4 Axioms for Leaders

Riffs on Spurgeon's Spiritual Leadership

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. 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. Show up for hard conversations, difficult tasks, and those painful moments. The kind of leader who always delegates or evades the hard stuff is a pretender.

Leaders leap first.

2. Leaders Reach Past Their Reach

“Do all you can, and then do a little more; and when you can do that, then do a little more than you can. Always have something in hand that is greater than your present capacity.”²

Leaders do more than the bare minimum. Leadership isn’t simply meeting expectations. Leaders have ambition for what’s next. They look beyond the horizon and imagine what could be done.

This part from Spurgeon is critical—leaders love to push their capacity. This is about having a vision/idea that’s bigger than we can currently handle. Why is this a part of leadership? Because it means I’ll need to grow, I’ll need a team, we’ll need to work together, grow together, and most importantly, we’ll need God to get us to the other side.

3. Leaders Love Deep Work

If you haven’t read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I highly recommend it to you. He basically says that if you want to get ahead, do great work, and stand out, you need to do deep work—extended blocks of time (2–4 hours) where you only work on one thing, undistracted, not multitasking. Spurgeon knew this principle, too.

“Excel also in one power, which is both mental and moral, namely, the power of concentrating all your forces upon the work to which you are called. Collect your thoughts, rally all your faculties, mass your energies, focus your capacities. Turn all the springs of your soul into one channel, causing it to flow onward in an undivided stream.”³

There’s an element of self-leadership, or self-control, required for leadership. You need the ability to focus, concentrate, and devote your full self to the task.

Leaders are not perpetually scrolling on their phones. They are not summoned by pings and memes. They flow onward.

4. Leaders Love Excellence

The best leaders engage in deep work so they don’t waste their time and energy and fail to do what King Solomon said, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Spurgeon, who was insanely productive and fruitful, put it like this:

“Give your second-best never. Keep you to the very first and fullest that you can produce for Christ; let your whole life be the noblest exertion of which you are capable.”⁴

As a pastor/planter or ministry leader, the work is too precious and meaningful to do halfway. Teaching 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. Counseling and care can’t be set to cruise control.

Let’s leave it all out on the field for Jesus. Make no apologies for your zeal. The lukewarm, immature, and lazy are not our guides. We serve one Master. He’s our Leader. Let’s follow his example and serve with the energy he gives us.

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This post originally appeared in my column, The Planter’s College, at New Churches.

1. C. H. Spurgeon, The Salt Cellars: Being a Collection of Proverbs, Together with Homily Notes Thereon, vol. 2, 200.

2. C. H. Spurgeon, “The Necessity of Growing Faith,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 31 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1885), 478.

3. C. H. Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry: Addresses to Ministers and Students, 49.

4. C. H. Spurgeon, An All-Round Ministry, 393.