introduction

Some years ago I was a part of an organization that prided itself on being movement oriented. We went to movement trainings. We developed movement trainings. We worked to see movement happen every where we went. A big aspect of this was the constant struggle of leadership, specifically: what does leadership look like? One of our fundamental teachings asked students to think of leaders they know of in the world. We’d then ask them to list all of the traits that made them leaders. We’d then ask them to consider Jesus and His example in order to compare and contrast. It was always a stark moment seeing the lights go on for people: the way of Jesus pursues an entirely different type of leadership. In my latter days with that organization, we noticed something troubling: the organizational leadership modeled the leaders of the world more often than not rather than the way of Jesus we taught in those movements across the globe. They acted like leaders of the world all in the name of guiding, guarding and governing (this was an oft repeated phrase).

I have continued to sit with movements, with what we experienced and with the way of Jesus. As I do, I continually see this guiding, guarding and governing more often than not working against the engine of movement which thrives on polycentric local and hyper local teams paving the way forward. There is certainly a need for guidance or guarding or governing but its place should be one where they exercise power in the way of Jesus, through service “underneath” rather than the outfront control and power that all too often accompanies notions of guiding, guarding and governing (as demonstrated constantly by leaders in the world). I’ve come to realize more and more that this is something for a custodial world where disciples are treated as children at best or prisoners at worst rather than the thriving, emergent kingdom of God where it is not-yet.

leadership in movements

Before critiquing a leadership paradigm, it's worth being clear about what movements actually ask of leaders. Movements are not grown by managing them. They are grown by generational reproduction: disciples who make disciples, groups that birth groups, leaders who make new leaders. Every meaningful transition point in movement leadership is reproductive, starting from sowing to gathering a group, from one group to many groups that start their own, from one stream of movement into a second even.

That reframes the leadership problem entirely. In an institution, the central question is supervision: are the people under me doing the right things? In a movement, the central question is transmission: does the DNA survive the third and fourth (and even eighth) generation. Will it survive in places I will never visit, among people I will never meet? You cannot supervise your way to even the fourth generation. Whatever guards a movement's health has to travel with the movement itself rather than finding itself dependent on a centralized source.

Two more things follow. First, leadership in movements is a function, not a position. Everyone leads somewhere, somehow, starting with the most basic act of owning and sharing their own faith. Second, the need is plural by design; movements thrive with a multitude of leaders and die where there are few. Ephesians 4 hands the church five gifts, not one office, and healthy movements need the full apostle-prophet-evangelist-shepherd-teacher mix in balance. Any paradigm that quietly reduces leadership to one or two of those gifts is already distorting the picture.

custodial vs. movement paradigms

Underneath most leadership debates sit two very different pictures of what the church is and what could go wrong with it.

The custodial paradigm assumes the thing already exists and needs stewarding. The leader stands above or outside the community. The greatest fear tends to lie in the realm of disorder, whether that’s called error, heresy, mess or something different. Success is preservation: the thing handed to us gets handed on intact. This is the native paradigm of the institution and it produces exactly the leadership it needs: careful, positional, protective leadership oriented towards control.

The movement paradigm assumes the thing must keep being born, over and over again. The leader stands inside the community and gives themselves away. The greatest fear isn’t disorder but sterility: the movement just stops and ceases to be. Success is reproduction beyond anyone's control. Jesus lit fires that would spread far beyond the reach of His physical, in person oversight, and He seems to have designed it that way on purpose (and this pattern continued with Paul and others).

It’s worth mentioning that these two paradigms have different “traps”. Custodial systems aim to be robust: withstand shocks and change nothing. But movements live in uncertainty, and what thrives in uncertainty is not robustness but antifragility: systems that soak up error and disorder through redundancy, iteration, and distributed ownership rather than through gatekeepers. A discovery group that gets something wrong and self-corrects through scripture and community is antifragile. A group that must wait for a guardian to correct it is merely dependent.

Here is what has increasingly made me uncomfortable: guide, guard and govern are custodial verbs. They presume a completed thing and a keeper for it. And a movement that has become the kind of thing that needs a keeper is already dying because of it.

[!INFO]

a quick look at the five-fold gifts (feel free to jump ahead)

the apostle

Apostles are pioneers and innovators that lean into kingdom expansion. They are intently focused on their specific vision and mission, fiercely guarding core values while constantly innovating beyond the status quo.

the prophet

Prophets thrive in building deep connections to God and keeping communities aligned with God in things like justice, righteousness, and holiness. They call people toward obedience through worship and prayer, constantly pointing to God's profound love while unafraid to speak truth to power and cry out for repentance where needed.

the evangelist

Evangelists live the gospel and naturally invite others into it. They're gifted storytellers and recruiters who communicate the gospel in culturally relevant, accessible ways that get responses.

the shepherd

Shepherds build healthy, sustainable communities. They foster community bonding centered on Jesus and mutual love. Shepherds are radically inclusive, seek reconciliation where there's disunity, and are committed to nurturing people.

the teacher

Teachers love theology and spend significant time seeking deep understanding of God's Word so they can pass it on to others. They're naturally curious and inquisitive, building tools and resources that make learning shareable within their communities.

*> Check out 5Q for a much deeper exploration of all of these themes.

guide/guard/govern in context

I want to be careful here, because I've taught this framework myself and the instincts behind it are not necessarily wrong. But held up against the movement paradigm, three problems emerge.

It is the shepherd/teacher leadership wearing a universal mask. Look at the verbs. Guiding is shepherding. Guarding is teaching-as-gatekeeping. Governing is institutional maintenance. This is a leadership paradigm built almost entirely from the two gifts Christendom leaned the sharpest into: shepherd and teacher. There isn’t nearly as much space for the apostolic and prophetic and especially the evangelistic gifts. And we already know what happens when those two gifts dominate: shepherding dominance breeds risk-aversion and codependency; teaching dominance becomes controlling gatekeeping of knowledge. Guide/guard/govern isn't a neutral description of movement leadership. It is the institutional church describing leadership in its own image.

It is an on-ramp for control and abuse. Each verb puts a subject above an object: if someone guides, someone else is guided. And whoever holds the guarding seat gets to define what counts as danger which is precisely the power an abuser wants most. The research on abuse in Christian organizations is sobering on this point: abusers run a front-stage/back-stage performance, and the front-stage persona of choice is almost always the protector. "I'm guarding the movement" is both a platform and a vocabulary for hiding in plain sight and communities are groomed to extend trust to exactly that person or persons. I watched a version of this happen. The organization I described above did not abandon the way of Jesus in spite of guiding, guarding, and governing; it abandoned it through them. Governing language does not prevent abuse. Unaccountable governing language launders it.

It stifles local and hyper-local autonomy. Guided groups wait for direction. Governed groups wait for permission. But the surest marker of a real movement is the opposite of waiting: communities freely expressing and structuring faith within their own culture, whether thats writing their own creeds, forming their own leadership, discerning their own obedience. Those leading within a movement will best determine the leadership structures it needs; that's not a concession, it's the mechanism of health. A standing governing center re-imports the colonial pattern Jesus demands we reject: imported culture, manufactured dependency, and structures that crumble the moment the center withdraws. It’s worth noting that there is also a simple arithmetic here. A function held by a person scales linearly because there is only one guardian's (or group of guardians') attention span and only one governor's (or group of governors') calendar. A movement growing generationally will outrun its guardians by the third generation easily. Then either the movement stops or the guarding does.

the accountability objection

The strongest response to all of this deserves to be stated at full strength: ungoverned isn't really ungoverned. Remove named authority and you don't get freedom; rather, you get government by whoever holds the most social power, unnamed and therefore untouchable. The church world has cautionary tales of networks that rejected "governing" language and ended up with unaccountable apostles governing harder than any presbytery ever did, just informally and invisibly. If abuse thrives backstage, then dismantling the visible structure can simply hand the whole theater to the performers.

And the early church itself doesn't support a no-guarding reading. Acts 15 is a polycentric movement convening a governing moment. Here leaders gathered, deliberated and issued a judgment precisely to protect the thing that made the movement spread. The apostles and elders did not refuse the guarding function. They distributed it, and they exercised it episodically and then they sent people rather than keeping the seat for themselves.

So I personally think that the critique cuts both ways and honesty requires the concession: any paradigm that replaces guide/guard/govern must produce more accountability than it does, not less. If polycentric just means "nobody is responsible," it is not the way of Jesus either.

model/multiply/release in context

What movements need, I've personally come to believe, is better captured by three different verbs.

Model. Authority in a movement flows from demonstrated practice not from office. Leaders embody the DNA at every level. The catalyst overseeing multiple streams still sows, still sits in a discovery group, still obeys what she reads. No level of leadership is an exemption from the first level. This is guiding, but from underneath: not directing others down a path, but walking it visibly enough to be followed. It is also, quietly, the first accountability mechanism: a leader whose life must remain observable at ground level cannot maintain much of a backstage.

[!WARNING] If a leader tells you that they don’t have to do any of that because they’ve put in their dues or were just called to govern, run. Modeling isn’t their goal. I’ve sat with leaders who prided themselves on ”not having to do all of that stuff” and everyone was much worse off for it.

Multiply. The leader's product is leaders, not decisions. And here is where guarding gets solved properly: quality control moves out of persons and into the DNA itself. The rhythm of discovery, the discipline of obedience-based discipleship, scripture at the center of every group, simple health audits that any community can run on itself are the things that actually guard a movement in the fourth generation the way no guardian can. Guarding done by a person scales linearly and corrupts predictably. Guarding done by DNA scales generationally and belongs to everyone. It multiplies, simply put.

[!WARNING] If a leader isn’t actually multiplying movement leaders, run. If the leaders aren’t multiplying (or multiplying to be different), healthy movement won’t ever be the outcome.

Release. Power is divested on a schedule, not hoarded until it's pried loose. Healthy catalysts divest power from themselves quickly by releasing decisions, resources and platforms to emerging leaders before it even feels comfortable. And release is what answers the accountability objection, because what it produces is not the absence of oversight but a different geometry of it: polycentric teams create mutual and lateral accountability. It produces peers with real standing who can see one another's backstage rather than hierarchical accountability where subordinates can see the guardian's front stage and touch nothing else. The five-fold mix is itself an accountability architecture: the prophet unafraid to speak truth to the apostle's power, the shepherd tempering the evangelist, each gift enriching and checking the others.

[!WARNING] If everything always only centers around a single leader (or small group of leaders), run. Release isn’t their goal. Control (and more importantly power) is.

Notice, finally, what changed in the grammar. Guide, guard, and govern take the movement as their object. The leader acts upon the community. Model, multiply, and release take the leader as their object. The community watches what the leader does themselves. That is the whole difference, and it is the difference the training exercise always surfaced: the leaders of the world act on those beneath them; Jesus emptied himself instead for all those around (*“but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness…”* Philippians 2:7 NRSV).

in conclusion

So is guide/guard/govern simply wrong? Not quite. The functions have a real purpose; the paradigm is what fails. Movements do need guiding, guarding, and governing but as functions distributed across polycentric teams and embedded in reproducible DNA, never as roles held by a custodial class, distant and uninterested in the work, the DNA and the release of power.

Held that way, each function transforms. Guiding becomes modeling: a life walked visibly rather than directions issued. Guarding becomes DNA plus mutual visibility: health carried in the practices themselves and in peers who can see each other truly. Governing becomes episodic and convened, Acts 15 style: a movement gathering to discern at a genuine crossroads, then sending people and dissolving the seat rather than a standing chair that someone occupies and eventually defends to control.

Leadership in a movement is scaffolding. It is necessary, load-bearing, even beautiful in its season and it exists to be taken down. The builders who leave the scaffolding up haven't finished the building; they've replaced it.

So the questions worth sitting with are not about the people you lead. They are about you. What are you holding that you should be releasing? Who has real standing to see your backstage? And if the movement outgrew you tomorrow, if it spread past your language, your oversight, your name, would you call that failure or would you call it fruit?