From marketplace to table of fellowship Religious transactionalism, Jesus critique, and contemporary church leadership reconstruction

Abstract

Contemporary church leadership is confronted with a crisis that extends beyond managerial concerns; it is fundamentally a theological crisis rooted in the church’s predominance of transactional logic. Transactional leadership, which structures relationships among leaders, congregants, and God around conditional exchange, reduces the Gospel to a system of spiritual contracts and fosters faith communities shaped by market logic rather than the logic of grace. This article contends that Jesus represents the earliest, most radical, and most consistent critic of religious transactionalism. Jesus’ praxis provides a hospitable leadership paradigm as a Christological alternative, consistently shifting leadership from emotion (marketplace) to trapeza (table of fellowship). This article advances four arguments using a method that integrates biblical-theological exegesis, systematic-constructive theology, and contextual hermeneutics: first, a theological diagnosis of transactionalism as religion in Barthian terms; second, an interpretation of Jesus’s action in the Temple as prophetic deconstruction; third, the table fellowship of Jesus as a reconstruction of the hospitalis paradigm; and fourth, a proposed hospitalis leadership paradigm for the contemporary Indonesian church. The article contributes by developing a leadership paradigm that originates methodologically from the historical Christ rather than secular leadership theory and is subsequently grounded in biblical references.