Some People Do Not
Seek Power to Lead.
They Seek It Because
They Were Never
Allowed to Have It.

Think about the child who grew up in a home where a parent's mood determined the weather for everyone else, where nothing he did was quite enough and every effort to get it right produced, at best, a temporary reprieve from the criticism, where the approval he needed most was the most inconsistently given, or the teenager who sat on the outside of every social circle, not because he was strange but because the social architecture of adolescence is often arbitrary and brutal, and he happened to land on the wrong side of it, or the young man who grew up in a church where worth was measured by how prominently God was using you, and God never seemed to be using him as prominently as he needed.

These are not unusual stories. They are the ordinary geography of human wounding, what makes them significant for this conversation is what they produce in adult life when they are not examined, and what they reach for when they finally find a context that seems to offer a solution.

Research on social exclusion from Florida State University found that people who experience rejection show measurably higher motivation to attain powerful positions within groups, the mechanism is straightforward: social exclusion threatens three things simultaneously, the need to belong, the need for control, and the need for meaning. Power, as the research documents, is one of the primary ways people attempt to restore all three at once, the boy who was never picked becomes the man who does the picking, not as a plan. As the most logical resolution his nervous system has ever been offered.

The Specific Wounds That Produce the Power Drive

Not all childhood pain produces the same leadership pathology, the research on wounded leadership identifies several specific wound profiles that are particularly likely to produce the hunger for positional power in religious contexts. Understanding them is not about assigning diagnosis. It is about being able to recognize the pattern when it is sitting in the chair at the front of the room.

1. 01The wound of the controlling homeThe child who grew up under a controlling parent, one whose love was conditional, whose approval was scarce, whose authority was absolute and non-negotiable. Learns two things simultaneously. First, that powerlessness is unbearable. Second, that power is the solution to powerlessness, the adult who carries this wound does not simply want influence. They need control in the same way the body needs oxygen. As a matter of felt survival, when they find a pastoral role, the need for control that was formed in response to someone else's control becomes the operating principle of the ministry. Every decision goes through them. Every staff member reports to them. Every congregant who pushes back becomes a threat to the only thing that makes the wound bearable: being the one in charge.
2. 02The wound of the absent or dismissive fatherThe research on leadership pathology returns again and again to the father wound, not because mothers are unimportant, but because the specific dynamics of paternal approval and dismissal map with particular clarity onto the dynamics of spiritual authority, the boy whose father was absent, dismissive, or whose approval was given only in response to achievement, grows up with a hunger for the kind of recognition that was supposed to come from home and never did, the congregation becomes the father's face, the approval of the people becomes the thing the father never gave, and the leader who cannot get enough of it, who needs the affirmation to be louder, more consistent, more enthusiastic. Is not managing a ministry. He is managing an old wound with new people.
3. 03The wound of social exclusion and not being chosenResearch on peer rejection in childhood and adolescence identifies it as one of the most reliably damaging social experiences a developing person can have. Being explicitly excluded. Told you are not wanted, not included, not chosen. Activates the same neural pathways as physical pain, the adult who carries significant peer rejection from their formative years carries, alongside it, a particular sensitivity to social hierarchy, who is in, who is out, who gets to decide, when that person finds themselves in a position of leadership where they control access, to the community, to resources, to the inner circle, the exercise of that control is never purely organizational. It is personal, the people who are allowed in are the ones who reflect back the version of him that never got chosen, the ones who are pushed out are the ones who, consciously or not, remind him of the experience of being excluded.
4. 04The wound of invisibility in the church itselfThis one is particularly common and particularly rarely discussed. Many of the leaders who cause the most damage in churches were formed in churches where worth was visibly and explicitly tied to how much God was using you, where the anointed were elevated and the ordinary were overlooked, where the currency of community was spiritual performance and the child who could not perform at the level that attracted attention learned to understand themselves as spiritually insufficient, that child does not leave the church and find a healthier framework. They stay. They work harder. They pursue the platform, and when they eventually get it, when they are finally the one at the front of the room, finally the one being celebrated, finally the one God is visibly using, the relief is profound and temporary, because the wound that drove them there cannot be filled by the very thing it was chasing.

Power as Restoration, and Why It Never Works

Research Finding

"Social exclusion threatens the need to belong, the need for control, and the need for meaning. Seeking a powerful position in a new group may allow rejected people to restore control and meaning, but subordinate positions may be better suited to restore belonging."

Satkunas, Coping with Rejection: Does Rejection Affect the Motivation to Seek Power? Florida State University, 2012.Share on

The research finding embedded in that study is worth sitting with. Power restores the sense of control that rejection took away, but it does not restore belonging, the actual thing the wound is hungry for, and so the leader who sought the position to resolve the wound of not being chosen finds themselves in a position of power that does not deliver the thing they were actually after. They are in charge. Everyone follows their direction, the room organizes itself around them, and underneath all of it, the wound is still there, still hungry, still asking the original question that nobody answered: do I actually matter to you, or only to the version of you that needs something from me?

That unanswered question is what makes wounded leaders so dangerous to the people around them, because the people in the congregation are not simply members of a community. They are, from the perspective of the wound, the audience whose job is to answer a question that is never quite asked and never quite satisfied. Every Sunday is another attempt to get the answer the wound has been seeking since childhood, and the congregation that finally fails to provide it in the form the leader needs. Through a conflict, a decline in attendance, a staff member who leaves, an elder who raises a concern. Becomes the newest version of the original rejection.

"The congregation is not simply members of a community. They are, from the perspective of the wound, the audience whose job is to answer a question that was never asked and never satisfied in the home where it first formed."

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What the Kingdom Framework Actually Says About Power

The Genesis mandate that grounds the framework I work from establishes something specific and countercultural about the nature of authority: it is always downward-facing, the image-bearer exercises dominion as a steward, not as a beneficiary, the authority is given for the sake of what is in the domain, the flourishing of the people, the health of the system, the fruit that genuine leadership produces. Power that turns inward, that uses the domain to serve the leader's unmet need, is not Kingdom authority. It is something else wearing Kingdom clothes.

This distinction matters enormously for how we think about leadership selection, formation, and accountability, in my book, I examine what genuine connection across difference requires and the first thing it requires is a self that is grounded enough to encounter another person as genuinely other, rather than as a mirror or a threat, the leader whose identity is organized around the wound of rejection cannot do this. Every person in the congregation is either confirming the wound or threatening it. Neither relationship is actually about the other person. Both are about the wound.

The path forward for the wounded leader is not a better leadership strategy. It is the interior work that was skipped, the examination of what drove them here, the honest accounting of what they have been using the role to solve, and the slow, difficult process of finding the belonging they were looking for somewhere other than the room they control, that work is available. It is not easy, and it is the only thing that actually treats the wound rather than just managing its symptoms at the expense of the people nearby.

"The boy who was never chosen becomes the man who does the choosing. He did not plan it that way, the wound planned it, and until the wound is named and treated, every person he chooses or excludes is part of a conversation that started long before they arrived."

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If you have been in a congregation led by someone whose need to control felt personal rather than pastoral. You were not imagining it. It was personal. It just was not about you. It was about something that happened before you got there, in a room you were never in, to a person you have never met, the child who needed to be chosen, who never was, who eventually found a room where the choosing was finally his to do.

You were not the solution to that wound. You were never supposed to be.