People grow fastest when they know someone believes in them. To be salt and light is to stand beside someone and draw out what God has already placed within them.
I think most of us in ministry are likely familiar with the story of Jethro and Moses in Exodus 18. It’s a perfect passage for leaders, because it’s the first real depiction in the Bible of the principle of empowerment or delegation.
Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, encourages him to find men who have proven themselves capable and appoint them as leaders and judges over Israel so they can take burdens off of Moses’ plate. It’s a principle that I’m sure many of us in the church media world aspire to adhere to as we replicate ourselves and build teams.
You don’t need perfect volunteers to build a strong team; you need the willingness to invest in the ones you have.
“But,” you might be asking, “what do I do if I’m not surrounded by capable people like Moses was? I’m stuck in a situation where I’m the only one with a track record and I have to do everything! I wish I had some proven people I could empower like Moses did!
With the teams many of us lead, maybe there’s not a clear group of capable people who have proven themselves trustworthy of responsibility. It might be a small team with limited experience, or it might even be a team I’m unfamiliar with because I’m a new leader.
Unproven doesn’t mean incapable.
Or maybe there are team members who have never had the chance to have more responsibility. Maybe they lack self-esteem and don’t see themselves capable of doing anything in life at a high level. Maybe they’ve never had someone around them to see potential in them and call it out. Maybe they’re so afraid of failure that they’re convinced that they really shouldn’t ever try anything new so they don’t disappoint others.
To overcome this, and to unearth unseen gems of potential, it’s our job to lean into Jesus’ famous teaching about salt and light found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.
Doubtless we are all familiar with this teaching and the importance of reflecting God’s light and goodness into our environments so they can experience Him through us. It’s an important principle to remember about how crucial it is to affect the world around us for Christ.
But what if there’s another way that we can be salt and light, and do it with the teams we lead? Let me explain.
Encouragement is a leadership strategy.
Turning on a light switch in a dark room doesn’t transform that room from an empty cube to a kitchen or closet or office. Flipping on the lights doesn’t open a portal in the space-time continuum that instantly populates the room with carpet and furniture.
The room already had fixtures and features. But they were likely unusable in the darkness, and the room was unable to achieve its fully intended purpose.
Light didn’t give the room its purpose, but it did make it so that the room could actually fulfill the purpose for which it was intended.
Similarly, consider salt. You can’t sprinkle salt onto veggies to make them taste like steak (unfortunately!), or onto mashed potatoes and make them taste like mac & cheese.
Salt doesn’t create flavor, but simply enhances what’s already there. A flavor that may have been present but mild has now been brought to the forefront so that the food can be experienced to the full degree.
So, then, consider how I can be salt and light to my team.
What if the team members we lead are symbolically a dark room with unrealized potential that needs to be illuminated? What if they’re a bland serving of food screaming for salt?
But if I’m only looking for well-lit rooms and well-seasoned foods (like the proven “capable men” that Jethro pointed Moses to) I may never see them.
Potential precedes performance.
My job, as a leader, is to see the potential inside each member of my team that they may not even see in themselves. Some people have a hard time seeing theirs because they’re looking through lenses of life so smudged by failure, loneliness, rejection, poor self-esteem, or any one of a number of other things. I can help illuminate their potential.
I have to be able to see them not as they are, whether wounded, quiet, hesitant, or unproven, and see them as God does: someone to whom He gave a divine calling and just needs to be in the right environment and around the right people (and perhaps under the right leader) in order for it to flourish. I must add salt to their lives and bring out a new vibrance and confidence they may not have known existed.
My team needs me to know them personally, so I can understand their strengths and weaknesses, their abilities and their potential, and then prayerfully shift them into opportunities where they can flourish.
So maybe I don’t always need to find proven leaders. Maybe I’ve got plenty of potential on the team around me, if I’m only able to invest in them and bring it forth. Plenty of capable people might just be ready to help share my load.
Go ahead and flip on the light. Wiggle the salt shaker. Your team’s untapped potential is counting on it.
