The prophet Elisha is dying. He calls the king of Israel, Joash, to his bedside. He tells the king to take a bow and arrows, then places his own hands over the king’s.
“Open the east window,” Elisha says. And Joash opens it.
“Shoot.” And Joash shoots.
“The arrow of the Lord’s victory,” Elisha declares, “the arrow of victory over Aram.”
Then Elisha tells the king to take the remaining arrows and strike the ground. So Joash strikes — once, twice, three times. And then he stops.
Elisha is furious.
“You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have defeated Aram and completely destroyed it. But now you will defeat it only three times.” (2 Kings 13:19)
The text is stark. The king had the arrows. He had the prophet’s hands over his. He had the declaration of God’s victory. And he struck the ground three times when the mission required five or six.
What exactly went wrong?
Not capability. Not access. Not even obedience — Joash struck the ground, after all. The number of strikes revealed the depth of his desire for the thing. He was willing to settle for less than the full thing. And that settling wasn’t announced. It was revealed in when he stopped.
The Question Insurgents Never Stop Asking
There is a question that lives at the beginning of every significant leadership story. It’s the thing that made you start. It’s what used to keep you awake — not with anxiety, but with a kind of holy restlessness. In church leadership it sounds something like:
Why aren’t more people experiencing the grace of God?
Who is not in the room yet, and why?
What would it take to build a community that genuinely transforms people?
That question is the engine. It’s the reason you struck the ground in the first place. And it’s the question that — quietly, almost imperceptibly — leaders eventually stop asking.
Not because they lose faith. Not because they fail. But because they succeed. They build something. And the thing they’ve built starts asking a different set of questions: How do we manage what we’ve built? How do we sustain this? How do we protect what exists?
These are not bad questions. They just aren’t the original question. And the longer the replacement questions go unchallenged, the further you drift from the mission that made you start.
When Insurgents Become Incumbents
Chris Zook and James Allen at Bain & Company spent years researching what makes organisations lose their edge. Their framework — the Founders Mentality — maps the journey almost every growing organisation makes, from insurgent to incumbent.
The insurgents are the ones who started the thing. They are, in Zook and Allen’s language, revolutionary, agitators — people waging a revolt against the status quo. They have an outsized sense of mission, a frontline obsession with the people they exist to serve, and an owner’s mindset — the sense that every decision matters, every resource spent is their resource, every person who walks through the door is their responsibility.
But as organisations scale, something predictable happens. Accountability gets dispersed. Discussions shift from real things — are we reaching people? are lives actually changing? — to systems, structures, and processes. The frontline voice gets quieter. The leadership conversation moves upstairs. And the insurgent gradually, uncomfortably, becomes the incumbent.
The language that signals this shift is telling. The insurgent says: we exist for the people who haven’t found us yet. The incumbent says: we need to serve the people we already have. Both are true. But which one leads sets the agenda for everything else.
Zook and Allen called this the Death of the Nobler Mission. The mission doesn’t disappear — it gets buried under the weight of the institution it created. And the tragedy is that most leaders don’t notice it happening. It doesn’t feel like betrayal. It feels like maturity. It feels like stewardship.
This is the 2 Kings 13 moment. Not failure. Settlement.
That’s what makes it so costly.
What Gets Settled For
The king doesn’t lose his arrows. He doesn’t walk away. He strikes — he just stops at three when the full thing required five or six. And the cost isn’t the next battle. It’s every battle after that. Three victories instead of the complete one. A partial win instead of the total thing that was on offer.
When leaders stop asking the founding question, that is what happens. Not collapse. Not scandal. Just a progressive narrowing of what’s possible. The mission contracts to fit what’s being managed, rather than expanding towards what’s still needed.
The people who could have been reached — aren’t. The community that could have formed — doesn’t, fully. The church becomes a very good institution for the people already inside it. And the people Jesus talked about in Luke 15 — the one sheep, the lost coin, the son not yet home — remain, at a careful distance, on the outside.
How to Stay Insurgent
The Founders Mentality gives us the outlines of an answer — and translating it into the church context sharpens it considerably.
Recruit like an insurgent. You get the culture you hire for. If you recruit for competence and compatibility with what already exists, you get managers. If you recruit for hunger, for restlessness, for people who carry the founding question themselves, you get missionaries. Your team over time will either protect what exists or keep pushing towards what doesn’t yet.
Train insurgency. The founding question needs to be deliberately, repeatedly returned to. Not as nostalgia — not as “remember when we used to…” — but as a current operating question. Build moments into your calendar, your team conversations, your strategy reviews, where the question gets asked again: Who are we actually for? Are we still for them?
Create heroes. What you celebrate, you get more of. If the stories told in your organisation are about building, managing, maintaining — that is the culture you are creating. If the stories are about the frontline, about the people reached, about the moments at the edge of your mission — that is a different culture entirely. Who are the heroes in your community? The answer tells you where the organisation’s soul actually is.
Reward insurgency. When someone raises the founding question — when someone says “but what about the people we’re not reaching?” — is that welcomed or quietly managed? The initiatives that get funded, the voices that get amplified, the people who get promoted: these are the clearest signals about what a culture actually values. The goal is not to return to the early days. The goal, as Zook and Allen put it, is to scale insurgency.
The Way Back
If you are reading this and recognising the drift — if you can feel the gap between the question that started you and the questions you are currently asking — the way back is not a rebrand. It is not a new strategy document.
It is a return.
Go back to the original impulse. What made you start? What did you see that made you angry enough, or grieved enough, or hopeful enough, to begin? Who were you for when you couldn’t yet afford to be for anyone? That question is still there. It has just gone quiet.
Pick it back up. And then strike the ground until something breaks.
Related: Lead Strong or Fade Quietly — The Question Every Leader Must Ask covers a companion question: not what you are fighting for, but what God is building in you for the long game. The two belong together. How to Change a Culture — The Five Years Nobody Tells You About — on what it costs to hold the mission long enough for it to take root.
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