As a pastor/planter, the work is too precious and meaningful to do halfway. Preaching God’s word requires a stewardship of our calendars, meetings, brains, hearts, souls, and margin so we can study and rightly handle the word of truth. Don’t settle for good enough. Let’s leave it all out on the field for Jesus.

Our lives are filled with axioms. These truisms, even if overstated, make a helpful point that’s easy to remember. 

In the world of sports, we hear, “Your best ability is availability.” I love this axiom. A great player who is always injured hurts his team’s chances to win it all. (Insert name of player you are thinking of, and I agree!) But when we hear this axiom, we also instinctively know that every other ability (talent, work ethic, and competitive drive) must be there, too. 

Axioms are like portable parables. Quick, memorable, and unpackable. There’s always more to say, explain, and caveat. But the point is to grab the point and go. 

I recently wrote about three elements we could all imitate from Spurgeon’s spiritual leadership. But in this article, I want to extract four axioms from Spurgeon’s teaching on leadership. If we boil down his profound insights on leadership, we can create four simple axioms or truisms that apply to church planting and all of pastoral ministry.

1. Leaders Leap First

The best dog leaps the stile first. All the pack will follow, but one hound leads the way…Those who aspire to leadership should take the first place in danger and in self-sacrifice.1 

Leadership includes showing and showing up.  

Spurgeon shows a simple lesson of leadership: show the way forward. When the church, staff, and pastors are wondering, “Where are we going? What are we doing? What’s the plan?” Leaders leap forward. Leaders propose a direction. Leaders bring ideas. Leaders don’t sit on their hands and wait. Leaders call for prayer. Leaders lead the team to brainstorm. Leaders call for collaboration. Brothers, real leaders show, model, and demonstrate what it means to be a leader. 

It is easy to be the kind of leader who only shows up for vision-casting, preaching, and the other fun aspects of ministry. But the “best dog” shows up for the danger, too.

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