Point man leadership will hardly survive in the current paradigm of the church of Christ. With such a high rate of turnover among ministers, congregations being used to the elders controlling everything, and point man leadership being a really big shift in how the current church of Christ operates , it would be a difficult sell to any established church. That being said, it would have to be implemented in a younger church both in physical age of the members and years of establishment. Or, it could be implemented in a "Breakout Church" (as described in Tom Rainer's book, Breakout Churches).
One reason I think appointment leadership would work, is that it puts much of the decision making capability into the hands of the most informed people. Instead of the elders having to spend so much of their excess time, many who have jobs, dealing with issues the staff talks about every day, why not let the staff make the decision? Think about it this way. The church staff is paid to think about logistics issues for 40 hours a week. What happens when the elders must make a logistics decision, is the staff must correctly communicate the pros and cons of said decision to the elders so that they can make the decision. Conversely, point man leadership would require that the elders have complete trust and faith in the preacher they hired to make the right decision. Sure this may seem like a lot of power given to one man, but when there are proper accountability systems in place, this shouldn't be a problem.
Think about all the examples of point man leadership in the Bible. Abraham, Moses, David, Paul... Just to name a few of the big ones. Sure they screwed up, sure they had their fair share of selfish decisions, but God always redeemed them for his purposes. Instead of being "better safe than sorry", let's take some risks and see where God leads the church.
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