Healthy Leaders part 2 – Big Vision is Narrow

Last week we started this series with the revelation that has to come before anything else: God is good, and a leader who’s settled in that doesn’t lead from fear. This week we turn to something more practical, but it only works once that foundation is in place — because what I’m about to say sounds, on the surface, like the opposite of ambition.

Big vision is narrow.

I know how that reads. Vision is supposed to be expansive, isn’t it — the bigger the better, more initiatives, more services, more programmes, more ground covered. But almost every healthy leader I’ve watched over the years, and almost every unhealthy one, has taught me the same lesson from opposite directions: the leaders who are stuck are almost always trying to do too much. The ones who are genuinely fruitful have, at some point, made peace with doing less — but doing it exceptionally well.

Without This, People Wander

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs 29:18

That line gets quoted often, usually to justify adding more to the plate. But look again at what “perish” actually means in context — it’s closer to wander aimlessly, cast off restraint, do whatever they want. A people without vision isn’t a people doing nothing. It’s a people doing everything, scattered, with no filter for what actually matters.

Vision isn’t the size of what you’re attempting. Vision is the picture of what could be, held together with the conviction that it should be. And a picture, by definition, has edges. It excludes as much as it includes. A vision that tries to hold everything isn’t a bigger vision — it’s no vision at all, just a longer to-do list with better branding.

Better Fewer, Better Done

Craig Groeschel has a line I keep coming back to, because it names something most leaders instinctively resist: it’s better to do fewer things well than many things averagely. A great Sunday. Great small groups. Depth over breadth. Most leaders who feel stuck aren’t lacking ambition — they’re almost certainly trying to do too much, spread so thin across every good idea that none of them actually flourish.

Here’s the phrase worth sitting with: you don’t grow something down, you grow it up. It’s tempting to think health comes from adding more layers, more programmes, more initiatives stacked on top of what’s already stretched thin. Real growth almost always looks like narrowing the target and then going deeper into it, not widening the target and going thinner across it.

Is It Just a Chair?

Jesus told a parable about a woman who lost one coin out of ten, lit a lamp, swept the entire house, and searched carefully until she found it (Luke 15:8). And another about a shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep to go after the one that wandered off (Luke 15:4). Neither of those stories is about scale. They’re about focus — a willingness to give disproportionate attention to one thing that matters, rather than average attention to everything.

That’s the question worth asking of everything you lead: is it just a chair? Is it just a coffee? Is it just a high five at the door? Is it just a kids’ session on a wet Sunday morning with six children in it? On the surface, those are small, easily overlooked details. But a leader with a genuinely narrow, focused vision doesn’t see them as small at all. They see every one of them as an opportunity for God to meet someone — and they refuse to let volume dilute their attention to what’s actually in front of them.

Rehearse It Until You Can’t Not See It

Vision isn’t just something you cast once and file away. It’s something you have to rehearse — go over it, re-enact it, hone it, repeat it — until it becomes the lens you see everything else through. There’s a concept from cognitive science called the reticular activating system: essentially, your brain filters out what it decides is unimportant and lets through what it’s been trained to notice. Buy a red car and suddenly you see red cars everywhere. They were always there. You just hadn’t been trained to notice them.

The same is true of vision. A leader who rehearses a genuinely narrow, focused picture of what God is doing starts noticing opportunities that were always available but previously invisible — because their attention had been scattered across too many competing priorities to see any of them clearly.

Believe for the Best, Prepare for the Best

There’s a version of leadership that believes for the best but quietly prepares for the worst — hedging every vision with a contingency plan built on fear rather than faith. A healthier posture, and a harder one, is to believe for the best and prepare for the best. Not naive optimism that ignores real risk, but a settled confidence that lets you commit fully to the narrow thing rather than spreading yourself thin trying to protect against every possible failure.

That posture only makes sense, by the way, once you’ve settled the revelation we talked about last week. You can’t prepare for the best while genuinely believing God might not be good. The two convictions are connected. A leader who trusts God’s goodness can afford to narrow their focus, because they’re not trying to cover every base out of fear — they’re pursuing one clear thing out of confidence.

This Week

Take an honest look at what you’re currently leading — your team, your ministry, your family, whatever’s in your hands. Ask: what would I have to stop doing, or stop trying to do at the same level, in order to do one or two things exceptionally well? What’s the “just a chair” moment in your world this week — the small, overlooked detail that a narrow, attentive vision would actually notice?

You don’t need a bigger vision this year. You very possibly need a narrower one — held with more conviction, rehearsed more often, and given the kind of attention that turns an ordinary chair, coffee, or high five into a moment where someone genuinely meets God.

Next in this series: a narrow vision still has to be carried by someone who’s built to sustain it. We’ll look at what it actually takes to be, in Erwin McManus’s words, structured for success rather than failure.

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