But what exactly is it?

Some people seem to think it means God will bless whatever we do. Others think it means Christians should somehow have an easier path than everyone else. Some treat it as if simply adding a Bible verse to their business somehow makes it Kingdom.

I'm not convinced any of those ideas capture what Scripture actually shows us.

The Kingdom has always been different.

Jesus never promised His followers an easier road. He promised His presence.

He never promised that every business would flourish simply because the owner was a Christian. He called people to faithfulness, wisdom, obedience and stewardship.

So perhaps the Kingdom advantage isn't found in easier circumstances at all.

Perhaps it is found in becoming a different kind of person.

A leader who can be trusted with influence.

A business owner whose integrity doesn't disappear when money is involved.

Someone whose decisions are shaped by conviction instead of fear.

Someone who understands that profit and purpose are not enemies, but neither are they the same thing.

These are the conversations I wish the Church had more often.

Conversations about what it genuinely looks like to build something that reflects the character of Christ in the marketplace.

• How should Christians think about ambition?

• What makes an offer honour God?

• Where is the line between wisdom and compromise?

• How do we pursue growth without allowing success to become our identity?

• How should we think about pricing, generosity, influence, competition, marketing and leadership?

These aren't simple questions.

They deserve better than simplistic answers.

That's why I enjoy gathering thoughtful Kingdom leaders around a table.

Not because I have all the answers.

Because good questions, explored together under the authority of Scripture, often sharpen us far more than another hour of consuming content.

This Sunday I'm hosting another Kingdom Advantage Roundtable.

It's an opportunity for Christ-centred coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs and leaders to come together for an honest conversation about building in the marketplace as followers of Christ.

Just thoughtful dialogue with people who genuinely care about honouring Christ while building something of substance.

If that sounds like the kind of conversation you've been looking for, I'd love you to join us.

Sunday 19 July

• 8:30 pm UK

• 3:30 pm Eastern

• 12:30 pm Pacific

You can reserve your place here:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/57IYo7EBRP2BaqKBYZoxlw

I'd also love to hear your perspective before we meet.

When you hear the phrase "Kingdom advantage", what do you think it actually means?

“Therefore hear the parable of the sower:” Matthew 13:18, NKJV

Every Christ-centred leader eventually asks the same question.

How do I interpret Scripture faithfully?

The question is unavoidable. Sermons, pastoral decisions, boardroom judgement calls, organisational cultures and everyday acts of discipleship all depend on how Scripture is understood. The Church has devoted enormous attention to the discipline of interpretation. We study languages, literary genres, historical contexts and canonical relationships because God’s Word deserves to be handled with reverence and care.

This is not only a question leaders ask for themselves in private devotion. Through preaching, teaching, coaching, strategy and everyday decisions, anyone who leads is also interpreting for everyone they lead, whether they intend to or not.

Yet another question receives remarkably little attention.

Who is the person doing the interpreting?

Before Scripture is opened, before exegesis begins and before any theological conclusion is drawn, the text is encountered by someone who is already being shaped, and has been shaped for years by decisions and experiences that themselves grew out of earlier shaping. That reader does not arrive as a detached intellect, suspended above history. The interpreter arrives as a person still being shaped by family, culture, church, work, suffering and success, someone who is still learning what is trustworthy, what is dangerous, what love requires and what faithfulness looks like.

The first context every reader brings to Scripture is themselves.

This claim stays well inside historic orthodoxy. Scripture’s authority, clarity and objectivity remain exactly as they were, and meaning still comes from the text rather than being invented by the reader. Christian interpretation is grounded in God’s self-revelation, the intention of the biblical authors, the literary and canonical context of the text and the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. Faithful hermeneutics simply requires us to acknowledge something obvious and often overlooked: interpretation always occurs through an interpreter.

There is no question that readers influence interpretation. But are those same readers, whether leading in the church or in the marketplace, sufficiently attentive to how they are already being shaped, long before they open the page?

The seed does not change

Jesus’ Parable of the Sower is ordinarily read as an explanation of why people respond differently to the proclamation of the Kingdom. Some receive the word with joy before falling away under pressure. Others allow competing concerns to choke its growth. Others bear lasting fruit. I believe the emphasis rightly falls on the condition of the soil.

But there is another observation worth sitting with.

The seed does not change. The sower does not change. Only the soil differs.

The different outcomes cannot be explained by changes in the word itself. They arise because the word is encountered by hearers whose condition differs before the seed is received. Jesus is probably not offering a theory of emotional formation, nor constructing a philosophy of hermeneutics. Yet He establishes a principle that reaches beyond what is taught as the immediate purpose of the parable.

The same Word is encountered differently because the hearers are not the same.

Jesus is describing proclamation reaching a crowd. But the mechanism He names, that the condition of the one receiving the Word shapes what becomes of it, reaches further than the ear. It extends into the quieter moment of a reader alone with a page. Reading is a slower form of the same encounter. The page does not proclaim itself into a room full of strangers. It waits instead for a single reader, and that reader brings the same soil the crowd once brought.

If people hear the same Word differently, should we also ask whether they read the same Word differently? Not because Scripture changes. Because readers do.

The interpreter is never neutral

For much of Christian history, theologians have rightly concentrated on the text itself: authorial intent, canonical relationship, the witness of Scripture to Christ. These questions remain indispensable. They protect the Church from reducing interpretation to subjective preference. But they do not remove the interpreter from the interpretative act.

Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that every act of understanding takes place within what he called a historically effected consciousness. We never approach a text without prior assumptions, traditions and horizons that have already shaped how we perceive reality. Understanding, on his account, means continually re-examining those assumptions in light of the text itself. Anthony Thiselton develops this within biblical hermeneutics specifically, arguing that faithful readers must remain willing for the biblical text to question them as deeply as they question it. Hermeneutics, for him, is fundamentally the cultivation of interpretative humility.

Hermeneutics has done good work establishing that readers bring preunderstanding to a text. Gadamer and Thiselton have already made that case well, and it is widely accepted. What has received far less theological attention is emotional formation specifically, as a constitutive part of that preunderstanding, with real consequences for Christian leadership and practical theology. That is the ground this essay is working.

Long before Gadamer and Thiselton, Augustine had already named the deeper issue. For Augustine, human beings are fundamentally creatures of love before they are creatures of intellect. In both the Confessions and On Christian Doctrine, he argues that sin disorders our loves (the people and things we set our hearts on), while grace reorders them toward their proper object in God. What we love shapes what we seek, what we fear, what we value and, ultimately, what we are able to recognise. Interpretation, on this account, engages the whole person, heart as well as mind. It is undertaken by people whose loves have already been ordered, or disordered, through formation.

James K. A. Smith develops Augustine’s insight for a contemporary audience, arguing that human beings are shaped less by the information they consume than by the desires cultivated through practice, liturgy, community and habit. We are, before we are thinkers, lovers. Formation, on this view, is less about acquiring correct belief and more about the gradual reorientation of a whole person’s loves, toward or away from the Kingdom of God.

Smith’s insight matters as much in the marketplace as it does in the pew. The rhythms that structure a working life, the calendar that never has margin, the meeting that treats urgency as virtue, the metric that quietly defines a person’s worth, function as a kind of liturgy of their own. They form desire long before any doctrine is consciously chosen. A leader can affirm sound theology on Sunday and still be formed all week by practices that teach a very different set of loves. If Smith is right that we become what we repeatedly do, then a leader’s calendar is doing theological work whether or not they have noticed.

Alistair McFadyen’s account of personhood adds a further layer: identity is never self-generated. It is constituted relationally, through our dealings with God and others. The interpreter, then, is not an isolated mind arriving at a text. They are a person continually shaped by relationship, whose entire history participates in what they are able to perceive.

Taken together, these voices suggest something significant. Before Scripture forms a leader through interpretation, the interpreter is already being shaped, and never stops being shaped, by relationships, practices, loves and experience. Christian formation, then, carries a wider task than teaching people how to interpret Scripture: forming people capable of receiving it truthfully.

Scripture examining the reader

Scripture itself demonstrates this pattern repeatedly, and nowhere more clearly than on the road to Emmaus. The two disciples possessed Israel’s Scriptures. They knew the promises concerning the Messiah. They had witnessed Jesus’ ministry and the events of His crucifixion. Their failure to recognise what had happened was not a failure of information. “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel. Indeed, besides all this, today is the third day since these things happened” (Luke 24:21, NKJV) reveals that their understanding of redemption had already been shaped by a particular vision of what Israel’s restoration must look like. Their disappointment was hermeneutical before it was emotional.

Jesus responds by returning them to the very Scriptures they already knew, read now in a different light. 'And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself' (Luke 24:27, NKJV). The text remains unchanged. What changes is the horizon through which the disciples encounter it. Their hearts are reformed before their eyes are opened.

Acts 10 tells a similar story from a different angle. Peter’s reluctance to enter Cornelius’s house likely had nothing to do with unbelief. It’s more likely that it came from a lifetime of faithful obedience to the practices that had formed his understanding of holiness. The vision of the sheet confronted the interpretative framework through which Peter understood covenant identity itself. Only once that framework had been unsettled could he say, “Then Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘In truth I perceive that God shows no partiality’” (Acts 10:34, NKJV). I imagine his perception changed because his formation was being reformed.

The religious leaders of the Gospels present the most searching case of all. Few people had studied the Scriptures more rigorously. Yet Jesus tells them plainly, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39, NKJV). Their failure cannot be reduced to ignorance of the text. Deeply embedded expectations about Messiah, righteousness and covenant prevented them from recognising the One to whom their own Scriptures pointed.

This reaches its clearest statement in Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (NKJV). The direction of interpretation reverses here. Rather than the reader standing over the text as its analyst, the text stands over the reader as its judge. Psalm 139 gives this the shape of a prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:23-24, NKJV). Faithful knowledge of God, David assumes, requires truthful knowledge of oneself. Self-examination is not an alternative to biblical interpretation. It is one of its necessary companions.

What psychology can and cannot tell us

Only once this theological ground is established does it become appropriate to ask what psychology might add. Psychology cannot determine the meaning of Scripture, nor establish a doctrine of interpretation. It can, at most, describe some of the cognitive and affective processes through which people perceive, prioritise and interpret the world.

Andrew Village’s research among 718 recently ordained Anglican clergy is the study most directly relevant here, because unlike most work in this field, Village was not studying general cognition. He was studying clergy actually reading Scripture. Examining interpretative preferences around the healing narrative in Mark 9:14-29, he found that psychological-function preferences correlated with which features of the passage clergy emphasised, those with stronger sensing preferences tending toward sensing-oriented readings, those with stronger feeling preferences toward feeling-oriented ones, and this held even after Village controlled for biblical conservatism, the strongest competing explanation for why clergy might favour one reading over another. These were clergy who shared the same seminary training, the same confessional tradition and the same recent ordination cohort, and they still did not read the passage identically. Village is careful not to claim that personality determines meaning, and neither do I. What his study demonstrates is narrower and, for this argument, more useful: trained, sincere, doctrinally aligned readers do not automatically attend to the same features of the same passage. Something prior to the text is already shaping what gets noticed.

Wider research on interpretation bias points in the same direction on a broader canvas, showing that people rarely process ambiguous information without prior expectation, and that existing affective patterns shape what gets noticed and what gets minimised. None of this should be pressed further than it can bear. It concerns cognition and social perception, not biblical hermeneutics as such. But taken alongside Village, it offers an independent, descriptive echo of something the biblical witness has already shown us: human perception is shaped, and shaped people read.

This is precisely where practical theology has something to contribute that hermeneutics alone does not. Richard Osmer describes the discipline as a movement through description, interpretation, normative judgement and response, insisting that theological reflection cannot stop at understanding a text or a situation but must ask what faithful action follows from it. John Swinton makes a related point from a different angle, arguing that theological understanding emerges from within communities already seeking to live faithfully, rather than from detached observation. Read together, they suggest that emotional formation is not a footnote to interpretation. It belongs to the very practice of theology: the interpreter is already living inside the realities the text is speaking into, and the practices of that life are shaping what they are able to receive.

When interpretation becomes culture

This reaches beyond private devotional reading. Leaders rarely communicate isolated biblical texts. They communicate interpretations of those texts, and over time those interpretations harden into practices, expectations and institutional cultures.

Two leaders can affirm the identical doctrinal statement and produce entirely different communities. One’s teaching on holiness forms a people who walk in grace. The other’s forms a people who walk in surveillance and shame. Both may preach the same texts on service and sacrifice, yet in one church those texts sit alongside a working theology of rest, limits and shared responsibility, while in the other they have quietly become the whole of the theology, so that Sabbath is affirmed in principle and denied in practice.

The same pattern holds in the marketplace, where leaders are just as surely interpreting Scripture, whether or not they would describe it that way. A founder whose worth has long been tied to usefulness can build a culture of chronic overwork and call it excellence. A coach whose security depends on being needed can cultivate dependency in clients and call it service. A consultant formed by scarcity can justify withholding, control or relentless expansion in the language of stewardship. None of these leaders are being dishonest. Their theology has simply been filtered through a pattern of perception they have never examined, so that ambition reads as calling, control or failure to let go reads as stewardship, and avoidance or delay reads as waiting on God.

The difference between these outcomes is rarely doctrinal. It lies in which biblical themes have become functionally central and which have quietly gone quiet, in the weighting rather than the words. Faithful interpretation is not simply a matter of identifying the right texts. It calls for understanding how the whole canon governs the significance of each one, and asking honestly what in the interpreter is deciding which parts get to speak loudest.

This is why leadership formation cannot be separated from biblical interpretation, and why biblical interpretation cannot be separated from spiritual formation. Every leader reads Scripture, interprets it and embodies that interpretation, in the church and in the business they lead, forming others through it whether they intend to or not.

Being interpreted

The question this raises is no longer simply whether a leader possesses sound interpretative method. It is whether the person using that method is being continually formed into the likeness of Christ.

Recognising this does not diminish the authority of Scripture. It safeguards it, because the reader, rather than the text, becomes the one who needs correcting. Leaders often ask whether they are reading Scripture faithfully. That question remains essential. But underneath it sits another: what has formed the person doing the reading?

The final task of Christian interpretation reaches further than producing accurate exegesis. It means becoming the kind of person capable of receiving God's Word with humility and renewed perception. Perhaps the most important question a Christian leader can ask is no longer only, “What does this passage mean?” It is also, “What in me is deciding what I notice, resist and apply?”

Augustine argued that sin disorders our loves before grace rightly reorders them. Perhaps faithful interpretation is one of the places where that reordering becomes visible, one text, one season, one uncomfortable recognition at a time.

Leaders spend enormous energy asking whether they have interpreted Scripture faithfully. That remains the right question. Yet perhaps another belongs beside it.

Who is the person doing the interpreting becoming?

Scripture does more than reveal God. It reveals the reader. Every encounter with God’s Word is therefore an invitation for the Holy Spirit to reform the one reading it.

Perhaps the first responsibility of Christian leadership is this: remaining willing, again and again, to be interpreted by the very Scriptures we set out to interpret.

This is the first in a three-part series on formation, interpretation and leadership. Part two looks at how these patterns become organisational culture.

Scripture cited

• Matthew 13:18: The Parable of the Sower, the seed unchanged while the soil, the hearer’s condition, differs

• Luke 24:21: The Emmaus disciples’ disappointment, shaped by expectations already formed before Christ spoke

• Luke 24:27: Christ returning the disciples to the same Scriptures, now read through a changed horizon

• Acts 10:34: Peter’s perception shifting only after his formation was unsettled

• John 5:39: The religious leaders who studied the Scriptures thoroughly yet failed to recognise what they pointed to

• Hebrews 4:12: The Word as the one doing the discerning, judging the reader rather than the reader judging it

• Psalm 139:23-24: David’s prayer of self-examination as an interpretative posture in itself

Further Reading

• Augustine. Confessions. Free full text: New Advent. Oxford edition: OUP.

• Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. Free full text: New Advent. Oxford edition: OUP.

• Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2004. ISBN 9780826476975. Purchase: Amazon.

• McFadyen, Alistair I. The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Purchase: Cambridge University Press. Free to borrow: Internet Archive.

• Osmer, Richard R. Practical Theology: An Introduction. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Purchase: Amazon.

• Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. Publisher page: Baker Academic.

• Swinton, John, and Harriet Mowat. Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press, 2016. Publisher page: SCM Press.

• Thiselton, Anthony C. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. London: HarperCollins / Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992. Free to borrow: Internet Archive.

• Village, Andrew. “Psychological Type and Biblical Interpretation Among Anglican Clergy in the UK.” Journal of Empirical Theology 23, no. 2 (2010): 179-200. Free full text: York St John Repository. Published version: DOI: 10.1163/157092510X527349.

Welcome to the Formation Room, a space for Bible-based devotions for leaders called to serve in the marketplace.

In each devotion, we open Scripture and consider how God forms the person behind the leadership, the business, the ministry and the public assignment.

Before we begin, let’s pray.

Father,

Search my heart and reveal what I cannot yet see.

Guard me from allowing fear, pride, resentment, insecurity or misplaced ambition to shape how I lead.

Form my inner life through Your Spirit so that my thoughts, words and decisions increasingly reflect the wisdom of Christ.

Teach me to steward my heart with diligence because every area of my leadership flows from it.

May my life become a faithful witness to Your transforming work, and may those I lead experience the fruit of a heart formed by Your truth.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Theme: Emotional Formation

Scripture: Proverbs 4:20–27, NKJV

“Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life.”
Proverbs 4:23, NKJV

Before continuing, take some time to read Proverbs 4:20–27 slowly.

²⁰ My son, give attention to my words;
Incline your ear to my sayings.

²¹ Do not let them depart from your eyes;
Keep them in the midst of your heart;

²² For they are life to those who find them,
And health to all their flesh.

²³ Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life.

²⁴ Put away from you a deceitful mouth,
And put perverse lips far from you.

²⁵ Let your eyes look straight ahead,
And your eyelids look right before you.

²⁶ Ponder the path of your feet,
And let all your ways be established.

²⁷ Do not turn to the right or the left;
Remove your foot from evil.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

What the Passage Is Teaching

Proverbs 4 forms part of Solomon’s extended instruction to his son. Rather than presenting a collection of disconnected sayings, chapters 1–9 are structured as a series of paternal teachings that urge the pursuit of wisdom over folly.

The language is covenantal rather than merely educational. Solomon is not simply transferring information. He is forming a way of life.

The repeated address, “My son,” reflects more than a family relationship. It echoes the pattern of covenant discipleship in Israel, where wisdom is passed from one generation to another through faithful instruction.

Proverbs assumes that leadership begins long before public influence. It begins with the formation of the inner person.

Verse 23 sits at the centre of this passage:

“Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life.”

The Hebrew word translated keep, nāṣar, carries the sense of guarding, preserving, watching over or maintaining something precious. It is often used when speaking about guarding a city or protecting something entrusted to your care.

Solomon therefore presents the heart as something that requires active stewardship, rather than passive observation.

In Hebrew thought, the heart is much broader than emotion. It refers to the centre of the whole inner person, including:

• Thought

• Desire

• Will

• Affection

• Conscience

• Memory

• Moral decision-making

Throughout Proverbs, wisdom or folly flows from the condition of the heart.

The phrase “with all diligence” literally carries the idea of guarding above every other guard. The construction intensifies the command.

Of everything a disciple is responsible to protect, the heart receives the highest priority.

Why?

“For out of it spring the issues of life.”

The imagery is that of a fountain or source. Everything visible in life emerges from an unseen spring.

• Speech

• Decisions

• Relationships

• Leadership

• Stewardship

• Integrity

All of these are downstream realities.

The passage then shows how guarding the heart affects the whole person.

Verse 24 addresses speech:

“Put away from you a deceitful mouth.”

Verse 25 addresses vision:

“Let your eyes look straight ahead.”

Verse 26 addresses direction:

“Ponder the path of your feet.”

Verse 27 addresses moral consistency:

“Do not turn to the right or the left.”

The movement is deliberate.

The heart shapes the mouth. The mouth influences attention. Attention directs the path. The path determines the course of a person’s life.

Scripture consistently moves from the inside outward.

Two Paths of Formation

Proverbs 4 contrasts two competing paths:

• The path of wisdom

• The path of the wicked

The contrast is about more than behaviour. It is about formation.

One path becomes brighter:

“But the path of the just is like the shining sun,
That shines ever brighter unto the perfect day.”
Proverbs 4:18, NKJV

The other grows darker.

Wisdom is therefore progressive formation. A person’s direction matters more than isolated moments because repeated choices gradually shape character.

This is why the condition of the heart matters so deeply. The heart influences the choices we repeat, and the choices we repeat gradually determine the kind of person we become.

The Heart Throughout Scripture

The command to guard the heart continues throughout Scripture.

Deuteronomy repeatedly commands Israel to love God with all the heart.

Jeremiah exposes the corruption of the heart apart from God’s transforming work:

“The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?”
Jeremiah 17:9, NKJV

Ezekiel promises that God will give His people a new heart and a new spirit:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.”
Ezekiel 36:26, NKJV

Jesus also teaches:

“For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Matthew 12:34, NKJV

And again:

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Matthew 6:21, NKJV

The New Testament deepens the teaching of Proverbs. Through the Spirit, believers receive a transformed heart, but they are also called to continue stewarding that transformed life.

God gives a new heart, and the disciple must learn how to guard what God is forming.

What This Reveals About Spiritual Maturity

Scripture never separates spiritual maturity from the condition of the inner person.

It is possible to master external disciplines while neglecting the heart.

A leader may develop strong communication skills while resentment continues to grow internally.

A business owner may expand their influence while fear quietly governs their decisions.

A pastor may preach faithfully while approval becomes the hidden source of identity.

Proverbs refuses to evaluate life primarily by visible outcomes. It asks a more fundamental question:

What is producing those outcomes?

The biblical vision of leadership begins at the source.

Kingdom leadership is not sustained by talent alone. It is not sustained by gifting alone.

It is sustained by a heart continually yielded to the wisdom of God.

What This Reveals About Emotional Formation

Guarding the heart is not emotional suppression.

Neither is it emotional indulgence.

It is intentional stewardship.

Every emotion invites discernment.

• Fear asks what you believe about God.

• Anger exposes what you value.

• Shame reveals where identity has become misplaced.

• Envy uncovers misplaced worship.

• Joy reminds you of God’s goodness.

Emotion is therefore neither master nor enemy. It is part of the inner life entrusted to God’s transforming work.

The wise leader learns to examine emotions before acting upon them.

The foolish leader allows unexamined emotions to become leadership decisions.

Formation happens in the pause between feeling and responding.

That pause creates room for truth, prayer, wisdom and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

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What This Means for Leadership

Every organisation eventually reflects the heart of its leadership.

A founder driven by anxiety will often create an anxious culture.

A leader governed by insecurity will frequently centralise control.

A coach seeking approval may struggle to challenge clients faithfully.

A ministry leader who has never addressed hidden ambition may unintentionally build a platform around personal significance rather than Kingdom service.

Strategy matters.

Systems matter.

Execution matters.

Yet Proverbs insists that all of them ultimately flow from the unseen life of the leader.

The most strategic investment a Kingdom leader can make is not simply improving external performance.

It is faithfully stewarding the heart from which every leadership decision emerges.

Personal Reflection

Reflect prayerfully on these questions:

• What has occupied your heart most during the past week?

• Which emotions have most influenced your recent decisions?

• What patterns repeatedly emerge in your speech when you are under pressure?

• What are those patterns revealing about the condition of your heart?

• Where is God inviting you to cultivate wisdom rather than merely change your behaviour?

• What practical rhythms help you guard your heart before entering places of leadership and influence?

Closing Prayer

Father,

Search my heart and reveal what I cannot yet see.

Guard me from allowing fear, pride, resentment, insecurity or misplaced ambition to shape how I lead.

Form my inner life through Your Spirit so that my thoughts, words and decisions increasingly reflect the wisdom of Christ.

Teach me to steward my heart with diligence because every area of my leadership flows from it.

May my life become a faithful witness to Your transforming work, and may those I lead experience the fruit of a heart formed by Your truth.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Continue the Conversation

The Formation Room is part of The Marketplace Theologian, where I write about leadership, emotional and spiritual formation, business, ministry and public life through a biblical lens.

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Paid subscribers are invited to The Kings & Priests Roundtable, a confidential monthly gathering for leaders serving in the church, the marketplace, and public life.

Pastors, ministry leaders, entrepreneurs, founders, professionals, coaches, and consultants come together for theological reflection, practical discernment, peer-level exchange, live case reflection, thoughtful challenge, and prayer.

It is a space to examine assumptions, learn across contexts, and consider what faithful Kingdom leadership requires in both the church and the marketplace when responsibility has been entrusted.

In each devotion, we open Scripture and consider how God forms the person behind the leadership, the business, the ministry and the public assignment.

Opening Prayer

Father, we come before You with open hearts and submitted minds.

As we turn to Your Word, quiet every distraction and bring our attention under the guidance of Your Spirit. Give us understanding beyond information. Show us what this passage reveals about You, about leadership and about the way You are forming us.

Search our motives, expose the patterns that are limiting our obedience and give us the humility to receive correction.

Where we have confused responsibility with control, faithfulness with exhaustion or calling with carrying everything alone, bring clarity.

Teach us to lead in a way that reflects Your wisdom. Help us recognise what You have assigned to us, what You are asking us to release and who You are calling us to trust.

Let this time in Scripture produce practical change in the way we lead, serve and steward what You have placed in our hands.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Theme: Leadership Formation

Scripture: Exodus 18:13–27, NKJV

Exodus 18:21 says:

“Moreover you shall select from all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”

Before continuing, take some time to read the entire passage slowly.

¹³ And so it was, on the next day, that Moses sat to judge the people; and the people stood before Moses from morning until evening. ¹⁴ So when Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he did for the people, he said, “What is this thing that you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit, and all the people stand before you from morning until evening?”

¹⁵ And Moses said to his father-in-law, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God. ¹⁶ When they have a difficulty, they come to me, and I judge between one and another; and I make known the statutes of God and His laws.”

¹⁷ So Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “The thing that you do is not good. ¹⁸ Both you and these people who are with you will surely wear yourselves out. For this thing is too much for you; you are not able to perform it by yourself. ¹⁹ Listen now to my voice; I will give you counsel, and God will be with you: Stand before God for the people, so that you may bring the difficulties to God. ²⁰ And you shall teach them the statutes and the laws, and show them the way in which they must walk and the work they must do. ²¹ Moreover you shall select from all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens. ²² And let them judge the people at all times. Then it will be that every great matter they shall bring to you, but every small matter they themselves shall judge. So it will be easier for you, for they will bear the burden with you. ²³ If you do this thing, and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure, and all this people will also go to their place in peace.”

²⁴ So Moses heeded the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said. ²⁵ And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people: rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens. ²⁶ So they judged the people at all times; the hard^[d] cases they brought to Moses, but they judged every small case themselves.

²⁷ Then Moses let his father-in-law depart, and he went his way to his own land.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

What the Passage Is Teaching

Exodus 18 sits at a pivotal point in Israel’s story.

The nation has been delivered from Egypt, but they have not yet received the Law at Sinai. They are free, but they are still learning how the people of God are meant to live.

Leadership formation comes before covenant instruction.

That is significant because Scripture consistently presents leadership as a matter of character before competence.

The chapter begins with Jethro observing Moses as he judges the people’s disputes from morning until evening. Moses is attempting to carry the burden of an entire nation alone.

His intentions are honourable. The problem is not that he is lazy or unwilling to work. The problem is that he is operating within an unhealthy leadership model.

Jethro’s assessment is remarkably direct.

He says:

“The thing that you do is not good. Both you and these people who are with you will surely wear yourselves out.”

The Hebrew construction emphasises certainty. Weariness is presented as the inevitable outcome of Moses’ current pattern.

This is more than poor time management. It is a structural problem.

Jethro then offers Moses a different pattern.

Moses is to remain responsible for:

• Teaching God’s statutes

• Interceding before God

• Deciding the most difficult matters

Everything else is to be entrusted to qualified leaders.

Now, notice the qualifications.

Before discussing ability, the text begins with reverence:

• “Fear God.”

Then integrity:

• “Men of truth.”

Then stewardship:

• “Hating covetousness.”

Only after character does administration appear.

Modern leadership frequently reverses this order. Scripture does not.

• Leadership begins with worship.

• Character produces trustworthy judgement.

• Trustworthy judgement creates healthy systems.

• Healthy systems protect both leaders and people.

Verse 23 contains another important observation.

Jethro says:

“If you do this thing, and God so commands you...”

Jethro’s advice remains subject to divine authority.

Wise counsel is welcomed, but it must still be tested under God’s direction. Even excellent leadership advice must remain accountable to God’s voice.

And Moses listens.

There is no recorded defensiveness. There is no insecurity. There is no attempt to protect his position.

He immediately implements structural change.

The chapter ends with a healthier leadership community, rather than a more impressive individual leader.

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Why This Moment Matters in Israel’s Story

This narrative also functions as preparation for Sinai.

Israel cannot receive God’s covenant while depending upon one exhausted leader. Covenant life requires distributed responsibility.

The structure of Exodus reflects this progression:

• God delivers His people.

• God forms His people.

• God establishes healthy leadership among His people.

The organisation of leadership is therefore part of Israel’s formation. It is more than administrative convenience.

How This Pattern Continues Through Scripture

This principle continues throughout Scripture.

• In Numbers 11, God places His Spirit upon seventy elders so they can share Moses’ burden.

• In Acts 6, the apostles appoint servants so that prayer and the ministry of the Word can remain central.

• Ephesians 4 teaches that leaders equip the saints for ministry rather than attempting to perform every ministry themselves.

• First Peter 5 describes shepherds serving willingly and eagerly rather than controlling God’s people.

Across Scripture, mature leadership consistently moves from centralisation towards multiplication.

What This Reveals About Kingdom Leadership

This passage challenges a subtle assumption that can be found in both church and business.

Many leaders unconsciously believe they are indispensable.

Sometimes that belief comes from:

• Pride

• Insecurity

• Genuine compassion

• Unresolved identity

Whatever the source, the result is remarkably similar.

Leadership becomes centred on the leader rather than on God’s ordering of His people.

Moses was indispensable to Israel’s calling. He was never intended to be indispensable to every conversation.

There is an important theological distinction between calling and capacity.

God’s calling is often larger than an individual’s capacity because His purposes are designed to form communities rather than heroes.

Leadership therefore includes learning how to steward our limitations faithfully.

Jesus Himself demonstrates this.

Although He was perfectly capable:

• He invested deeply in twelve disciples.

• Within the twelve, He invested more closely in three.

• He frequently withdrew to pray.

• He left work unfinished because the Father had assigned that work to the Church, empowered by the Spirit.

Perfect leadership did not attempt universal availability. It practised perfect obedience.

What This Reveals About the Leader

Leadership often reveals our spiritual formation more clearly than private devotion.

A leader who cannot delegate may be dealing with more than an operational problem.

They may:

• Struggle to trust others because of previous betrayal

• Fear becoming unnecessary

• Derive their identity from being needed

• Confuse control with stewardship

Formation requires us to ask a deeper question:

What emotional need is being satisfied by remaining indispensable?

Exodus 18 does not condemn hard work.

It exposes leadership patterns that will eventually consume both the leader and the people.

Healthy leadership requires internal surrender before external delegation.

What This Means for Your Leadership

For marketplace leaders, founders, coaches and consultants, Exodus 18 offers several enduring principles.

• Build systems before growth demands them.

• Select people primarily for character and integrity before skill.

• Reserve your highest energy for the work that only you are called to do.

• Recognise that exhaustion can sometimes be evidence of poor stewardship rather than faithfulness.

• Evaluate every expanding responsibility by asking, “Has God actually assigned this to me?”

Many businesses plateau because founders continue operating as technicians rather than forming leaders.

Kingdom businesses scale through the stewardship of people, rather than the accumulation of personal control.

Personal Reflection

Now, take some time to reflect slowly.

• Which responsibilities has God genuinely entrusted to you?

• Which responsibilities have you assumed without His assignment?

• Where has your identity become attached to being needed?

• What would faithful delegation require you to trust God with?

• Which areas of your leadership currently depend too heavily upon your presence?

• How might your team, family, ministry or business become healthier if you focused more on forming leaders than solving every problem?

Closing Prayer

Father, teach me to lead from trust rather than control.

Form my character before You enlarge my influence.

Give me wisdom to distinguish between what You have assigned to me and what belongs to others.

Guard me from building leadership around my own strength instead of Your purposes.

Raise up faithful people around me whose character reflects Yours.

Help me to steward authority with humility, courage and dependence upon Your Spirit.

May those I lead become stronger because they are being formed into mature disciples and leaders, rather than remaining dependent upon me.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.

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The Formation Room is part of The Marketplace Theologian, where I write about leadership, emotional and spiritual formation, business, ministry and public life through a biblical lens.

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Control does not always look like control.

Sometimes it looks like being responsible.
Sometimes it sounds like wisdom.
Sometimes it hides inside strategy, peace, discernment, prayer, planning, or even a verse of Scripture.

In this episode of LIVE at the Public Square, I’m asking a question that every Christian leader, minister, business owner, and marketplace leader needs to sit with:

What if the thing you’ve been calling wisdom is actually control wearing more acceptable clothing?

We’ll explore how control can quietly shape the way we lead, decide, plan, pray, build, measure, and respond under pressure. This is not about becoming careless, passive, or unprepared. It is about learning to recognise when stewardship has crossed into something God never asked us to carry.

If you have ever felt responsible for holding everything together, making sure people respond the right way, avoiding the wrong outcome, protecting the image, securing the result, or making obedience feel safe before you move, this episode will give language to something you may not have known how to name.

Reflection question
What am I trying to secure that God only asked me to steward?

LIVE at The Public Square with JJ Clarke is the audio and video extension of The Marketplace Theologian: the conversations the Church and the marketplace are not having.

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Have you ever spent far too long adjusting something that was already ready to be released?

Perhaps you’ve rewritten the same section of content several times, changed the date of an event, changed it back, and then questioned whether the event should happen at all. Perhaps you’ve delayed a conversation because you wanted to anticipate every possible response. Perhaps you’ve prayed, sought counsel, reviewed the facts, and still found yourself returning to the same decision because you hoped that, with enough thought, the risk would finally disappear.

Most people would call that perfectionism.

But perfectionism never fully explained me or my actions. I’ve always valued progress over perfection. I’m willing to build, test, learn, make changes, and continue moving. The issue wasn’t that I needed everything to be flawless.

For years, instead of calling it perfectionism, I called it overthinking.

I’ve often described myself as a ‘professional’ overthinker.

I remember writing the launch strategy for my Kingdom business and leadership community. I’d planned to go live every week on TikTok, at 7pm UK. The plan was clear. The content was prepared. Yet the first week came and went while I continued debating if I’d chosen the best time to go live.

Should it be earlier for one part of my audience? Later for another? Would people be available? Should I go LIVE twice a week? Twice in one day? Was the day right? Would another time or day produce a better response? Should I consider a weekend?

By the second week, I was still going back and forth. I sat there thinking about time zones, audience habits, scheduling, engagement, visibility, and every other practical consideration I could find. Eventually, I put my head in my hands and said out loud, “JJ, you really need to figure out this overthinking thing.”

What came to me in that moment surprised me.

I sensed the Holy Spirit exposing something I hadn’t recognised clearly before: You don’t have an overthinking problem. You’re trying to control outcomes, and that’s not your job.

That hit me like a tonne of bricks.

The decision about what time to go live was never really about the time. It wasn’t about navigating a global audience either. I was trying to find the time that would guarantee the right response. I wanted to minimise the possibility of nobody attending, people missing it, or the launch failing to produce what I hoped it would produce.

Now don’t get me wrong. Launches require planning. Strategising for a global audience is part of that planning. But here’s what I don’t want you to miss. I’d already made a strategic decision. I’d already written a solid strategy. What I should’ve been doing was implementing. Instead, I went back to the strategy boardroom. I got my thinking in a loop.

I was trying to take responsibility for things that were not mine to control.

That’s where the search for certainty becomes a formation issue.

So, real quick, what is formation?

Formation asks what has shaped the way you now respond to pressure, uncertainty, responsibility, and the possibility of getting something wrong. It asks what you may have learned about safety, visibility, trust, failure, and control long before the current decision appeared.

Perhaps you learned that being wrong brought criticism, shame, rejection, or a loss of trust. Perhaps your judgement was dismissed often enough that you now look outside yourself for confirmation before you can move. Perhaps a decision in the past went badly, and part of you has quietly made every future decision responsible for protecting you from that kind of pain.

You may not recognise this as formation at first. You may call it caution, perfectionism, overthinking, self-doubt, or simply needing more time. Yet beneath the behaviour may sit an older belief: uncertainty is unsafe; mistakes cost too much; I need to secure the outcome before I can move.

That belief can shape the way you lead.

You may return to decisions that are already sufficiently clear because being wrong feels dangerous. You may seek reassurance after you’ve already received wise counsel because you’ve learned that your own judgement can’t be trusted. You may delay boundaries, visibility, conversations, pricing decisions, launches, applications, or acts of obedience because the decision feels like more than a decision.

It feels like a test of whether you can avoid criticism, disappointment, embarrassment, loss, or the possibility of having to begin again.

You may still look responsible from the outside. You may still be praying, seeking counsel, reviewing the numbers, and doing your due diligence. Yet underneath the process may sit a quieter demand: I need to know this will work before I move.

That’s difficult because leadership regularly requires you to act without controlling what follows.

You can’t control how someone receives a boundary. You can’t control whether a client says yes. You can’t control how many people attend the event. You can’t control whether people understand your decision. You can’t control whether an opportunity produces the future you hoped it would produce.

You can prepare well. You can communicate honestly. You can count the cost. You can seek wisdom. You can act with integrity.

But you can’t guarantee the outcome.

Myles Munroe said that planning is the highest form of faith.

I understand what he meant. Planning can be an act of faith because it takes seriously what God has entrusted to you. You prepare the teaching. You make provision. You build the structure. You organise your time. You count the cost. You don’t call poor preparation faith.

But planning stops serving faith as soon as we turn it into an attempt to remove the need for faith.

When you keep revising the plan because you’re trying to guarantee the response, planning has moved beyond stewardship. You’re asking it to give you control over an outcome that remains in God’s hands.

Proverbs 16:3 and 16:9 hold that tension together:

“Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established.”
— Proverbs 16:3, NKJV

“A man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”
— Proverbs 16:9, NKJV

Read together, these verses don’t set planning against faith. They place planning within a posture of dependence. Verse 3 calls for active commitment, bringing your works, your preparation, your strategy before God. Verse 9 reminds you that even your best-laid plans remain under God’s governance. The Hebrew behind “directs” carries the sense of establishing or making firm. God doesn’t override your steps because you planned poorly. He governs the path, the timing, and the outcome, even when you’ve planned well.

Open hands don’t mean empty hands. They mean active faith, wise preparation, and surrendered outcomes.

James 4:13-15 goes further, confronting the assumption that we can speak about the future as though it belongs to us to secure:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.’”
— James 4:13-15, NKJV

James isn’t rebuking the business plan. He’s rebuking the posture behind it. The people he’s addressing have made plans that leave no room for God. They’ve spoken about the future as though it’s already settled, as though their preparation has secured the outcome. James calls that presumption. The corrective isn’t passivity. It isn’t vagueness. It’s a posture of dependence: if the Lord wills. That phrase doesn’t mean you stop building. It means you build with open hands.

This is where the doctrine of providence matters. David Fergusson’s work on providence resists simplistic language about God controlling every detail while still affirming God’s continuing care, purpose, and involvement in creation. Providence gives us a theological frame for responsibility without sovereignty. We act, choose, prepare, and build. God remains God. The future remains within God’s providential care.

That distinction matters for leaders.

You’re responsible for the next faithful step: preparing the teaching, setting the date, having the conversation, making the offer, setting the boundary, submitting the application, or releasing the work. You’re not responsible for making that step produce the exact result you hoped for.

You can influence the response through preparation, wisdom, and integrity. You can’t secure it.

Gerald Sittser, a theologian, historian of Christianity, and Professor at Whitworth University, wrote in his book, The Will of God as a Way of Life, challenges the assumption that discernment is chiefly about decoding a hidden future. He directs attention towards the faithfulness already required in the present: the responsibilities in front of you, the character required of you, and the obedience that’s already become clear.

That reframes the search for certainty.

The question may not always be, “What else do I need to know before I move?”

Sometimes it is, “What have I already been shown that I’m delaying because I can’t secure the outcome?”

That’s a more searching question because it doesn’t allow discernment to become a respectable name for avoidance.

It also protects us from another error. Faith doesn’t mean acting carelessly, ignoring wisdom, or treating practical preparation as a lack of trust in God. Faithful planning is part of stewardship. A leader who refuses to prepare and then calls the consequences faith has confused dependence on God with irresponsibility.

The issue isn’t whether you plan.

The issue is whether you’re asking planning to give you sovereignty.

You may still feel nervous before you go live. You may still need to make a difficult decision with incomplete information. You may still need to release work without knowing how it’ll be received. You may still need to say yes or no without being able to predict what it’ll mean six months from now.

But you can stop making the decision responsible for protecting you from every possible outcome.

You can stop negotiating with clarity because uncertainty feels uncomfortable.

You can become more conscious of what fear is asking you to carry.

You can return to the work of discernment with a clearer boundary between responsibility and control.

The formation question isn’t simply whether you overthink.

The question is:

What has formed your need for certainty, and what outcome are you trying to control because uncertainty feels too costly to carry?

References

• David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

• Gerald L. Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life: How to Make Every Decision with Peace and Confidence (Zondervan, revised edition, 2004).

Scripture References

• Proverbs 16:3 (NKJV)

• Proverbs 16:9 (NKJV

• James 4:13-15 (NKJV)

I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that not every good opportunity belongs to you in every season.

That can be difficult to admit when the opportunity appears connected to your calling. It may put you in the right room. It may bring visibility, relationships, income, credibility, access, influence, or a route towards work you have prayed about for years.

It may be an invitation you genuinely want.

It may also be a door you could force open if you were willing to rearrange enough of your life to make it happen.

That is where discernment becomes more serious than asking whether something is good.

A good opportunity can still compete with a responsibility already entrusted to you.

A visible opportunity can still require you to neglect work that is less public, less exciting, and more necessary.

A strategic yes can still be poorly ordered.

As leaders, we often know this intellectually. The difficulty is living it when saying no feels as though you are losing ground.

You may tell yourself that this is the room where a decision about your future will be made. This is the person you need to meet. This is the opportunity that could create the next stage of your work. This is the moment you cannot afford to miss.

Sometimes that may be true.

But sometimes the pressure underneath the opportunity is not faith. It is the belief that you must secure the outcome yourself to ensure it works out.

That belief can make you overextend.

You say yes while carrying something else that needs your full attention. You stretch your finances to avoid missing an opportunity. You take on extra preparation, travel, visibility, delivery, meetings, or relational obligations, then wonder why your existing responsibilities have become harder to commit to.

The issue is not always capacity in the practical sense.

Sometimes the issue is control.

You may be trying to make sure that the future arrives in the form you have imagined.

That is worth paying close attention to.

Control often does not sound like control while you are inside it. It can sound like stewardship. It can sound like being strategic, responsive, available, prepared, or serious about the assignment.

But control begins to show itself when you feel unable to let a good opportunity pass without trying to force it into your life. When the possibility of missing a connection, a room, a platform, or a future outcome feels more threatening than neglecting what is already in your hands.

At that point, the question is no longer simply whether the opportunity is good. The question is whether you are trying to manage an outcome God has not asked you to secure.

Jesus gives us one of the clearest pictures of this.

In Mark 1, His public ministry is gathering momentum. He has taught in the synagogue, cast out an unclean spirit, and healed many people. The demand is real. The need is real. The opportunity to remain where people are responding is real.

Yet Jesus does not allow public demand to determine His next move.

Mark 1:35–39, says:

“Now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place; and there He prayed. And Simon and those who were with Him searched for Him. When they found Him, they said to Him, ‘Everyone is looking for You.’

But He said to them, ‘Let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also, because for this purpose I have come forth.’

And He was preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and casting out demons.”
— Mark 1:35–39, NKJV

“Everyone is looking for You” could easily become a governing sentence in the life of a leader.

Everyone has questions.

Everyone wants answers.

Everyone wants access.

Everyone sees the value of the opportunity.

Everyone can explain why it would make sense for you to stay, to attend, accept, to speak, to travel, to build, or to respond.

But Jesus had withdrawn to pray. His availability was ordered by communion with the Father and clarity about His purpose. Healing the sick and serving those in need were also part of His ministry.

He did not deny the need.
He did not suggest that the people mattered less.
He did not withdraw from responsibility.
He refused to allow immediate demand to redefine the work He had been sent to do.

The point is not that these needs sat outside Jesus’ purpose. The point is that immediate demand did not determine where, when, or how He carried out that purpose.

That is a serious question for leaders carrying public responsibility.

What is currently determining your next decision?

Is it prayerful clarity about what God has assigned to you in this season?

Or is it the pressure created by need, visibility, access, expectation, or the fear of losing momentum?

I have had to sit with that question in relation to a recent opportunity to return to Ghana in August 2026 for mission work. It is meaningful work. It would involve ministry, teaching, relationships, and conversations that may shape future doors. Part of me wanted to make it happen because of what it could lead to. In fact, I had already agreed to go and accepted speaking engagements to speak at the Pan-African Symposium.

However, I am also in a season of completing my academic studies. The dissertation work in front of me, due on 1 September, is not as visible and does not carry the same immediate sense of momentum. But this is more than a commitment I made to myself. I had already sensed the Holy Spirit directing me to give priority to my academic work in this season. That means it cannot receive whatever energy is left after everything else. It requires my attention, discipline, and obedience.

The question was not whether mission work in Ghana was good. It was.

The question I had to grapple with was one of discernment.

Was I being asked to make this particular opportunity happen now, or was I being formed to remain faithful to the work already requiring my attention?

By formation, I mean the way repeated choices, pressures, experiences, and acts of obedience shape the person we are becoming.

In this case, saying no was not only about protecting time for my dissertation. It was also about learning whether I could trust God with a future I could not secure by forcing one good opportunity into a season already full of responsibility. I had to decide whether I would honour the direction I believed He had already given me, even when another meaningful opportunity was in front of me.

I was disappointed about turning down the Ghana opportunity because I knew I could make it work. But disappointment does not mean a decision lacks wisdom. Sometimes disappointment is the cost of allowing a good opportunity to remain good without making it yours in that season.

Acts 16 gives us another category we need.

Paul and his companions were travelling with the intention of preaching the gospel in new places. The work itself was good. The desire was good. The potential fruit was good.

Yet the Spirit redirected them.

“Now when they had gone through Phrygia and the region of Galatia, they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia. After they had come to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit did not permit them. So passing by Mysia, they came down to Troas.

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia stood and pleaded with him, saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ Now after he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go to Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them.”
— Acts 16:6–10, NKJV

The mission was not less Kingdom because the Spirit did not permit it at that point.

This matters because, as leaders, we can assume that every good opportunity to serve must be pursued immediately.

Acts 16 shows us that even the work of preaching the Gospel is subject to God’s direction, timing, and assignment.

It gives us a different way to understand good opportunities.

A good opportunity may be wrongly timed.
It may compete with what God is currently directing you to do.
It may be fruitful, meaningful, and worth returning to at another time. But it may not be yours to walk into now.

Direction matters as much as desire. Learning to recognise that is part of good stewardship.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz and colleagues carried out research to compare people who tend to keep searching for the best possible choice with people who are more able to make a suitable decision and move forward.

This is what they called “maximising”: the tendency to pursue the best possible option rather than deciding that an option is sufficiently good.

Across seven separate participant groups, people with stronger “maximising” tendencies were more likely to report:

• less happiness and life satisfaction

• less optimism and self-esteem

• more regret after decisions

• more perfectionistic tendencies

This was not a study of Christian leadership, calling, or ministry, and it should not be treated as one. But it still offers a useful caution. The persistent drive to secure the best possible outcome can make it harder to commit faithfully to the responsibility already in front of you. Read the study here.

There is a spiritual version of this.

You may keep looking for the more strategic route. The more influential room. The more impressive connection. The more visible opportunity. The path that appears to guarantee the future you want.

And while you are searching for the ideal route, you may become less present to the actual work of this season.

The dissertation.

The recovery you have postponed.

The family responsibility.

The financial stewardship.

The boundary you need to establish.

The work you have already promised to complete.

The quieter assignment that does not look like advancement, but may be forming the leader you will need to become when greater responsibility arrives.

Nehemiah gives us a further leadership principle.

His situation is different. The invitation he received was not a good opportunity. Scripture tells us that Sanballat and Geshem intended to harm him. Yet the passage speaks clearly to the way leaders must weigh invitations against work already entrusted to them.

“Now it happened when Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arab, and the rest of our enemies heard that I had rebuilt the wall, and that there were no breaks left in it, though at that time I had not hung the doors in the gates, that Sanballat and Geshem sent to me, saying, ‘Come, let us meet together among the villages in the plain of Ono.’ But they thought to do me harm.

So I sent messengers to them, saying, ‘I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down. Why should the work cease while I leave it and go down to you?’

But they sent me this message four times, and I answered them in the same manner.”
— Nehemiah 6:1–4, NKJV

Nehemiah did not treat every invitation as an assignment.

He weighed the request against the work already in his hands, the context surrounding it, and the pattern of the people making it.

His response shows healthy discernment: he did not allow a reasonable-sounding invitation to pull him away from work he was already responsible for completing.

Some invitations will look reasonable. Some may even sound strategic. But a request can still pull you away from work that needs your attention, weaken your focus, or draw you into a responsibility that was never assigned to you.

Not every invitation deserves equal access to your time, attention, energy, location, or presence.

This is where as a leader, you need to be honest about what saying yes may cost you.

What would have to cease for you to take this opportunity?

What work would receive less attention?

What responsibility would become harder to carry?

What promise would you need to break, delay, or dilute?

What are you trying to secure by making this happen now?

Faithfulness is often less dramatic than control.

Control asks, “What could this lead to?”

Faithfulness asks, “What has God already entrusted to me?”

Control fears that one missed opportunity will derail the future.

Faithfulness trusts that God’s favour is not limited to one event, one room, one introduction, one launch, one conversation, or one visible door.

That trust does not make disappointment disappear.

You may feel sad about the opportunity you decline. You may even grieve what it might have opened up. You may need to explain your decision to people who expected you to say yes.

Sadness does not prove the decision was wrong.

It may simply mean the opportunity was genuinely good, which you already knew.

It also reminds us that discernment is not always a choice between good and bad.

Sometimes it is recognising what is rightly ordered for this season, and allowing a good opportunity to remain good without making it yours.

The formation questions I want to leave you with today are:

• What am I trying to control by saying yes to this opportunity?

• Am I trying to secure an outcome God has not asked me to secure?

• What work, responsibility, or season of obedience may be affected by this yes?

• Is this opportunity mine to walk into now, or is it simply a good opportunity that has not been assigned to me in this season?

Before You Say Yes - I have a gift for you

We’ve established that a good opportunity can compete with what God is asking of you in this season.

I created a simple Opportunity Discernment Audit to help you slow down, bring the details out of your head and onto the page, identify the pressure beneath the opportunity, and consider what this yes may cost.

It will not tell you what God is saying or replace prayer, Scripture, discernment, wise counsel, or practical wisdom. It is simply a tool to help you see the details more clearly, so that urgency, fear, or the need to secure an outcome do not make the decision for you.

Use it to get clear on the details, and lay the decision before God in prayer with greater honesty and clarity.

In this episode, I explore what may sit beneath second-guessing, overthinking, reassurance-seeking, delayed decisions, and the need for certainty. What looks like a confidence issue may be a formation pattern shaped by criticism, shame, rejection, betrayal, past mistakes, pressure, or fear of being wrong.

I share a practical Decision Discernment Audit to help you examine a significant decision before you make it, revisit it, or hand it over to someone else. It will help you identify what you know as fact, the pressure influencing the decision, what the situation may have activated in you, what wisdom requires, and what faithful obedience requires next.

This episode will help you distinguish between discernment, fear, wise caution, paralysis, and the urge to outsource responsibility to other people.

I also explore why discernment does not always mean complete certainty, how fear can make you distrust clarity you already had, why a good opportunity is not always yours to carry in a particular season, and the difference between receiving counsel and outsourcing your authority.

I share a personal reflection on a current decision involving mission work in Ghana and completing my dissertation, alongside biblical teaching from Romans 12:2, Hebrews 5:14, Isaiah 30:21, 1 Samuel 15, 1 Kings 12 and 13, Proverbs 3:5–6, Proverbs 11:14, and James 1:5.

Reflection question

Am I seeking clarity because I genuinely need it, or am I seeking certainty because I am afraid of what it will cost me to move?

LIVE at The Public Square with JJ Clarke is the audio and video extension of The Marketplace Theologian: the conversations the Church and the marketplace are not having.

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In this first Marketplace Theologian Live, I reflect on a frustrating personal experience that became a lesson in leadership formation.

After my laptop failed for the second time in four months while working on my Master’s dissertation, I found myself wrestling with a question many leaders have asked:

“Is this spiritual attack, or is God forming something in me through the resistance?”

This conversation explores:

• Why disruption often appears between intention and fulfilment
• The difference between resistance and defeat
• How interpretation shapes our response to pressure
• What leadership formation looks like in real time
• Why obedience must not be governed by circumstances
• The role of discernment when facing setbacks

Key Reflection:

The disruption may not be the story. The formation may be the story.

About JJ Clarke

JJ Clarke is a Practical Theology Practitioner, Leadership Formation and Business Coach helping Christ-centred leaders discern what has shaped them, recognise the blind spots influencing how they lead, and bring their identity, leadership and business back under God’s formation.

Questions for Reflection

• Has this disruption changed what God asked you to do?
• Are you interpreting resistance as defeat?
• What is being formed in you through this pressure?
• What remains available for you to steward?
• What does obedience look like with the resources you still have?

#LeadershipFormation #MarketplaceTheologian #KingdomLeadership #PracticalTheology #FaithAndWork #LeadershipDevelopment #ChristianLeadership #SpiritualFormation #KingdomBusiness #LeadershipThoughts

Get more from JJ Clarke in the Substack app

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You may be the person everyone comes to.

The one who answers the message when it comes late. The one who notices what has been missed and quietly fills the gap. The one who takes the extra call, gives more than was agreed, and carries things other people have left unresolved.

You may not even describe yourself as a people-pleaser.

You may call it being dependable.

You may call it care.

You may call it service.

And sometimes, it is.

But what happens inside you when someone is disappointed with you?

When you say no to a request that you could technically make room for, but know you should not?

When you reply later than they hoped?

When you decide that someone else needs to carry the consequences of their own choices?

Do you feel guilty? Do you begin to explain yourself in more detail than the situation requires? Do you replay the conversation afterwards, wondering whether you were unkind, selfish, difficult, or somehow less faithful?

That is worth paying attention to.

People-pleasing is often treated as though it is simply a desire to be liked. It can be that. But for many people, it reaches further than that. It can involve a learned conviction that meeting other people’s needs is the safest way to remain connected, valued, or beyond criticism.

In their 1991 paper, “Parentification of the Child: A Case Study of Bowlby’s Compulsive Care-Giving Attachment Pattern,” Malcolm L. West and A. E. R. Keller explored what they described as compulsive caregiving. They defined it as an adult attachment pattern in which a person places greater emphasis on giving care in relationships than receiving it. Their case study connected this pattern with role reversal in childhood, where care for a parent became linked with attachment and connection.

This does not explain every difficulty with boundaries. It does, however, give language to a question worth asking: has caring for others become one of the ways you secure safety, connection, or value? Read the study here.

People-pleasing is always theological.

It rests on beliefs about love, service, sacrifice, obedience, responsibility, worth, and what God requires of you when other people are unhappy.

You may have learned that love means immediate access.

You may have learned that being helpful is how you remain safe in relationships.

You may have learned that saying no makes you selfish.

You may have learned that keeping the peace is more spiritual than telling the truth.

You may have learned that somebody else’s disappointment is evidence that you have done something wrong.

Those beliefs do not stay in the background. They become active in the decisions you make.

They show up in the messages you answer while you are meant to be resting. They show up in the work you complete without charging. They show up in the boundaries you keep postponing. They show up in the conversations you avoid because you know someone may not like what you have to say.

Over time, you can begin to organise your life around avoiding other people’s discomfort.

And that can look remarkably like faithfulness.

This is one reason people-pleasing can be difficult to confront in Christian leadership spaces. It can borrow the language of service. It can sound humble. It can present itself as sacrifice.

But Christian service is not the same as becoming available to every demand. Scripture does not ask you to abandon discernment in order to prove that you care.

Jesus withdrew to pray while people still needed Him. “So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed” (Luke 5:16, NKJV).

The wording in Luke suggests that this was a repeated pattern in Jesus’ life, rather than a single moment of withdrawal. He did not retreat because people were unimportant. He withdrew because His public ministry was ordered by prayer and communion with the Father, not simply by the pressure of immediate need.

The needs had not disappeared. The crowd had not suddenly become less demanding. Yet Jesus did not allow need to become the sole governor of His availability.

Paul names the deeper issue even more directly:

“For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.” Galatians 1:10, NKJV

The issue is not kindness. It is not compassion. It is not whether you are willing to serve.

The question is whether another person’s disappointment has become more governing in your life than the will of God.

The goal is not to eliminate sacrifice. The goal is to ensure that sacrifice flows from obedience to Christ rather than fear of disappointing people.

That does not make you distant. It shows us that love and availability are not the same thing.

You can care deeply and still have limits. You can be responsible and still allow another person to carry what belongs to them. You can serve faithfully without assuming responsibility for what God has entrusted to another person.

Galatians 6 holds a tension many of us need to recover.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2, NKJV).

Then Paul writes,

“For each one shall bear his own load” (Galatians 6:5, NKJV).

There are burdens people need help carrying.

There are also responsibilities that belong to them.

Discernment is learning to tell the difference without allowing guilt to make the decision for you.

A later study by Michal Braun, Sarah Hales, Lior Gilad, Mario Mikulincer, Anne Rydall, and Gary Rodin examined caregiving styles among 110 spouses caring for partners with advanced cancer. The authors found that compulsive caregiving was positively associated with caregiving demand and caregiver attachment anxiety. This was a specific clinical context, not a study of church leadership or entrepreneurship, so it should not be stretched beyond what it can bear.

Yet it supports a modest and useful observation: care can become entangled with anxiety, and anxiety can make it difficult to discern where responsibility ends. Read the study here.

The formation question is not whether you are caring enough.

It is whether fear has become entangled with your care.

When you say yes, is it because love requires it? Or because you are afraid of what it will mean if someone is unhappy with you?

The answer may require tenderness. These patterns rarely emerge in a vacuum. But tenderness does not mean leaving them unexamined.

Formation often requires a different practice. You may need to pause before answering, allow a message to wait, or state a boundary without building a case for why it is necessary. You may need to let someone experience the discomfort of carrying their own responsibility, then bring your own impulse to intervene before God in prayer.

None of this makes you less loving. It may be part of how you become free enough to love truthfully.

So perhaps the question is not simply whether you care too much.

The question is: what have you come to believe faithfulness requires when people are unhappy with you?

How is your theology of people-pleasing showing up in your leadership?

People often ask how I became interested in leadership formation.

The answer is that I arrived there long before I had language for it.

For most of my life, I thought I was interested in leadership, confidence, purpose, business, calling, and later theology. Looking back, I can see that a different question was quietly sitting underneath all of them.

What forms a person?

What shapes them beneath success, visibility and influence?

I did not begin asking that question in a classroom.

I began asking it through my own lived experience.

I grew up in church. Faith was not a late discovery for me. It was the environment in which I was raised. I served, participated, learned, and eventually held leadership responsibilities of my own. Yet some of the most significant moments of my formation occurred outside the neat categories I had inherited for understanding spiritual growth.

There were seasons that exposed the difference between outward faithfulness and inward formation.

One of those seasons culminated in the decision to call off a wedding to a minister. From the outside, it appeared to make little sense. The relationship looked acceptable. The future looked secure. Yet beneath the surface were dynamics that were emotionally and spiritually damaging.

Walking away required me to confront a question that would later reappear in many different forms.

How do you recognise when fear, obligation, expectation, or religious language are persuading you to remain loyal to something that is harming you?

At the time, I would not have described that as a formation question.

Now I definitely would.

Later came further experiences that forced similar confrontations with identity, worth, discernment, voice, and courage. Some of those experiences were painful. Some were deeply disappointing. Some painful. Some revealed how easily spiritual language can be used to clarify truth, and how easily it can be used to obscure clarity.

What interested me was never simply what happened.

It was what those experiences revealed in you and about you.

• Why do intelligent people stay in situations they know are unhealthy?

• Why do capable leaders ignore what they know?

• Why do some pressures mature us while others diminish us?

• Why do some people emerge from difficulty with greater clarity while others become trapped by it?

Years later, I found myself asking similar questions in a very different environment.

I spent more than sixteen years working within corporate settings, leading, influencing, solving global finance problems, and operating in high-pressure professional environments. The context had changed, but the underlying questions had not.

I observed capable leaders making decisions that could not be explained by competence alone.

I watched people delay action they knew they needed to take.

I saw fear presented as strategy, people-pleasing presented as service, exhaustion presented as commitment, and insecurity presented as perfectionism.

The presenting issue was rarely the real issue.

Something deeper was always at work.

By then I had moved into coaching and leadership development, and the same pattern continued.

Leaders wanted help with business growth, visibility, confidence, decision-making, communication, strategy, or execution.

Yet repeatedly I found myself drawn beneath the visible problem, again.

The question was rarely what they should do.

The question was what was shaping the person who needed to do it.

Practical Theology eventually gave me language for observations I had been making for years.

It provided a framework for thinking about formation, identity, discipleship, leadership, emotion, vocation, and obedience as interconnected realities rather than isolated subjects.

It helped me understand that formation is never confined to church activities. We are being formed in boardrooms, relationships, disappointments, responsibilities, ambitions, losses, successes, and pressures.

We are being formed while building businesses.

We are being formed while leading teams.

We are being formed while caring for ageing parents.

We are being formed while carrying responsibilities that nobody else sees.

The Marketplace Theologian emerged from those observations.

It exists because I believe many of the conversations leaders most need are happening in the gap between theology and lived experience.

The gap between Sunday and Monday.

The gap between public leadership and private formation.

The gap between what we are building and who we are becoming while we build it.

This publication is my attempt to explore that territory.

Not as someone who has mastered it.

As someone who has spent much of her life being formed by it.

Because formation is always happening.

The question is what is forming us.

One of the easiest ways to avoid obedience is to call fear a timing issue.

You’ll hear it in church leadership and you’ll hear it in business.

“It’s not the right season.”
“I need more clarity.”
“I’ll move when the conditions improve.”

Sometimes that’s true.

Sometimes waiting is wisdom.

But formation requires a deeper question:

How do you know whether time is genuinely the issue, or whether fear is speaking through the language of timing?

One way to discern the difference is to ask what would need to change before you acted.

If the answer is a genuine constraint, circumstances may eventually shift. Resources may become available. Responsibilities may change. Information may emerge that you do not currently possess.

The obstacle is external.

If the answer is fear, the conditions rarely change enough. The numbers never feel safe enough. The certainty never arrives. The risk remains. The cost remains. The invitation remains.

The obstacle is internal.

Fear often disguises itself as discernment because discernment sounds more spiritual and more responsible.

Yet over time, fear reveals itself by making the threshold for obedience permanently movable.

There is always one more reason to wait.

One more thing to resolve.

One more condition to satisfy.

That is why this is ultimately a formation question.

The issue is not simply whether you act today or six months from now.

The issue is what repeated delay is forming in you.

Every act of obedience forms trust.

Every act of avoidance forms dependence on certainty.

And certainty has never been a prerequisite for following God.

The question is not whether you are waiting.

The question is what your waiting is producing.

Your faithful service might be forming something in you that God didn’t ask you to carry.

That is the thought I want to sit with today.

I recently found a Bible study I created three years ago on biblical coaching and mentoring relationships. As I began working through it again, I returned to one of the obvious leadership relationships in Scripture: Jethro and Moses in Exodus 18.

I’m sure you know the passage.

“Choose capable men… appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.” Exodus 18:21

I have taught on this before. Most leadership conversations focus on delegation. But this time, something else stood out.

Jethro was not only solving a delegation problem.

He was exposing a formation problem.

Moses was carrying responsibility from morning until evening. He was doing what many leaders do. Seeing a need and stepping in. Carrying the weight. Being available. Solving the problems.

Yet Jethro’s response to what Moses may have considered faithful service was:

“What you are doing is not good.” Exodus 18:17

As I reflected on this, what stood out to me was what the weight of responsibility had begun forming in Moses.

When left unaddressed, what starts as faithful service can become a burden.

As a leadership formation coach, I see this often in my coaching practice.

A leader becomes so accustomed to carrying everything that they begin to believe the success of everything and everyone depends on them. Slowly, they make themselves a prisoner of their own faithful service.

I remember experiencing this in my corporate role.

For years, I carried the belief that I had to show up daily, even when I was depleted and unwell. It led to burnout.

The burden of service became even heavier when I first realised I was being called out of employment and into entrepreneurship.

The thought of leaving a place where people needed me to move into the unknown, where there was no one waiting for me to help, was its own kind of formation work.

I know you know what I mean.

Your assignment exposes what has and has not yet been formed in you, and what inside you may need to be reformed.

Moses had faith to confront Pharaoh, courage to lead Israel, and obedience to follow God’s instructions.

But in this moment, the pressure of leadership revealed a belief that he had to carry more than God had assigned him to carry.

That is why Jethro’s intervention was timely and critical.

It was more than surface-level leadership advice. Jethro interrupted a pattern of formation.

He helped Moses see a blind spot.

Every leader has blind spots that become normal through daily unchecked repetition.

My question to you is this:

Have you taken time to consider what the weight of your responsibility is forming in you?

And who has permission to tell you, “what you are doing is not good,” before the burden breaks you?

Questions like this sit at the heart of The Marketplace Theologian.

Because formation is happening in the church, in the marketplace, and in the private places where leaders learn what responsibility, obedience, success, and faithfulness are supposed to look like.

My next long-form essay will take this further by exploring what formation actually is, how it happens, and why Kingdom leaders need to pay attention to what both the church and marketplace are producing in them.

This is the third part of a series. Part One traced the origins of the sacred/secular divide through Greek philosophy, Hebrew anthropology, and the theological claims of the incarnation and resurrection. Part Two examined what the Reformation recovered, what it failed to complete, and what that failure has cost marketplace leaders. Part Three turns to the Church itself, and asks the question that sits underneath everything the series has argued so far: what does the Church’s own self-understanding have to do with the people it forms?

I write this as a practical theology practitioner, leadership formation and business coach for Christ-centred leaders. I’ve also spent much of my working career working alongside non-Christians in corporate spaces before shifting my work to support Christ-centred leaders in the marketplace predominantly. Being raised in the Church since I was one year old, I have held multiple offices within it. It is that dual location that makes this question so glaringly visible to me. The Church plays a formative role which is clear among the leaders I work with. An observation is that most leaders are not equipped by the church for the professional lives they are actually living. This is an observation that this series has been building toward, and one that I believe the Church is ready to hear.

The Ecclesiological Gap Nobody Names

The Church has a highly developed theology of what happens when believers are gathered. Centuries of reflection on worship, sacrament, preaching, communal formation, and the nature of the assembled body of Christ have produced rich and contested traditions of ecclesiology. What the Church has almost entirely neglected is an equally serious theology of what happens when those same believers become scattered.

It seems the gathered Church has a liturgy, while the scattered Church has been left to improvise.

The gathered Church is the congregation assembled, the Sunday service, the midweek meeting, the community formed around worship and word. The scattered Church is those same people dispersed into their Monday to Friday worlds, into offices, wards, classrooms, courtrooms, studios, and kitchen tables. Same people. Different context. And in most churches, a completely different level of theological formation.

That asymmetry reflects a theological statement about what the Church believes actually matters. When the entire architecture of formation, the discipleship programme, the teaching calendar, the pastoral investment, the language of calling and commission, is organised around the gathered life of the congregation, an unspoken message is communicated to members about their Monday to Friday world. It says: what happens here, in this building, under this roof, with these people, is where the Kingdom work is. What happens out there is where you go until you come back for the next gathering.

Maybe the Church did not intend to communicate this, but intention does not determine formation. Repeated practice does. And the repeated practice of most Western churches has formed believers who are genuinely equipped for the gathered life and largely unprepared for the scattered one.

What the Church’s Self-Understanding Has Produced

The dominant ecclesiologies of the Western Church, whether institutional, gathered community, or attractional, have oriented the Church’s energy inward. Success has been measured by who comes through the doors, not by what happens when they leave. Formation has been designed for Sunday, not Monday. The metric of a thriving church has been attendance, giving, small group participation, and volunteer engagement, all of which are gathered-life metrics. The scattered life of members in their professional, civic, and economic contexts has registered in most ecclesiological frameworks as mission field rather than formation ground.

This distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Treating the marketplace as mission field places the marketplace leader in the role of evangelist or moral exemplar. It gives them a task to perform in their professional context, be a witness, demonstrate Christian values, invite colleagues to church, but it does not give them a theological account of their work itself. It does not tell them that the decisions they make, the cultures they shape, the people they lead, and the systems they navigate are sites of genuine Kingdom formation and genuine Kingdom responsibility. It frames their professional life as the location of their outreach rather than the location of their vocation.

The result, as Newbigin (1989) argues, is a Church that has largely accepted modernity’s settlement: faith belongs in the private register, and the public square operates according to its own logic. What Newbigin recognised, and what Charles (2023) documents in the specific context of vocation, is that the Church did not simply fail to resist this settlement. In significant measure it prepared its own members to accept it, by forming them in a way that fails to integrate their faith with their professional lives in the first place.

The Pentecostal Contradiction

There is a specific tension within the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition that deserves to be named because it runs directly through the communities where many marketplace leaders have been formed.

Pentecostal theology contains, at its pneumatological core, one of the most powerful resources available for resisting the sacred/secular divide. The claim that the Spirit of God is active and present across all of human life, not confined to religious spaces or religious activities, is precisely what Part One of this series argued the Hebrew text already establishes. The Spirit filled Bezalel, a craftsman, before He filled a priest. A Pentecostal theology that takes its own pneumatology seriously should produce marketplace leaders with an extraordinarily robust theology of Spirit-empowered vocation.

Amos Yong, one of the most significant Pentecostal theologians working today, has argued consistently that the Spirit’s activity cannot be contained within ecclesial boundaries. The pneumatological imagination of Pentecostalism, properly developed, opens rather than closes the boundaries between sacred and secular, between gathered and scattered, between what counts as Spirit-filled work and what does not.

But Pentecostal church culture has frequently contradicted its own theology.

The elevation of the five-fold ministry as the pinnacle of calling, the cultural messaging that the most obedient response to the Spirit is full-time ministry, the language of being called out of the marketplace into something more spiritually serious, these patterns have made Pentecostal and charismatic communities some of the most effective enforcers of the sacred/secular divide even as their theology should have made them its most natural critics.

The tradition that pneumatologically should have been most resistant to the divide has in practice often reinforced it most powerfully, because its ecclesiology elevated the gathered, Spirit-filled assembly and its recognised ministries above the scattered, Spirit-empowered lives of its members in the world.

This is not an indictment of the tradition. It is an internal theological tension that the tradition itself needs to name and resolve, because the stakes for the marketplace leaders formed within it are significant.

What a Missional Ecclesiology Actually Requires

Newbigin’s most cited claim, that the local congregation is the hermeneutic of the gospel, is frequently used to argue for the importance of gathered community. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. For Newbigin, the congregation’s credibility as a sign of the Kingdom is demonstrated not only in how it worships but in how it lives, including how its scattered members inhabit the world from Monday to Saturday.

A missional ecclesiology in the tradition Newbigin describes cannot be content with forming believers for the gathered life alone. If the congregation is to be a genuine sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s redemptive purposes for the whole of human life, then the formation it offers must be adequate to the whole of human life. That includes the boardroom, the classroom, the hospital ward, the legal chamber, the trading floor, and every other space where its members spend the majority of their waking hours exercising influence, making decisions, and shaping the lives of the people around them.

A Church that releases its people into those spaces without equipping them theologically is falling short of the very witness it claims to care about.

Stevens (The Other Six Days, 2000) frames this clearly: the Church’s responsibility does not end at the door on Sunday morning. It extends into the other six days, which is where most of the formation, and most of the compromise, actually happens. A discipleship programme that does not take the other six days seriously is not a complete discipleship programme. It is half a theology with the more demanding half missing.

What This Requires of the Church

Consider a solicitor. She has been in practice for fifteen years. She is sharp, principled, and deeply committed to her faith. Every week she navigates commercial pressures, client demands, and institutional expectations that quietly push against the values and beliefs she holds. She has had to decide, on more than one occasion, how far she is willing to go to protect a client’s interests when the means conflict with her conscience. She prays. She reads her Bible. She goes to church faithfully.

But nobody in her church has ever asked her what it costs to be a solicitor with a Kingdom conscience. Nobody has ever offered her a theological framework for the decisions she faces on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody has ever told her that what she does from Monday to Friday is a site of genuine Kingdom formation and genuine Kingdom responsibility. If she has worked it out, she’s done so largely alone.

That is a formation gap. And it is the ordinary experience of thousands of people sitting in church pews every Sunday morning.

The practical theologians, the formation practitioners, and the marketplace leaders who have been navigating this gap for years do not need more conferences about faith and work. They need the Church to do something more structurally demanding than holding events.

They need the Church to ask, seriously and institutionally, what it means to form its members for their actual lives. Not to perform faith in their professional contexts, not to bring colleagues to church, but to lead with Kingdom authority in the spaces they already occupy, to make decisions with theological integrity when the systems around them push against everything they believe, and to understand that their work itself, when done under God’s authority and in obedience to His purposes, participates in what He is doing in the world.

That requires a different ecclesiology. We’re not talking about the abandonment of gathered life, which remains essential, but an equal theological seriousness about the scattered life. It requires discipleship programmes that take vocation as seriously as they take devotion. It requires preaching that addresses the ethical complexity of professional life rather than defaulting to private moral instruction. It requires a pastoral culture that can hold the question: what is the Spirit doing in this person’s boardroom, and how do we equip them to discern and respond to it?

These are not small asks. They require the Church to take seriously a domain it has largely handed over to parachurch organisations, marketplace ministries, and individual leaders working out their theology alone.

An Invitation to the Conversation

I have laid out the argument from my location. But this conversation cannot be completed without the voices of those leading from within the gathered structures - the Church. If you are a pastor or church leader, I am genuinely asking for your perspective.

Not to debate. To think together. To dialogue together.

Choose the question that is most alive for you and share your response in the comments to be part of this conversation.

Once I have heard from those leading from within the Church, I want to open this conversation wider, to the marketplace leaders, coaches, business owners, and practitioners who experience the cost of this formation gap from the other side. That conversation is coming.

Every perspective is welcome. The conversation the Church and the marketplace are not having has to start somewhere.

For pastors and church leaders:

1. When your discipleship or spiritual formation programme prepares members for Christian life and witness, how deliberately does it account for the professional, civic and relational contexts in which most of that life is lived?
   
   

2. When your church speaks publicly about calling and vocation, which forms of work are most visibly recognised? How might the stories you tell shape your congregation’s understanding of work that matters to God?
   
   

3. How does your ecclesiology account for the scattered Church, and how is this reflected in the way you commission people into their weekly contexts?
   
   

4. Pentecostal and charismatic traditions possess pneumatological resources that can challenge a sacred-secular divide. How are those resources shaping the culture and formation of your community’s members in their professional lives?
   
   

5. What theological, spiritual and practical formation would help marketplace leaders in your congregation lead from a Kingdom foundation in their professional lives?
   
   

And underneath all of it, one question that perhaps the Church has never been asked directly enough:

What is the Church for?

Further Reading in Scripture

• Acts 2:42-47, the gathered life of the early Church, its worship, formation, and community.

• Acts 8:1-4, the scattered Church, dispersed into the world and carrying the gospel into every space.

• Ephesians 4:11-13, the purpose of leadership gifts is to equip the saints for works of service, not to do the ministry on their behalf.

• Jeremiah 29:4-7, seek the welfare of the city where you have been placed. Engagement not withdrawal.

• 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, every member of the body has a function. Different roles do not mean different value.

• Exodus 31:1-5, the Spirit of God filling Bezalel, a craftsman. The Spirit’s work is not confined to religious spaces.

• Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission. The going is the primary posture.

Sources

• Charles, J. Daryl. Our Secular Vocation: Rethinking the Church’s Calling to the Marketplace. B&H Academic, 2023.

• Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. SPCK, 1989.

• Stevens, R. Paul. The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective. Eerdmans, 2000.

• Yong, Amos. The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology. Baker Academic, 2005.

This is the second part of what began as a two-part series. Part One traced the sacred/secular divide through Greek philosophy, Hebrew anthropology, the incarnation, and the resurrection. In developing Part Two, it became clear that the ecclesiological question underneath the argument needed its own treatment. That will be addressed in Part Three. This piece focuses on what the Reformation recovered, why that recovery failed to reach the marketplace, and what it has cost the Church.

The Reformation, the Recovery, and the Relapse

The Reformation recovered something essential that the medieval Church had buried under centuries of institutional hierarchy. Luther’s doctrine of Beruf, the German word meaning vocation or calling, was a genuine theological breakthrough. Every lawful occupation is a calling from God. The baker serves God through bread. The magistrate serves God through justice. The merchant serves God through commerce. The farmer serves God through cultivation. Sacred work is not the exclusive property of priests and monks. Every person who works within their God-given capacity and station participates in the ongoing ordering of creation.

Calvin extended this further. The whole of human life, including its civic, economic, and cultural dimensions, falls under the lordship of Christ. Believers are not called to retreat from these spheres but to inhabit them faithfully, bringing the wisdom and justice of the Kingdom to bear on every domain.

This recovery represented a significant dismantling of the clergy/laity hierarchy that had defined Western Christianity for over a millennium. It gave ordinary working people a theological account of their lives that the Church had largely withheld from them.

But the recovery was incomplete. Christendom structures retained their hierarchies even as the theology shifted. The Church’s social position had changed less than its theological language. Religious office remained the pinnacle of calling in practice, whatever the doctrine said in principle. And then the nineteenth century brought its own reversals that largely undid what the Reformers had begun.

Certain streams of revivalism narrowed the horizon of Christian concern to the individual soul and its eternal destiny. The complexity of vocation, stewardship, and cultural engagement gave way to a singular focus on conversion. Certain forms of Pietism reinforced the devotional over the vocational, the inward over the outward, the personal over the structural. Much of the nineteenth-century missionary imagination, for all its breadth and courage, embedded an assumption about calling that has proved remarkably durable: the most serious response to God’s call is to leave your profession and go into ministry. Ordinary work is what you leave behind when the real assignment arrives.

This nineteenth-century theological retreat did not stay in the history books. It is sitting at the boardroom table now.

The result, as Charles documents in Our Secular Vocation (2023), is a Church that spent the twentieth century producing Christians who were genuinely devout in their private lives and functionally secular in their professional ones. A theology of vocation exists in academic literature. It has not made it into the formation of marketplace leaders at any meaningful scale.

What This Has Cost

The cost shows up in very specific, and recognisable ways.

Hill (Just Business, 2018) calls this the divided moral imagination: the pattern by which believers apply one set of ethical commitments in their private lives and operate according to an entirely different framework in their professional decisions. Their operant and espoused lives are unaligned. This is the natural consequence of formation that has never integrated the two domains. When no one teaches a leader that their faith should shape how they run a board meeting, they default to whatever the organisational culture demands. The faith stays in the sanctuary. The professional judgement stays in the boardroom. And neither challenges the other.

It looks like the senior executive who is asked to approve something that conflicts with their values. They know it is wrong. But they tell themselves that this is business, that everyone makes these calls, that the alternative would cost them their position or their relationships or their credibility in the room. They sign. They go home. They go to church on Sunday. There is no theological framework available to them that bridges what happened in the boardroom on Thursday and what they are singing about on Sunday morning. The sacred/secular divide did not cause the compromise. But it removed the resources that could have helped them resist it.

It looks like the coach, consultant, counsellor, or independent practitioner who undercharges for their work year after year, not from strategic positioning but from a genuine belief that charging properly for a God-given gift is somehow spiritually suspect. The work is too close to calling to be treated like a commercial transaction. The result is a practice that is never sustainable, a leader who quietly resents the imbalance, and a theology that has confused generosity with self-erasure. That belief did not come from Scripture. It came from a framework that has spent centuries telling people that work done for money is secular and therefore lesser, and from a distortion of “freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8) that turned generosity into self-erasure.

It looks like the leader who manages a team with extraordinary integrity. Who treats people well, makes honest decisions, holds their values consistently in difficult moments, and creates a culture that others notice and cannot quite explain. And who would never describe any of that as ministry, because ministry is what happens in a church building, and what they are doing is just good leadership. The sacred/secular divide has not made them a worse leader. But it has robbed them of a theological account of what they are doing and why it matters to God, which means it has also robbed them of a source of meaning that their work deserves.

It looks like the care worker, the butcher, the delivery driver, the warehouse operative, the nurse, the school teaching assistant, the office cleaner, whose daily labour is invisible to any conversation about Kingdom calling they have ever encountered in church. They serve people, they show up with consistency and integrity, they treat the people around them with dignity, and they go home exhausted. No one has ever suggested to them that what they do participates in the ongoing ordering of creation that Genesis 2 describes as the original human vocation. The sacred/secular divide has not made them less faithful. But it has left them entirely without a theological account of their own lives, working out their faith in isolation from any framework that could tell them their work matters to God.

These are the ordinary experiences of Christ-centred leaders in the marketplace who were formed by a theology that had no category for their professional lives as sites of Kingdom engagement. Newbigin (1989) documents the process by which Christian faith becomes privatised in secular cultures, arguing that Western modernity constructed a sharp divide between public facts and private values, and that the Church largely accepted this settlement by adopting the sacred/secular framework, which accelerated this privatisation from within. Long before modern secularism told believers to keep faith private, many had already been formed to treat their professional life as spiritually secondary. The privatisation of faith in the marketplace was not only a cultural pressure from outside. As Charles (2023) demonstrates, the Church’s own formation practices contributed to it.

Ecklund and colleagues found that many Christ-centred professionals desire guidance navigating the ethical dilemmas and tensions they face at work, but receive limited support from their church communities and are largely left to navigate them alone. The formation gap is felt by the very people sitting in church pews on Sunday morning and walking into professional life on Monday.

Charles documents that the Church has been found “oddly indifferent” to the challenges marketplace leaders face daily, doing “little or nothing” to equip them for the professional lives they are actually living. One business consultant cited by Charles put it plainly:

the Church has "largely failed Christians who struggle daily to live out their faith commitments in their places of employment."

This is not a critique of pastoral faithfulness. It is an observation about what the structures of formation have consistently prioritised and what they have consistently left out.

This has been especially costly in Pentecostal and charismatic contexts, where the language of calling is often rich but the formation of marketplace vocation remains thin.

When marketplace leaders have no theology for their work, the Church loses public witness. Its people remain present in boardrooms, classrooms, clinics, studios, courts, companies, and civic spaces, but they have not been formed to speak, decide, create, challenge, or build from a consciously Kingdom-shaped imagination (Matthew 5:13-16). The Church has members in the marketplace, but it has not equipped them to carry its voice there.

The Discernment the Marketplace Demands

Recovering the theology of vocation does not mean sanctifying everything that calls itself work. Spotting when a system is pulling you away from your values is not optional for a marketplace leader. It is what faithful leadership requires. The marketplace leader who cannot discern the systems they are operating within will eventually be discipled by them.

The marketplace contains systems that demand allegiance, form identity, and accumulate power in ways that can sometimes be directly opposed to the Kingdom. What Scripture names through Babylon, most explicitly in Daniel and Revelation 18, is the description of any economic or institutional structure that positions itself as the final source of meaning, security, and worth.

Hussey’s research on secular workplaces documents how organisational cultures suppress religious identity through expectations of neutrality, quietly sidelining the faith that the Church failed to equip its people to hold with confidence in the first place. The marketplace is not neutral territory. It is actively formative territory. And the formation it offers is not always aligned with the Kingdom. Leaders who arrive without a robust theology of vocation do not simply remain theologically neutral. They are formed by whatever framework the institution provides instead.

Daniel is the model here. He did not opt out of Babylon. He entered it, learned its language, was found excellent within its systems, and never surrendered his soul in the process. He served faithfully within a structure that was hostile to everything he believed, without either withdrawing from it or being consumed by it. That is an example of active, discerning, Kingdom-rooted leadership in the most demanding professional environment imaginable. That is the kind of formation the marketplace requires. And it is precisely the kind of formation the modern Church must provide.

It is worth naming, however, that Daniel had no choice about serving in Babylon. Modern marketplace leaders do. That agency is itself a theological responsibility. Discernment sometimes requires the courage to walk away rather than remain complicit in a system that cannot be redeemed from within. Faithful presence is not the same as unconditional presence. Knowing the difference is part of what a whole-life theology of vocation must equip leaders to do.

Stevens (The Other Six Days, 2000) is clear that a theology of vocation must hold two convictions simultaneously. Work is a good gift from God, and the marketplace is a legitimate site of Kingdom calling. And work can form people in directions that are hostile to the Kingdom, and the marketplace can disciple people away from God with greater efficiency than overt persecution. These two convictions define the territory in which discernment becomes essential.

The argument is not that all work is automatically holy. The argument is that work done under God’s authority, in obedience to His purposes, with honest attention to the systems it serves and the people it shapes, participates in the vocation and stewardship that Scripture consistently affirms as good. That distinction requires precisely the kind of theological formation the Church must now provide.

What This Requires Now

Wright’s argument in Surprised by Hope (2007) provides the eschatological grounding for all of this. The Christian hope is not the soul’s escape from this world. God’s redemptive purposes are directed at this world, not away from it (Romans 8:19-21, Revelation 21:1-5). Which means what happens in the boardroom, the warehouse, the classroom, and the ward is not separate from what God is doing. The work of justice, compassion, and integrity done faithfully in the marketplace is part of the Kingdom.

Vanhoozer and Strachan (2015) argue that every believer who occupies a public role is, in some meaningful sense, a public theologian. They carry a set of convictions about human dignity, about truth, about what flourishing looks like, into spaces where those convictions are contested and consequential. Whether or not they articulate those convictions explicitly, they embody them in the decisions they make and the way they treat the people around them. If pastors are public theologians by office, marketplace leaders become public theologians by witness, decision, and presence.

This is what the Church has failed to teach. Not just the theology in the abstract, but the application. What does it mean to be a person of faith when the quarterly targets conflict with the values you hold? What does faithful presence look like in an institution that has no category for it? How does a leader maintain theological integrity without turning their professional life into a performance of religiosity? These are not simple questions, and they will not be answered by a sermon series. They require sustained, serious, theologically grounded formation that takes the marketplace seriously as a site of Kingdom work (Ephesians 4:11-13).

The leaders who will serve this generation well are those who have been equipped to hold two things at once. A rigorous, Scripture-rooted account of why their work matters to God (Colossians 3:23-24). And a clear-eyed, discerning understanding of the ways in which the systems they work within push against everything they believe (Romans 12:2). Not one or the other. Both simultaneously. That is the permanent condition of faithful engagement in the marketplace, and it is what a whole-life theology of vocation makes possible.

The sacred/secular divide drew strength from Greek dualism, gathered institutional force through the medieval period, was only partially corrected by the Reformation, and was reinforced by later movements that narrowed the Christian imagination. It has cost the Church its voice in the marketplace because the very people positioned to embody that voice were never formed to recognise their work as a site of Kingdom witness. And it has cost marketplace leaders a theological account of their own lives that would have changed how they lead.

That cost is recoverable. But recovery requires the Church to take the theology of work as seriously as it has historically taken the theology of worship, and to recover the biblical imagination in which ordinary labour can become an act of faithful service before God (Genesis 2:15, Colossians 3:23-24).

Part Three continues the argument by turning to the Church itself, asking what its own self-understanding has to do with the people Christ commissioned. It addresses the ecclesiological question that sits underneath everything this series has argued so far, and opens the conversation to the voices of those leading from within the Church’s gathered structures.

Further Reading in Scripture

• Genesis 2:15, Work as part of the creation mandate before the Fall.

• Jeremiah 29:4-7, Faithful presence and seeking the welfare of the city while living in exile.

• Daniel 1:8-20, Formation, conviction, and public service inside an imperial system.

• Matthew 5:13-16, Public witness through visible faithfulness.

• Colossians 3:23-24, Work done as unto the Lord.

• Revelation 18, Babylon as a spiritual, economic, and political system of idolatrous power.

• 1 Corinthians 15:58, Labour in the Lord as meaningful in light of resurrection hope.

Sources

• Charles, J. Daryl. Our Secular Vocation: Rethinking the Church’s Calling to the Marketplace. B&H Academic, 2023.

• Ecklund, Elaine Howard, Denise Daniels, and Rachel C. Schneider. ‘From Secular to Sacred: Bringing Work to Church’. Religions 11, no. 9 (2020): 442.

• Hill, Alec. Just Business: Christian Ethics for the Marketplace. IVP Academic, 2018.

• Hussey, Ian. ‘An Evangelical Group’s Experience of Australian Secular Workplaces’. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 36, no. 3 (2023): 317-44.

• Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. SPCK, 1989.

• Stevens, R. Paul. The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective. Eerdmans, 2000.

• Vanhoozer, Kevin J., and Owen Strachan. The Pastor as Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Baker Academic, 2015.

• Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope. SPCK, 2007.

At some point in your life, someone communicated it to you.

Maybe it was the sermon that described your job as what you do to fund the real Kingdom work. Maybe it was the quiet assumption in your church that the most serious Christians eventually leave their careers for ministry. Maybe it was the unspoken hierarchy in every conversation about calling, where ministry meant sacrifice and your work in the marketplace was never quite named as an equivalent act of obedience.

Perhaps it was subtler than any of those. The way leadership in the marketplace is treated as something you do until you grow into something more spiritually significant. The way your professional expertise is welcomed when it serves the church’s administrative needs but rarely engaged as something with Kingdom value in its own right.

The message was never stated directly. It did not need to be. You understood it.

Your work is secular. The pastor’s work is sacred. And the closer you draw to God, the more you should probably be moving away from what occupies most of your waking life.

That message is not in the Bible. It entered the Church from somewhere else entirely, and understanding where it came from is the first step toward being free of it.

The Greek Inheritance Behind the Divide

Greek philosophy, particularly the tradition running through Plato, taught that the soul was superior to the body and that the material world was a lesser shadow of true spiritual reality. The wise person’s goal was to transcend matter, not engage with it. This was not a fringe idea. It shaped the entire intellectual world in which early Christianity grew.

Christianity engaged Greek thought critically. The creeds themselves are evidence of that. But the idea that spirit is superior to matter quietly embedded itself into Christian imagination without ever being fully examined. The result was a version of faith in which the spiritual and the physical were treated as different orders of reality rather than different dimensions of the same God-given world.

The monastic movement did not create the divide, but it gave it institutional form. It would be a misreading of the tradition to flatten monasticism into anti-labour spirituality. The Benedictine tradition especially integrated ora et labora, prayer and work, and monasteries were frequently sites of agriculture, craftsmanship, scholarship, and commerce. The problem was not that monks worked. The problem was the structural message that certain streams within this tradition often communicated to those outside it: that the most committed believers withdrew from ordinary life, that closer proximity to God required greater separation from the social and economic world. Ordinary vocational life was not elevated by that framework. For many who received the message, it became what you moved away from as your devotion deepened.

What the Hebrew Text Actually Says

The divide that most damages marketplace leaders today finds no home in the biblical text.

The word avodah, from the root abad, appears in Genesis 2:15 when God places the human being in the garden to work it and keep it, and it appears in Exodus 3:12 when God tells Moses that the people will worship Him on the mountain after the exodus. It is the same root. Work and worship share a single linguistic origin in Hebrew. The semantic separation that English imposes between tending a garden and worshipping God, between running an enterprise and serving the Lord, does not map cleanly onto the original text.

This requires care. Ancient Hebrew thought did maintain distinctions: holy and common, clean and unclean, sacred spaces and consecrated roles. The argument is not that the Hebrew Bible collapses every category. The argument is that Hebrew anthropology does not support the modern Western assumption that some human labour is spiritually meaningful while ordinary professional work is not. That specific divide, the one that tells a marketplace leader their expertise is secular and a pastor’s work is sacred, finds no foundation in the biblical framework.

And work appears in that text before sin does. Genesis 1 and 2 establish work as creation mandate. The human being is given responsibility, creativity, and the task of cultivation and stewardship within the created order. This is pre-Fall. The curse in Genesis 3 does not introduce work. It distorts work that was already given as gift. This single observation is quietly devastating to the idea that work is what we do in a fallen world until we can stop. Work is what we were made to do in a good world. Redemption does not evacuate it. It reorients it.

The clearest biblical confirmation of this is Bezalel. In Exodus 31:1-5, God identifies Bezalel by name, says He has called him, and then describes what the filling of the Spirit of God produces in this man: skill, intelligence, knowledge, and craftsmanship in gold, silver, bronze, stone-cutting, and woodworking.

It is worth pausing on what this passage actually represents. This is the first time in all of Scripture that someone is explicitly said to be filled with the Spirit of God. Not a priest. Not a prophet. A craftsman. The Spirit of God rests first and most explicitly on someone doing technical, artistic, material work for God’s purposes.

The Church has largely looked past this. Dorothy Sayers named the problem directly in her 1942 essay Why Work?:

“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

This passage has received far less attention in the theology of vocation than it deserves, partly because a Christian imagination shaped by the sacred/secular divide has no category for it. If the spiritual and the material are treated as separate realms, a Spirit-filled metalworker is an anomaly.

Within the biblical framework, it is exactly what should be expected.

The Incarnation and Resurrection as Theological Statement

The most decisive argument against the sacred/secular divide is not a proof-text. It is the incarnation itself.

The eternal Son of God, through whom all things were created, takes on human flesh. He is born into a specific family in a specific location. He works in a family trade. For the majority of His earthly life, He is not conducting what any contemporary church would recognise as ministry. He is doing physical, skilled, material work in a marketplace context. As Keller and Alsdorf argue in Every Good Endeavour (2012), this was not incidental to the story of salvation. God chose to spend three decades doing ordinary work, and that choice is itself a theological claim: matter is not a problem to be escaped, the created world is not an obstacle to holiness, and ordinary human labour participates in the ongoing stewardship of creation rather than standing outside it.

The resurrection deepens this further. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of Christianity’s most explicit theological rejections of Greek contempt for matter. Paul’s extended argument in 1 Corinthians 15 is addressed precisely to those shaped by the assumption that the spiritual is superior to the material and that redemption means the soul’s escape from the body. Paul’s answer is unambiguous: Christ rose bodily, and believers will share in that bodily resurrection. The Christian hope is not the soul’s release from matter. It is the redemption and renewal of the whole person within a renewed creation. If God’s redemptive purposes are directed at the transformation of this world rather than its abandonment, then human labour that participates in that creation, however partially and imperfectly, is not incidental to the Kingdom. It cannot be written off as secular.

Paul’s letters draw out the vocational implication without qualification. The household codes in Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3 and 4 are addressed directly to people in economic and professional relationships. Paul does not treat their work as spiritually marginal or advise them that it will matter less before God than the work of those in religious office. He tells them how to do it as an act of obedience to God. Colossians 3:23-24 is precise: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.” This is not a consolation prize for people whose work is lesser than ministry. It is a theological claim about the nature of all work done under God’s authority.

Volf argues in Work in the Spirit (1991) that the Spirit’s work is not confined to religious spaces or religious activities. He is active across all of human life. The Spirit does not confine His work to sanctuaries. Neither did He in Exodus 31.

Part Two continues the argument by examining what the Reformation recovered and then lost, what the divide has cost the Church in the marketplace, and what a whole-life theology of vocation actually requires of leaders building today.

Further Reading in Scripture

• Genesis 1:1 to 2:15, the creation mandate and God’s work as the human pattern.

• Genesis 2:15, avodah as work and worship from the same root.

• Exodus 31:1-5, Bezalel and the Spirit of God filling a craftsman.

• Colossians 3:23-24, all work done as for the Lord.

• Ephesians 6:5-8, the household codes addressed to those in economic and professional life.

• 1 Corinthians 15, the bodily resurrection as theological rejection of dualism.

• 1 Corinthians 10:31, all things done to the glory of God.

Sources

• Keller, Timothy, and Katherine Leary Alsdorf. Every Good Endeavour: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. Hodder and Stoughton, 2012.

• Volf, Miroslav. Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Pastors. Ministers. Gifted, faithful people who have devoted themselves to God and to the people He has placed in their care. And yet something keeps showing up in their formation. They have been equipped to expound Scripture, but not always to understand the very people sitting in front of them.

This piece is my attempt to name why. And to make the case that engaging the social sciences is not a compromise of biblical faithfulness. It is an expression of it.

In 2025, Pope Leo addressed the International Theological Commission and reminded the gathered theologians that the Church must engage every field of human knowledge. His exact words were that there is no science that theology may ignore. It was not a controversial statement. But in many of the circles I work in, the resistance to it is real, and the cost of that resistance is showing up in the leaders I coach with every week.

The Biblical Pattern the Church Has Forgotten

God has never asked His people to be ignorant of the world they are sent into.

Paul stood in the Areopagus and quoted Greek poets. He did not distance himself from what they knew. He was fluent in it, and that fluency opened a door that condemnation would have closed (Acts 17:22-31).

Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians before God used him to lead a nation (Acts 7:22).

Daniel was trained in the literature and language of Babylon. He understood their systems from the inside, and from that position, he influenced what he could clearly see (Daniel 1:17-20).

In every case, the pattern is the same.

God placed His people inside the intellectual frameworks of their age, equipped them to understand those frameworks deeply, and then used that understanding for Kingdom purposes. Always under His authority. Always accountable to Him.

That does not mean human knowledge is without risk. Paul is clear in 1 Corinthians 1:20-25 that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world. In Colossians 2:8, he warns against being taken captive by hollow philosophy rooted in human tradition rather than Christ. James 3:13-17 draws a sharp line between wisdom from above and wisdom that is earthly and unspiritual. The call has never been uncritical adoption of anything. It has always been discerning engagement under the authority of God.

The Church does not usually get into trouble by engaging with outside knowledge too enthusiastically.

The problem is that when it does engage, it often does so without a strong enough theological foundation to evaluate what it is taking in. So it baptises frameworks, adopts language, and practices without the discernment to know which parts are compatible with a biblical worldview and which parts are not. It is something I am encountering repeatedly in my postgraduate research in Practical Theology and Ministry, and it is one of the reasons I felt this conversation needed to be had publicly.

What the Social Sciences Actually Offer

Psychology, sociology, leadership theory, and the mental health sciences are tools for understanding the people Scripture speaks to. They are not authorities and they are not replacements for the Word. They are ways of seeing more clearly the human beings God has called us to serve, and any insight they offer must be tested and brought into submission to Christ.

Practical theology holds two conversations at once. The first is with Scripture, careful, exegetical, accountable to the text, and committed to what it actually says. The second is with the world, honest and attentive to how people actually live, think, feel, and struggle. The work is bringing those two conversations into contact with each other so that the Word speaks directly into the reality people are living. Separate those two conversations, and you end up with theology that is technically correct and pastorally ineffective.

Engagement with both theology and the social sciences will result in better, more faithful praxis than acting on either alone.

Alistair McKitterick

I have seen what that looks like when they are separated. A leader who can quote chapter and verse but cannot sit with someone in genuine pain without immediately defaulting to a scripture and a quick prayer. A congregation that is theologically educated and emotionally illiterate. A church that preaches wholeness yet produces people who are quietly falling apart.

When a pastor understands how trauma shapes the nervous system’s threat response, it does not compete with the doctrine of sanctification. It deepens it. It explains why a genuinely converted person can still react from places of fear and self-protection that feel entirely involuntary. Quoting 2 Timothy 1:7 to someone whose body is locked in a trauma response is not always wrong. But it is often not enough. And without understanding why, a pastor cannot accompany someone through the gap between what Scripture promises and what they are actually experiencing. Human behaviour is shaped by experience. But in Christ, identity is not defined by that experience, and transformation is not limited by it. Scripture does not permit experience to become an excuse. Both things are true, and a pastor who holds them together can actually accompany people rather than just exhort them.

Where the social sciences accurately observe human behaviour, they often echo realities Scripture has already revealed with greater authority and clarity. The brokenness of human nature. The power of community to form or deform. The weight of what gets passed down through families and cultures. They describe from the outside what Scripture names from within. Where their assumptions align with a biblical anthropology, the insights serve formation. Where they diverge, discernment kicks in. That difference is not decided by preference or usefulness, but by whether what is being observed aligns with and submits to the truth revealed in Christ.

The Cost of Refusing to Engage

When church leaders keep the social sciences at arm’s length, people pay for it.

Depression gets diagnosed as a lack of faith. Anxiety becomes a spiritual failure. Trauma gets spiritualised instead of addressed. People learn to perform wellness because it is what the culture of the congregation rewards. The greeting becomes a ritual. How are you? I’m blessed and highly favoured. Nobody stops to find out if that is actually true. They carry what should have been addressed for decades, and often pass it to the next generation without ever knowing it.

I know some of those people. I have been one of them, more than once.

Peter Scazzero, whose work on emotional health in the church has shaped pastoral thinking for over two decades, puts it plainly: emotional health and spiritual maturity are inseparable. It is not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. That is not a therapeutic claim. It is a formation claim. And the Church has been slow to reckon with it.

The Church also walks away from ground it is meant to hold. Questions about mental health, identity formation, and how power works inside institutions do not disappear when church leaders refuse to engage them. They get answered by other voices with other frameworks. And the people who were looking to the Church for wisdom find it somewhere else.

The quietest, yet most expensive cost, is in leadership development. A generation is being formed without the tools to understand themselves, their congregations, or the systems they are leading. The issue is not Scripture. It is how it is being applied. There are leaders who can open a text beautifully and cannot hold a room. Who preach transformation and have never examined what transformation actually requires of a human being.

The Question of Discernment

None of this means adopting whatever the social sciences produce. These disciplines carry their own assumptions about human nature, the source of meaning and telos, and what flourishing actually looks like. Some align with a biblical anthropology. Some do not.

Mark Cartledge, one of the leading voices in Pentecostal practical theology, identifies the failure mode on both sides of this conversation. He observes that practical theology seems either reluctant to use Scripture or under the spell of social science. That diagnostic is worth sitting with. The answer to the Church’s over-spiritualisation of human experience is not to overcorrect toward secular frameworks. It is to develop the theological maturity to hold both in their proper relationship.

As McKitterick argues, theology is far from being an optional dialogue partner. It is the essential voice in any discussion of moral significance. That means discernment is not a reason to disengage from the social sciences. It is the skill you develop by engaging carefully. By asking the questions the disciplines themselves are not asking. And supplying the answers that Scripture provides. What is the source of this transformation? Is the change being described genuinely lasting, or is it behavioural management dressed up as growth? Who or what is being named as the agent of human flourishing?

A church leader who understands psychology well enough to know where it illuminates and where it overreaches is far more useful to the Kingdom than one who avoids it entirely. Clarity about which insights serve formation and which carry assumptions that quietly displace it. That is the goal.

What Faithful Leadership Requires Now

The leaders who will serve this generation well hold Scripture as the final authority and bring every other form of legitimate knowledge into the service of that authority.

It has always looked like this when the Church was at its most transformative. Paul in the Areopagus. Moses in Pharaoh’s courts. Daniel in Babylon’s administration. The pattern is not new. What is new is the generation of leaders who have been told that engaging the world’s knowledge is a threat to their faith rather than an expression of it.

Paul was right that the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God (1 Corinthians 3:19). He was also the man who stood in the Areopagus and used that world’s wisdom as a bridge. That tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the permanent condition of faithful engagement.

McKitterick captures what this requires of those of us working at this intersection. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, the practical theologian will begin to see the situation afresh, to critique presuppositions, and have a broader understanding of what is really going on. That is not a concession to secularism. It is the discipline of faithful leadership.

The leaders who will navigate it well are not the ones who disengage from the world to protect their theology. They are the ones who hold Scripture as the final authority and bring everything else into the service of that authority. Who ask the hard questions. Who stay in the room when the conversation gets uncomfortable. Who refuse to let the people in their care be led by anyone less equipped to hold both the Word and the weight of human experience at the same time.

That is what this generation needs from its leaders. And it is entirely possible. But it requires the willingness to engage.

I would love to know where you land on this.

Does your church or organisation integrate insights from psychology or the social sciences into leadership development? And if so, how do you hold that alongside your theological grounding?

Further Reading in Scripture

• 2 Timothy 1:7: The spirit of power, love and self-discipline, and the limits of quoting it to someone whose body is locked in a trauma response

• Acts 17:22-31: Paul’s engagement with Greek philosophy as a bridge to the gospel proclamation

• Acts 7:22: Moses formed in Egyptian wisdom before his Kingdom assignment

• Daniel 1:17-20: God giving Daniel understanding in the literature and wisdom of Babylon

• 1 Corinthians 1:20-25: God making foolish the wisdom of the world

• 1 Corinthians 3:19: The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God

• Colossians 2:8: The warning against being taken captive by hollow philosophy dependent on human tradition

• James 3:13-17: The distinction between heavenly wisdom and earthly wisdom

• Romans 12:2: The renewing of the mind as the mechanism of genuine transformation

• Hebrews 5:11-14: Maturity and the trained capacity to distinguish good from evil

Further Reading

Cartledge, Mark J. The Mediation of the Spirit: Interventions in Practical Theology. Eerdmans, 2015.

McKitterick, Alistair. The Theological Imperative Model for Practical Theology. Journal of European Baptist Studies 16:4, 2016.

McMinn, Mark R. Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling. Tyndale House, 1996.

Scazzero, Peter. The Emotionally Healthy Church. Zondervan, 2003.

Scazzero, Peter. Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. Zondervan, 2021.

Wright, N.T. The New Testament and the People of God. Fortress Press, 1992.

Take a moment and imagine this.

You have built a multi-six figure coaching business. You are the only breadwinner in your home. You have been financially stable for two years because of what you built. Your clients love you. You have genuinely helped people. You have the testimonials, the income, the momentum.

And then you have an encounter with Jesus.

A real one. The kind that changes everything. You give your life to Him. You believe. You want to serve the Kingdom. You love Him.

But your business was built on reading tarot cards and helping people access higher consciousness using techniques from The Secret. Manifestation. Energy alignment. Spiritual guidance through tools that you now, somewhere deep in you, know are not of God.

So what do you do?

You wrestle. Of course you do.

Because it is not a theoretical question. It is your mortgage. It is your children’s school fees. It is the clients who are mid-programme and depending on you. It is the audience you have spent years building who followed you for exactly this.

So the negotiation begins.

Jesus understands my heart. He knows I am not using the cards for divination the way I used to. I am saying a Bible verse when I turn them now. I am not praying to the crystals. I am just placing them in the room. Giving them to clients as decoration. I will pivot after the next launch. After the next income injection. After I have enough in the bank to make the transition safely.

God knows my heart.

This conversation is not being had in the church. It is not being had in the marketplace either. So let us talk about it.

When you have read this, share your thoughts in the comments. I want to hear from you.

What the Bible Actually Says About the Heart

Here is the problem with that phrase.

God does know your heart. That part is true. But what does Scripture say about what He finds there?

Jeremiah 17:9 is unambiguous. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”

The verse that follows is verse 10. “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.”

God knowing your heart is not a comfort when what He finds there is negotiation. When what He finds is a heart that knows the truth and is choosing delay.

Proverbs 21:2 says “A person may think their own ways are right, but the Lord weighs the heart.” We are remarkably capable of convincing ourselves that what we are doing is reasonable. That our circumstances justify the pause. That God understands the complexity. And He does understand the complexity. But understanding is not the same as endorsing.

The phrase God knows my heart is most often used not as an act of surrender but as a substitute for one. It is the thing we say when we know what obedience requires and we are not ready to do it yet.

And when a leader uses it in the context of their business practice, it almost always means one thing.

They are negotiating with their obedience.

The Danger of Syncretism

There is a theological term for what happens when sacred and unsacred frameworks are combined. It is called syncretism. A term I use for it is mixture.

Throughout Scripture, God draws a consistent line between the holy and the common, between what is consecrated to Him and what is not. In Deuteronomy 7, He instructs Israel not to blend worship of Him with the practices of surrounding nations. In Ezekiel 44:23, the priests are charged with teaching the people to distinguish between the holy and the common. In 2 Corinthians 6:14, Paul asks what fellowship light can have with darkness.

The concern is not the object or the practice in isolation. The concern is what it is being given authority to do, and what spirit is operating through it.

Galatians 5:9 is the verse that explains why this matters practically. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Mixture does not stay contained. It spreads. It shapes how you think, how you explain transformation, how you frame what you do, and eventually what you pass on to the people you lead.

A Bible verse said over a tarot card does not sanctify the card. A scripture quoted at the end of a manifestation session does not make the session Kingdom aligned. The source has not changed because the language has shifted.

The Hardest Part Nobody Talks About

I want to be honest about something.

It is easy to say you would just change your business. It is easy to say that from the outside. From a place of financial stability. From a place where your livelihood is not attached to the very thing that needs to change.

Dismantling a business that is working is one of the hardest things a leader can be asked to do. Especially when it has served real people. Especially when clients have experienced genuine relief, genuine progress, genuine transformation through what you offered. The results were real. The relationships were real. The income was real.

And yet.

The results being real does not mean the source was right. The clients being helped does not mean the framework was aligned. Something can produce a genuine outcome and still draw from a source that is not God. That is precisely what makes mixture so difficult to address. Because it works. At least on the surface. And at least for a while.

A few weeks ago I saw a coach post something that stopped me in my tracks. She had built a significant platform using manifestation and The Secret. She found Jesus. And she was brave enough to go live and post publicly, apologising to her audience for misleading them. She offered people their money back.

I sat with that for a long time.

Because it is one thing to privately reorient. It is another to do it publicly. To your audience. To the people who paid you. To the community that followed you for the exact thing you are now renouncing. What courage. What integrity.

I wonder how many would do the same.

I also notice how quickly some Christians rushed to judgement over cases like hers. The very people who can be quickest to condemn this kind of story are sometimes the same people I later find myself having the most complex conversations with about their own frameworks. About the language they use. About where the source of transformation in their coaching actually sits.

Because here is what I have found in over a year of having these conversations.

It is not only leaders coming out of New Age spirituality who are navigating mixture. It is Christian coaches who have been in church their whole lives. Who picked up language from the wellness and coaching space because it sounded powerful, holistic, even biblical. Who started using words like energy, alignment, manifestation, frequency, and inner healing without ever examining what frameworks those words carry or where they originate.

When Christians Straddle Both Lanes

The conflation of the scientific and the spiritual is one of the most subtle and most significant challenges facing marketplace leaders right now.

The nervous system is real. The body’s capacity to hold stress is real. Somatic awareness, noticing how what you carry shows up physically, is not inherently problematic. God designed the body. None of that is in dispute.

The problem is when observable biological function is presented as spiritual mechanism. When the nervous system becomes the primary pathway to healing. When the body’s responses are attributed spiritual authority. When a process is described as releasing what only the Holy Spirit can restore.

The centre of power has moved. Not dramatically. Not obviously. Subtly. From the Holy Spirit to the self. From God as the source to the framework as the source. From transformation led by truth to transformation produced by a method.

And many leaders do not realise it has happened.

They have not examined the origins of the frameworks they were trained in. They have not asked where the language they use every day comes from. They have not held their coaching practice up to Scripture and asked whether what they are describing as the source of transformation is actually the Holy Spirit or actually the process.

God knows my heart, they say.

And He does. That is exactly what makes this so serious.

Obedience Is Not Negotiable

Here is the theological reality that the phrase God knows my heart cannot escape.

1 Samuel 15:22. “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

God does not want the sacrifice of your intentions. He wants the obedience of your actions. And when we use His knowledge of our heart as justification for delayed obedience, we are not being pastoral with ourselves. We are negotiating with sin.

That is a strong statement. I want to stand behind it.

Because what is at stake is not just personal alignment. It is the people you lead. James 3:1 says that teachers will be judged more strictly. Your clients do not just receive your service. They absorb your framework. They begin to understand transformation through the lens you give them. And if that lens is mixed, even subtly, they are being formed by something other than Christ as the source.

That is the weight of leadership. That is why mixture in a coach or leader is not a private matter. It is a formation issue that extends to everyone they touch.

This Is Not Condemnation

I want to be clear about why I am writing this.

Not to shame anyone. Not to point at specific people. Not to create a culture of suspicion or fear inside the coaching space.

I am writing this because I have sat with enough leaders over the last year to know that this conversation is happening in private while it remains largely unaddressed in public. People are navigating one of the most significant transitions of their leadership life completely alone because they do not know who to ask and they are afraid of how other Christians will respond.

The church does not often speak with a marketplace focus. Christian coaching tends to address either business strategy or faith strengthening. Very few people are speaking about formation. About what happens when your past life, your previous frameworks, and your spiritual history have shaped you, and what needs to be addressed when you come to Christ or return to Him.

That gap is what this piece is for.

What You Can Do

If anything in this post has landed somewhere in you, here is what I want you to know.

You do not have to figure this out alone. You do not have to publicly out yourself to find a way forward. And you do not have to dismantle your business overnight.

But you do have to be honest. With God first. And then with yourself.

If you are navigating questions like these in your business, coaching, leadership, or ministry, I have created a training inside Kingdom Leaders: ACTIVATED that goes much deeper. If you are ready to examine these issues more carefully, strengthen your discernment, and align what you are building with Kingdom truth, it is there for you.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Let’s talk about it.