On Call, Not in Charge

One of my favorite authors is Leonard Sweet and he once wrote something that stopped me cold when I first read it. He said that followership is less about a call than it is about being on call — being available, trusting, alert, watchful, open, ready to be summoned. I have returned to that phrase many times since. It captures something that most discipleship frameworks manage to avoid, which is the deep, countercultural, ego-threatening reality that the primary posture of the Christian life is not leadership. It is followership.

This is not a popular message. We have built an enormous amount of Christian culture around the concept of leadership in leadership conferences, leadership pipelines, leadership development programs, leadership books. Some of that is genuinely useful and important. But underneath the scaffolding of leadership culture, there is a question that does not get asked nearly enough in what if God's primary assignment for your life is not to lead anything?

What if the most faithful thing you can do is follow?

Submission, surrender of control, acquiescence, these words do not fare well in the current cultural climate. Our world is oriented around self-determination, personal success, and the relentless optimization of individual outcomes. The person who says, I am here to follow, not to lead, and who genuinely means it, who has actually let go of the need to be in front is practicing something that looks, from the outside, like weakness. From the inside, it is one of the hardest things a human being can do.

I know this because I have had to do it, repeatedly. One of the most difficult ongoing disciplines of my life has been laying aside my ego and simply obeying the Holy Spirit rather than trying to figure out how to influence the people around me. That is a harder sentence to write than it looks, because the impulse to influence, to steer, to advise, to position, to be useful in ways that are visible is absolutely relentless. It does not initially appear as ego. It appears as concern, wisdom, leadership, or burden for the people I care about. But underneath, often, it is the same old desire to be the one who is needed.

The Holy Spirit does not need my help with His job. His job is to convict of sin, to draw people toward the Father, to open eyes and soften hearts. I cannot do any of that. My job is to be available when He summons me and alert to where He is moving, open to what He asks of me in the moment, willing to act or to be still according to His direction rather than my strategy.

That last phrase is worth unpacking further. His direction rather than my strategy is something worth building. It has steps and timelines and goals that are determined in advance. It is inherently shaped by my understanding of the situation and what we believe the best outcome would be. Followership, in its truest form, releases the strategy. It trades my predetermined route for His active guidance. And it does this not reluctantly, as a last resort when my strategy fails, but as a first choice. As the posture of a disciple who has genuinely decided that the One being followed knows the destination better than the one following.

If God wants you in a role of leadership, it will become evident. That is not passivity rather it is trust. You do not have to manufacture your own visibility or position. You do not have to lobby for your own relevance. You show up, you follow, you use the gifts He has placed in you for the purposes He has in mind, and you trust that His economy does not waste what He has invested in you.

Being on call is not a lesser assignment. It is, in a world that has made self-promotion its primary spiritual discipline, a profoundly radical one.