Abstract
M.A.
Leadership failure in the church, which will be defined in the successive
description, is of the order of the day. It has been recorded in the annals of
church history that church leaders have failed ever since the Eden-narrative up
until this day. The researcher assumed that there must be deep-seated reasons
for some church leaders to fail.
According to Barbara Hannah (1971:38), Robert Louis Stevenson struggled with,
as he called it, "man is not truly one, but truly two" in his book, "The strange case
of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde", long before modern psychology. Here it is exactly all
about that which happens consciously and that which works in the subconscious.
The researcher has been involved in the AFM church as a pastor for nearly thirty
years and has, through the years, been amazed at how well-meaning pastors,
practically involuntarily become involved in practices foreign to ministry such as
fraud and adultery, which lead to divorce, and in many cases to their ministry
being terminated. Therefore he conducted interviews with ordained pastors of
the AFM church with the view to determine whether a phenomenon such as a
dark side, or as S.J. Jung calls it, shadow, exists which forms part of a person's
composition. The question was put to the pastors as to how they experience
their dark side, and without exception the interviews which were conducted
during this study confirmed the existence of the dark side.