The Storm Christian Leaders Are Dying In

Why defended leadership works—and why it is destroying leaders and driving others away

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Christian leadership is haemorrhaging at both ends—older leaders collapsing under defended survival, and younger leaders refusing to inherit a model that burns people out. Yet the answer is not the abandonment of leadership, but its re-formation—towards a way of leading that no longer survives by defence, but is sustained by freedom, and a deeper participation in the life of God.

We are living through a collapse of leadership trust and, just as quietly, a collapse of leaders themselves. This is not primarily a crisis of competence or strategy, but a formational crisis — a crisis of the leader’s interior world. That is why I’m returning to Simon Walker’s The Undefended Leader, a book that names with rare clarity how leaders fail not through lack of skill, but through the loss of interior freedom.

I began this series just before the end of last year with an overview of The Undefended Leader (read it here), and this second piece continues a step-by-step walk through the book.

Leadership organised around defence slowly erodes interior freedom, relational authority, and spiritual depth. Before we can speak meaningfully about a better future for Christian leadership, Walker insists, we must first tell the truth about the storm—and about why so many leaders, often with the best of intentions, have learned to armour themselves, or quietly step away altogether.

Let’s begin where Walker begins: with the truth about the hostile world of the leader.

The Storms of Exposure

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There is a particular loneliness to leadership that few people talk about honestly. Not the loneliness of being busy or burdened with responsibility, but the deeper loneliness of being permanently exposed.

To lead today is to live in a permanent state of exposure. Leaders are:

• Assessed before they are understood

• Criticised before they have finished thinking

• Condemned for the very patience and discernment we later complain they lack

Walker names this reality with particular clarity. He describes the leader's world not as occasionally difficult but as structurally hostile.

This reframes what we often misdiagnose as leadership failures. The issue is not primarily a lack of skill, courage, or even integrity. It is the conditions under which leadership is exercised and practised.

Walker’s claim is essentially this:

Leadership never happens in calm, indoor conditions. Leaders don’t get to work from a sheltered control room. They stand outside, exposed to the elements.

He uses the image of a weather system to describe the ambient pressures that come with leadership, almost by default. Leaders become the screen onto which others project their hopes and fears, their idealism and their disappointment, their gratitude and their blame. Leaders live with a level of scrutiny and visibility that few can escape, where actions are watched, motives are interpreted, and silence is often filled with assumptions. Alongside this comes a chronic ambiguity: decisions must be made without full information, for outcomes that remain unclear, and all with a persistent sense of operating without a solid place to stand.

Much of what lands on a leader does not properly belong to them at all. Disappointment that has nowhere else to go often settles on the leaders, simply because they are there. Even changes people have explicitly asked for can generate resistance once they begin to unsettle familiar patterns. Gratitude is fleeting; frustration is additive and adhesive.

Crucially, Walker’s point is not that leaders are doing something wrong when any of this happens. This is not bad weather caused by poor leadership techniques. You do not choose this weather, and you cannot opt out of it. It comes with the role and is intrinsic to it. To lead is to step into exposure, and the question is not how to avoid the weather, but how to stand in it without becoming hardened, defensive, and lost.

So before we talk about being “undefended,” we need to be honest about the weather system leaders are standing in.

Only leaders who are honest about the hostility of their environment can choose not to be defended.

This isn’t about pretending the storm isn’t real. It’s about learning how to stand in it without becoming someone you’re not.

Defensiveness as an Adaptive Response

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Walker observes that leadership today demands greater exposure than previous generations faced—a reality that has intensified exponentially since he first identified the trend.

• Decisions are exposed before they are mature

• Judgments outpace reflection

• Narratives are set before meaning can settle

The leader’s interior world—which should include hesitation, doubt, prayerful wrestling, and slow discernment—has been hollowed out by environments that deny them room to breathe and be.

This produces what Walker describes as a hostile field. Importantly, this hostility is not primarily personal. It does not require bad actors, although there are plenty of those these days. It arises from systems that prize speed over wisdom, clarity over truthfulness, and performance over presence.

Some leaders are indeed morally bankrupt. But the hostility directed at most leaders cannot be explained by moral failure alone; leadership itself has become a site onto which anxieties, projections, and unmet longings are placed.

In such a world, defensiveness is not a moral failure. It is an adaptive response.

Walker is careful here. Leaders develop defences because defences work. They protect against misunderstanding, against attack, against being consumed by expectations that are impossible to satisfy. Defensiveness allows leaders to function. It enables them to survive.

In fact, many of the traits we reward in leaders—certainty, control, emotional distance, message discipline—are simply socially sanctioned forms of defence. They signal competence in a hostile environment.

The tragedy, Walker suggests, is not that leaders defend themselves.

But what begins as protection slowly becomes imprisonment.

Over time, defended leadership reshapes the self. Leaders lose touch with their own vulnerability, not because they deny it, but because it becomes too dangerous to access.

• Feedback gets filtered

• Relationships are thinned out

• The interior life narrows and constricts

• Leadership becomes about performance rather than presence

What gets lost is not effectiveness, at least not at first, but something more subtle and more costly: authority rooted in honesty, influence grounded in relationship, and vision born from depth rather than protection.

The world of leadership has grown more hostile since Walker’s book was written. Leaders now operate within attention economies that reward outrage, flatten any nuance, and archive every misstep forever. Social media and digital permanence mean that mistakes are not merely remembered; they are curated and weaponised again and again.

The possibility of repair has diminished, and redemption has been removed from public life. The costs of exposure are increasing, and protection mechanisms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Here is our catch-22. Our world seems to require more defence than ever, which will lead to more of what we are already suffering.

Is there an alternative?

Undefended Naivety

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In this context, undefended leadership can sound naïve, even reckless. It raises a genuine and pressing question: Is it possible to lead without defence and still remain safe?

The rest of Walker’s book answers this question, having allowed us to ask it honestly upfront. Because the deeper issue is not whether leaders can afford to be undefended, but whether leadership that is permanently defended can ever point beyond itself.

One of the quiet tragedies of the hostile world of leadership is what it does to those watching from the edges. Younger leaders are not rejecting responsibility just out of apathy or fragility, but also because they have paid close attention. They have watched leaders endure relentless storms, public scrutiny, moral failure, and institutional collapse. They have seen the personal cost of leadership borne not only by individuals, but by families, friendships, and faith itself. And they have noticed how often leaders respond by armouring up—controlling, managing impressions, defending territory—only to discover that these very strategies eventually cause their downfall.

What many younger leaders see is not simply failure, but a lack of alternatives. Leadership appears to demand either heroic invulnerability or quiet self-betrayal. When those are the only options on offer, opting out can feel like the most honest choice. In that sense, leadership avoidance is not cowardice but is discernment shaped by observation.

This is where Simon Walker’s work becomes rather radical. The Undefended Leader does not ask leaders to become tougher, louder, or more resilient in the usual sense. It offers a different imagination altogether: leadership that remains open under pressure, truthful under threat, and present without resorting to defence.

Walker names the cost of defended leadership with rare and penetrating clarity. And more importantly, he gives us an alternative path that younger and perhaps older leaders have scarcely seen embodied. Not a denial of storms, but a way of standing within them without losing one’s soul.

This is where a theological horizon begins to emerge.

The Recovery of Interior Freedom

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Although Walker does not write a theology of leadership, his vision is unmistakably shaped by his Christian imagination and theological convictions. The undefended leader he gestures toward is not simply emotionally intelligent or psychologically integrated, but grounded in a different source of security altogether. This is leadership that does not derive its legitimacy from performance, approval, or control, but from a prior belonging. Most leadership advice teaches you how to survive the system. This one teaches you how to live in a different one.

At its deepest level, the invitation here is Christological.

In Christ, God does not bypass the hostility and vulnerability that deform human life, but recapitulates them—entering our pressures, misunderstanding, abandonment, and threats, and reorders them from within. Christian leadership, then, is not heroic survival in a hostile world, but a participation in Christ’s own way of inhabiting it.

From an Ignatian perspective, the task is not the removal of storms, but the recovery of interior freedom within them. Discernment begins by telling the truth - speaking out loud - about the pressures we face and noticing how fear and defence have organised our responses. Our task is not to eliminate vulnerability, but to learn how to stand undefended before God—honestly, attentively, and free enough to choose where we place our trust. Which is often where we started when we first chose and responded to a call to leadership.

In a world organised against vulnerability, this is not weakness. It is participation in a different reality and a form of leadership that does not require sacrificing one’s soul to survive.

Chapter Two of Walker provides a necessary reckoning. It names the real pressures leaders face, legitimises the defences they have built, and quietly prepares the ground for a more radical question: what would leadership look like if it were no longer organised around fear and self-defence?

The chapters that follow look at this possibility.

Why not join me as I unpack the rest of The Undefended Leader?

I’m planning a series of paired posts: one engaging each chapter, and a second reflecting more personally on my own journey into—and ongoing practice of—being undefended.

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