Leadership Is Entrusted, Not Extracted
Empowered vs. Entrusted
A few years ago I was part of a group that had the opportunity to meet with an organizer from the Washington Interfaith Network. After her presentation we were in conversation when I mentioned the word “empower.” After I had finished, she told me they had stopped using “empower” and had started using the word “entrust” instead.
It may seem like semantics, but words have power.
She explained that when we talk about empowering others, the implication is that I have the power and I am giving it to you. It sounds generous. It sounds right. But underneath it is a quiet assumption about who holds power and who does not. In that sense, “empower” can actually be a disempowering statement.
They chose a different word.
Entrust.
To entrust is to acknowledge that people already have power. People already have agency. People already have the capacity to move toward their own goals. Entrusting is not about giving something away. It is about recognizing what is already there and choosing to trust it toward a shared vision.
That shift has shaped how we approach our work. We strive to apply this idea of entrusting in our work in congregational innovation, especially with young adults.
The Collective Voice, our 787 Collective podcast, entrusts young adults to tell their own stories. To honor their own spiritual curiosities. To name their own experience of faith formation. To help the church understand what is happening, not by speaking for them, but by listening to them.
We have entrusted young adults with real responsibility. We have hired them to lead our social media and redesign or website. We have invited them to shape the work of our Next is Now project - helping young adults transition from college ministry to young adulthood. We have asked them to lead Collective Threads - regional strands in the greater tapestry of The 787 Collective, weaving together young adult ministry leaders through shared stories, spiritual practices, and mutual support.
We are trying, in small ways, to model something for the church. Young adults are not leaders someday. They are leaders right now. The same shift has shaped how we approach congregations.
In our work through Houses of Hope, we do not come in as experts who already know what should happen next. We are not here to extract leadership from a place or impose it from the outside. Instead, we begin with a different assumption. You are the expert on your congregation and your community. There is wisdom here. There is experience here. There is history here.
Our role is to ask better questions. To listen closely. To help mine the wisdom that is already present. To create space where that wisdom can surface and take shape.
And then, to entrust.
To entrust a congregation to take its next most hopeful step. To entrust leaders to act on what they already know. To entrust communities to move toward healing and wholeness from within. It may sound like a small shift in language, but it has profound implications.
Imagine if our world entrusted instead of empowered. What would shift if we stopped assuming that power sits with a few and is handed out to the rest, and instead began from the belief that power is already present in every person and every community. Policies would be shaped with people, not for them. Leadership would look less like control and more like shared responsibility. Institutions would spend less time trying to fix others and more time listening for the wisdom already at work. We might move slower, but we would move together. And in that movement, we might discover that the work of transformation has never depended on a few people giving power away, but on all of us being trusted to use what we already hold for the good of one another. For the good of all.
Empower to entrust.
It changes where we locate power. It changes how we show up. It changes what leadership looks like. In the work of Congregational Innovation, this takes shape in how leaders are formed, how congregations are engaged, and how innovation is cultivated.
Whether through cohort learning, storytelling, or experiments in congregational life, the posture is the same. We are not here to hand out leadership. We are here to recognize it, call it forth, and entrust it. And it reminds us of something we forget too easily. People do not need us to give them power. They need to be trusted with the power they already hold.