, even when the process is uncomfortable?

The question, then, is not only whether the Church still believes in leadership, but whether we are willing—personally and collectively—to become the kind of people, and to form the kind of communities, in which truthful, courageous leadership can actually take root. For leadership does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows, or withers, in response to what we reward, what we tolerate, and what we are prepared to take responsibility for ourselves, whether in the Church, in politics, or in the wider life we share.

Jeremy Marks 29th January 2026