Leading with God’s Timing

Why God’s Timing Matters in Leadership

Jesus gives us permission to trade in haste for attentiveness and speed for divine deliberation. This does not mean we won’t go fast, but it does mean we will go at the pace of God’s word and commit to move only when God speaks.

Trusting God’s Timing for Impactful Leadership

As audacious as this may sound, waiting on God’s “go” gives us confidence to lead teams that need to swim against the competitive tides. Spending time with God to authentically hear from him gives us authority to point organizations in a direction that is littered with grace and cluttered with mercy. Like Harriett Tubman, who was known to stop those following her on the underground railroad to literally hear from God, Christian leaders can develop the disciplines to hear both the direction and the pace of God’s promises that can lead to the fruit we desperately want to produce.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Speed in Leadership

It is true that there are plenty of leaders who believed they were actively listening for God and took a wrong turn. There are many more employees and staff members who have experienced leaders who called themselves listening and still went on warp speed, leaving their teams and followers to languish in the dust. But the purpose of crucifying speed is so that God’s grace-filled timing may be resurrected. We cannot control every outcome, but we can purposefully set our intentions on God’s timing and embrace the grace and mercy that comes in our human attempts to join his pace. As you reset your own sense of time, I invite you to consider these reflections with your team:

Practical Ways to Follow God’s Timing

Make room for collective discernment—As a key element to minimize harm, making room for trusted individuals to discern the pace together can keep people from feeling left behind. Setting the pace together helps leaders to cultivate trust that will lead to speed at just the right time.
Seek impact over impulse—Beyond the appeal of impact can be a thirst for lasting effect that can overcome the impulses of the day. While acting on an urge can get you there fast, acting with a view toward longer-term impact will help you stay. Impulses tend to fade while impact tends to last.
Put the right drivers in the seat—What people, problems, or pressures are driving the need for speed? We often don’t realize that we are being driven by false realities until it’s too late. Take the time to assess who or what is driving your pace and make sure that the driver can be trusted to take you in the direction of God’s calling.
Reclaim the sacramental slow—With ever-increasing pressures to be fast, leaders will have to be intentional about instituting slower rhythms. This can be as simple as blocking “think days” on the calendar to step off the moving treadmill, building checks and balances into decision making that take time to ensure that every decision isn’t rushed, or even pausing after each meeting or gathering to return space to God and reflect on what is next. Slow can be exercised like a sacrament when it is intentionally engaged in partnership with God.
Embrace loss—Following God’s pace might lead to a few missed opportunities, deadlines, or rewards. But God never promised that we would not experience loss, only that our losses would be minimized in light of what we gain with him. We may lose elements in the world, but when we follow his timing, we will gain the eternal value of our souls (Matthew 16:26).

Life is fast and getting faster. Leadership is filled with pressure to speed to the finish and to be the first in the field. But the invitation to forsake the pace of the world in exchange for the pace of God’s timing will give us more peace than we could ever imagine in this world. With this non-anxious pace of leadership, God can bring the kind of healing through us that our teams and employees so desperately need.

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