Who Is in Front of You?

The Ordinary Work of Christian Leadership

In Mark 6, Jesus and the disciples are confronted by an enormous crowd. The day is growing late, the people are hungry, and there is nowhere nearby capable of feeding thousands of people. The disciples see the problem clearly and offer a perfectly reasonable solution: send the people away. Let them go into the surrounding villages and find something to eat.

Jesus responds with an unsettling instruction: “You give them something to eat.”

The disciples immediately recognize the impossibility of what he seems to be asking. They do not have enough money. They do not have enough food. They do not have the resources to solve a problem of this size. Jesus does not argue with their assessment. Instead, he asks a much smaller question: “How many loaves have you? Go and see.”

There is something important in that movement. Jesus does not ask the disciples to pretend that their limitations are not real. He does not demand that they somehow manufacture resources they do not possess. But neither does he allow the size of the problem to become an excuse for disengagement. They cannot feed five thousand people on their own, but they can look around. They can pay attention. They can discover what is available. They can bring what they have to Jesus. They can participate in what God is doing.

Perhaps much of Christian leadership happens in precisely that space between believing we must solve everything and deciding that, because we cannot solve everything, there is nothing for us to do.

Family-systems thinking has given church leaders an important language for understanding one side of this tension. We are not responsible for another adult’s choices, emotions, behavior, faithfulness, or future. When we begin trying to manage those things for other people, we can easily become rescuers. We overfunction, others underfunction, and what initially appears to be care can actually diminish another person’s agency. Healthy Christian leadership requires boundaries, differentiation, and the humility to recognize that we cannot produce transformation in another human being.

But there is another danger. We can become so careful not to be responsible for other people that we slowly forget that the Christian life makes us profoundly responsible to and with one another. “I can’t change them.” “That is their responsibility.” “They need to figure that out.” “That isn’t my area.” Or in more direct language, “Not my monkey, not my circus.” Each statement can be true, and each can also become a sophisticated justification for disengagement.

Paul holds this tension together in Galatians 6. He tells the church to “bear one another’s burdens,” and only a few verses later reminds each person to “carry their own load.” Christian community requires both. I cannot carry your life for you, but your life is not therefore irrelevant to me. Your life is not mine to control, but you are not mine to ignore.

Christian responsibility, then, is not primarily about control. It is about faithful participation. Sometimes participation means helping. Sometimes it means challenging. Sometimes it means listening carefully enough for another person to discover what they actually believe God is calling them to do. At other times it means allowing someone to struggle with something they need to learn to carry themselves. We may connect people, encourage them, ask difficult questions, create opportunities, remove unnecessary obstacles, or simply walk beside them for a while. Wisdom lies partly in discerning what kind of participation actually helps another person move toward greater faithfulness and agency.

This is why an easily overlooked detail in Mark’s account matters so much. Before the food is distributed, Jesus looks at the crowd and has compassion for them because they are “like sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus sees people who need tending. The disciples, at least at first, see a logistical problem.

That difference should make Christian leaders uncomfortable.

It is entirely possible to fulfill all of our formal responsibilities and still fail to notice the people God has placed around us. A pastor can prepare excellent worship, preach thoughtful sermons, visit the sick, answer email, attend meetings, and administer the life of a congregation with great competence. A presbytery staff member can maintain a program, support committees, produce resources, organize events, and complete everything contained in a job description. These things are important. Many are indispensable. But they can also become the boundaries of our imagination about ministry.

Christian ministry is larger than the formal work assigned to us.

Sometimes the most consequential ministry we do on a particular day will never appear in a report. It may happen when we notice the person standing alone at a gathering instead of automatically sitting with our friends. It may occur when we introduce two people who could strengthen one another’s ministries, ask one more question rather than assuming we understand someone’s situation, or recognize a gift in someone who cannot yet see it themselves. It may happen when a struggling leader is met neither with judgment nor rescue, but with someone willing to help them explore their next faithful step. It may be as ordinary as encountering something frustrating and deciding to help make it better rather than simply adding our complaint to the system.

None of these things is grand. Most will go unnoticed. Yet communities are formed through hundreds of choices exactly like these.

We become hospitable by practicing hospitality. We become trustworthy through repeated acts of trustworthiness. We build relationships by repeatedly choosing relationship. We become courageous by practicing small acts of courage before the dramatic moment arrives. In the same way, Christian community is formed when we repeatedly decide that the people God has placed around us are worthy of our attention, curiosity, encouragement, and care.

This becomes particularly important in busy institutions. The harder we work, the easier it can become to define ministry by our formal sphere of responsibility. A pastor becomes responsible for this congregation. A committee becomes responsible for this assignment. A staff member becomes responsible for this program. A congregation becomes concerned primarily with its own institutional health. Over time, everyone may become highly responsible inside their own silo while the relationships between those silos slowly disappear.

Nobody has to intend this. In fact, isolation can emerge precisely because faithful people are working very hard.

But busyness narrows our field of vision. Eventually the question “Am I doing my job?” can replace the much larger Christian question: Who has God placed within my field of care?

That question does not mean that everyone becomes our responsibility. Nor does it eliminate boundaries, competence, or appropriate roles. It does, however, require us to look beyond the formal definition of our work. Who is in front of me? Who is beside me? Who is standing at the edge of the room? Who never seems to be included? Who has become isolated inside their congregation or ministry? Who possesses gifts that need encouragement? Who is struggling but remains capable of taking another step? What relationship could be strengthened? What possibility might emerge if someone simply helped two people discover one another?

These questions take us back to Jesus: “How many loaves have you? Go and see.”

The question is strikingly ordinary. Jesus directs the disciples’ attention away from the enormity of what they cannot do and toward what is actually present. What do you have? What has already been entrusted to you? What resources, relationships, gifts, possibilities, or openings already exist? What can this person actually do? What is possible from here?

The disciples do not perform the miracle. Jesus does. But they participate. They look. They bring what they find. They organize the crowd. They distribute what Jesus gives them. They gather what remains. Their responsibility is neither everything nor nothing. Their responsibility is faithful participation in what God is doing.

Perhaps this is also a better way to think about the scale of our own ministries. Many of the problems facing the church are far larger than anything we can solve. Congregations are changing. Trust is fragile. Leaders are exhausted. Institutions struggle. Communities become divided. Churches turn inward. No pastor, staff member, committee, or presbytery can fix all of this.

But that does not leave us without responsibility.

The question is not whether we can solve everything. We cannot. The question is whether we will notice what God has placed before us and faithfully participate.

This may also require us to rethink where we spend our energy. Most of us devote enormous amounts of time to formal responsibilities, urgent tasks, administration, meetings, and problems demanding immediate attention. Yet if we applied something like the familiar 80/20 principle to ministry, we might discover that a relatively small portion of our activity produces a disproportionate amount of trust, growth, connection, discipleship, imagination, and missional possibility.

Perhaps some of our most fruitful work happens in the twenty percent that is easiest to neglect: tending relationships, developing people, making connections, asking good questions, noticing gifts, building trust, encouraging faithful risk, and helping another person take a step they might not have taken alone.

If that is true, our calendars deserve theological scrutiny. We should ask not simply, “What requires my time?” but “What deserves my energy?” The two are not always the same.

Jesus does not ask the disciples to begin with a grand strategy for feeding thousands. He begins with attention: Look around. See what is there. Bring what you have. Start with the people and possibilities already in front of you.

Perhaps that is where much of faithful ministry still begins.

Who is in front of you?

And once you have truly seen them, the next question becomes much harder to avoid:

What is the next faithful thing?

For Conversation

• When you hear Jesus ask, “How many loaves have you? Go and see,” what does that question evoke in your own ministry right now?

• Where have healthy ideas about boundaries, differentiation, or personal responsibility perhaps drifted toward isolation—either in your own ministry or in our wider life together?

• Think about a recent meeting, meal, worship service, or gathering. Who was in front of you? Who did you naturally engage, and who might you have overlooked?

• Where are you tempted to say, “That is not my responsibility”? When is that healthy differentiation, and when might there still be a faithful form of participation available to you?

• When someone is struggling, what does it look like to walk beside them without rescuing them? What kinds of questions help another person discern and take their own next faithful step?

• Consider how you currently spend your time and energy. What relatively small portion of your work seems to produce the most trust, connection, growth, discipleship, or missional possibility? Does the way you allocate your time reflect its importance?

• What is one small, ordinary practice you could change this week that might help another person experience deeper connection, greater agency, or a clearer sense of God’s invitation?

A Practice for the Week

Once each day, pause long enough to ask: Who is in front of me? Pay attention before deciding what needs to happen. Ask what God might already be doing, what belongs to the other person to carry, what—if anything—is yours to offer, and what the next faithful step might be. Then, when appropriate, take it.