Leadership Horticulture

Language is hugely nuanced depending on the culture and context but I think it's fair to say that if we read the Bible for the first time, we would never use the term Senior Pastor to describe a church leader. Mainly because the term is only used to describe Jesus. In this episode we talk about how the gift of apostle gets muddled up with the modern senior pastor and why that ends up being a...

Jesus expressly told us not to use honorific titles. Not just once but three times in Matthew 23. Does this mean we can't call our parents, mum and dad? Or that we can't refer to a doctor as doctor? Not quite. The point Jesus is making is that whenever titles are loaded to protect and serve an existing power dynamic, we should refrain from using them. This is exactly how the Pharisees us...

If your pastor wants you to rob a bank, what do you do? This silly little example is a powerful way of illustrating the nuances of biblical submission. There are plenty of verses about submission (including to leaders) but all of them are held in tension with the need to submit to God and to one another. Even though it's rarely preached explicitly, the subtle takeaway for many in the modern c...

Honour is a good thing. But too much honour or overemphasis of honour in one area (such as leadership) in a culture can have unintended fruit in the long term. I believe much of how honour is taught in the modern church is very different from how it is described in the Bible (particularly the New Testament). Sadly this often results in the disempowering of the saints with the emergence of the cler...

When we planted Reflect Church in 2021, we defaulted to leading as a team of 5. I'd like to say that this came from some sort of theological conviction but it didn't. The honest answer is that we were afraid. We'd seen the dark side of top-down leadership and were looking to mitigate the risks. As we made major decisions (like signing a building lease) as a church in this way, I beg...

Welcome to the first episode of the Leadership Horticulture podcast. I've spent the last (almost) 20 years involved in church leadership and have learnt a few things along the way. In particular over the last six years thanks to a particularly painful series of events in 2020, I have spent a lot of time processing what went wrong and examining our theology for church and leadership in general...