One of the things we saw last week in Greek class, as we discussed the first two verses of Philippians, is that New Testament leadership was shared leadership. Paul does not to refer to a solitary "overseer" but instead to (plural) "overseers." The fact is, Jesus never entrusted leadership of a local church to a single individual. Thus it's not surprising that we find numerous references in the New Testament to what Michael Green once called a "fellowship of leadership" -- witness the "elders" of James 5:14 as well as the "elders" of Acts 14:23. A plurality of qualified elders serves many functions, not least to help a congregation avoid the cult of personality that often accompanies one lead pastor or the burnout that often attends the single pastorate. I once heard it said that pastors today have three full-time jobs -- teaching/preaching, counseling, and administration. No one person can do all of that well.
I was reminded of this when I learned that the tower at Reagan National Airport (which I've flown into numerous times) was short-staffed on the night of the fatal collision of an American Eagle airliner and a military helicopter.
Hopefully the FAA will address this issue and make needed changes, sooner rather than later. My heart goes out to the controller as he or she was one person working two positions in arguably one of the most if not THE most intense, congested, and restricted airspaces in the United States. It's intense because of its proximity to the nation's capital, the Pentagon, and other very sensitive areas. Just why airport towers are understaffed is certainly open to political debate, but to me there's really no excuse for it. I think everyone in the aviation industry now realizes in hindsight that what happened at Reagan was an accident waiting to happen, and my guess is that runway 33 will be closed until things are figured out -- or that military aircraft will no longer be allowed to fly their normal route past the airport. If not, I would hope that airline pilots would refuse to accept an approach where any aircraft is flying right beneath them with a vertical clearance of only 200 feet. That's just plain absurd.