What’s in the Water?

A parable on healthy and unhealthy cultures in Christian nonprofits and the church: why changing leaders so rarely changes the water

The Pond

I never thought I would actually have a pond. Not because I didn’t want one. I did, the way you want certain things you’ve quietly filed under someday. But ponds, in the budget of a ministry life, rank somewhere below mission-critical, and for most of my career mission-critical things ate the whole budget. So I let it go.

Then we moved to Malvern, and the house we bought already had one. A pond, with a small waterfall, native plants growing up through the rocks at the edges, and a handful of frogs who’d apparently decided the place was theirs before we arrived. I found, a little while later, a small community of people online who were closing down their own backyard ponds and trying to rehome their resident fish before the water went still for good. I took a few. Then a few more. Before I knew it our pond was teeming with life: dozens of koi, some pushing two feet long, and another fifty or so goldfish darting underneath them like the koi’s own weather system. We had, more or less by accident, built a wildlife preserve in our backyard. A lifelong dream, fulfilled without my having done much of anything to create it.

Now comes the part nobody puts in the brochure: keeping it.

I check the pH. I clean the filters. I feed the fish something that actually nourishes them, not just whatever’s cheapest. When a fish shows signs of disease or dies, I remove it before it can spread whatever it’s carrying to the rest. I net the pond when predators get bold. I clear out the debris that piles up every autumn and is still sitting there waiting for me every spring. I watch the water level, and when the algae starts winning, I intervene. And every so often, I find another pond closing down somewhere, and I bring its fish into mine.

How do I know the pond is healthy? Not because nothing ever goes wrong in it. I know because the plants are growing. The fish are multiplying. The frogs are croaking, and raising young of their own. Health, it turns out, was never a single decision I made once, back when we moved in. It’s a few hundred small acts of ongoing attention, repeated for as long as I want the pond to stay a pond and not become a swamp.

I think that’s also true of the organizations we build to do God’s work. And I think many of us have been getting the maintenance manual wrong.

What Makes Water Healthy

When something is wrong in an organization, our first instinct is almost always to look at the fish. We move people. We hire new ones. We let others go, sometimes with cause and sometimes mostly to be seen doing something. And occasionally that’s exactly right: some fish really do need to come out of the pond before they make everyone else sick. Henry Cloud calls this kind of decision a necessary ending, and he’s right that avoiding it usually costs the whole pond more than making it ever would. But it’s worth asking, before we reach for the net, what kind of problem we’re actually looking at: a fish problem, or a water problem.

Healthy organizations are not primarily the result of finding better fish. They are the result of tending the water.

By “water,” I mean the invisible collection of assumptions, behaviors, incentives, habits, stories, and expectations that quietly shape everyone who enters an organization. Some of it gets inherited from seasons of poor leadership or unaddressed pain that no one currently on staff actually caused, which is part of why it’s so hard to fix by simply replacing people.

Patrick Lencioni has spent a career making essentially this argument to secular organizations: that organizational health isn’t a soft companion to strategy, talent, and finances; it’s the multiplier that determines whether any of those things actually produce anything. A brilliant strategy executed inside an unhealthy culture rarely survives contact with that culture.

The water changes whatever’s poured into it.

Before I go further, let me name the three things I’ve spent forty years trying to lean into, since they quietly govern every scripture choice in this piece. First, reading the Bible with Jesus at its center, not as one teacher among many but as the person the whole story points toward, hoping to be shaped enough by it to, as John put it, “walk as Jesus walked” (1 John 2:6). Second, reading a few hundred books on leadership and organizational development, Christian and secular alike, while paying particular attention to Jesus’ own ministry as a leader, because I’ve never found a richer case study. Third, trying to help the church, and Christians generally, set down the extra weight we keep piling on top of the gospel and get back underneath the plain, astonishing thing Jesus actually offered. So when scripture shows up here, it isn’t proof-texted management advice. It’s meant to do what scripture is for: form us toward Christ, even while it happens to be remarkably good at diagnosing organizations along the way.

Jesus made a claim that doubles, conveniently, as an organizational diagnostic: you’ll know a tree by its fruit, not by what it says about itself (Matthew 7:15–20). Paul lists what actually grows out of a life shaped by the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness) against what grows out of one that isn’t (Galatians 5:19–23), and the contrast isn’t subtle. Christian organizations are, in my experience, unusually skilled at producing excellent language about their values. The real test was never the language on the wall. It’s what the water actually produces in the people who drink it every day.

The Revolving Door

Here’s the pattern I keep watching repeat itself, in church staffs and Christian nonprofits alike, often in organizations full of genuinely good people who want things to be better.

Something goes wrong: staff mistreatment, a toxic culture, leadership that doesn’t live out, Monday through Friday, the very values it preaches from a stage or prints in a strategic plan. The organization changes its senior leadership, because senior leaders are, after all, supposed to have their hands on the wheel. Hope returns for a season. A year or two passes, and the old dysfunction starts creeping back in through the floorboards. So they change leaders again, or redraw the vision and strategy, or bring in outside consultants at a cost running anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The problems resurface anyway. They swap vendors and partners. They rewrite the OKRs (objectives and key results).

A decade goes by. The water tastes the same.

Ronald Heifetz gave us a useful pair of words for this: technical problems and adaptive challenges. A technical problem is one your existing expertise can solve: you bring in someone who knows how to fix the specific thing that’s broken, and it gets fixed. An adaptive challenge is different. It requires the system itself, and the people inside it, to actually change, and that can’t be outsourced to a consultant or solved by a new hire, no matter how gifted. Tod Bolsinger, writing for ministry leaders specifically in Canoeing the Mountains, makes the same point with a sharper picture: most of our leadership training assumes we’re still on a known river in a stable canoe. But the terrain underneath a lot of our organizations has quietly become mountains. We keep paddling like nothing’s changed, because paddling is what we know how to do.

Swapping the fish is a technical fix. It’s necessary sometimes, but it isn’t sufficient, and after the third or fourth round of it failing to hold, the pattern itself should be telling us something. Testing the water is the adaptive work almost nobody wants to do, because it’s slower, and because it almost never lets any one person off the hook entirely.

Meanwhile, real people are paying for that decade. Staff members leave wounded and rarely say the whole reason why. Donors grow quietly cynical. Some walk away from faith entirely, not because the gospel failed them, but because an organization that claimed to represent it did. That’s the actual cost of mistaking a water problem for a fish problem, and it’s too high to keep paying.

Something in the Water

Here’s the harder claim, and the one I think most boards would rather not sit with: sometimes the dysfunction isn’t a person at all. It’s something the whole system has absorbed, and it will infect the next good leader just as efficiently as it infected the last one, sometimes faster, because the new leader doesn’t yet know what’s normal here and what isn’t.

Edwin Friedman spent much of his career studying exactly this, and writes about it in his book A Failure of Nerve. Chronic anxiety in a system, he argued, doesn’t politely stay contained to whoever introduced it. It gets absorbed by anyone who enters the system (including emotionally healthy, well-intentioned people) because systems have a gravity of their own, and most of us are far less immune to it than we’d like to think. Friedman wasn’t writing as a Christian voice. But few thinkers have shaped how a generation of ministry leaders actually think about congregational and organizational dynamics as much as he has, and his work needs to be strongly considered here.

The prophet Jeremiah saw the same pattern centuries earlier, in different language. God’s people, he said, had committed two evils: they’d abandoned the spring of living water, and then dug their own cisterns instead, broken ones, that couldn’t even hold what they’d settled for (Jeremiah 2:13). What strikes me about that image is how invisible the failure would have looked from a distance.

A cistern looks exactly like a well, right up until the moment you actually go looking for water and discover there isn’t any.

This is the question I think every long-suffering board, every weary staff member, every well-meaning new hire eventually has to ask, even though it’s an uncomfortable one: is something in the water here making every new thing we introduce sick before it has a chance? Has this pond been forming everyone who lives in it (including the people we brought in to fix it) for longer than anyone wants to admit?

It’s harder work to address, often more than a volunteer board wants to invest. That’s a hard ask for people already giving their time freely. But if they truly care about the mission, the path forward is simple, if not easy: roll up their sleeves and do the work, or graciously make room for a board that will.

When the Wineskin Looks Holy but Isn’t

Scripture doesn’t shy away from this. If anything, it goes looking for it.

When Jesus dictates letters to seven churches in Revelation, the sharpest words aren’t reserved for outsiders: they’re for congregations that looked, by any outward measure, perfectly fine. Sardis had a reputation for being alive, and Jesus tells them flatly that they were dead (Revelation 3:1). Ephesus had sound doctrine, hard work, and theological discernment, and had quietly let go of the love it started with (Revelation 2:2–4). Laodicea considered itself rich, comfortable, and lacking nothing, while Jesus describes it as lukewarm enough to make him sick (Revelation 3:15–17). Every one of these is a system that had learned to talk about its own health long after it had stopped having any.

A couple of years ago, our mission took three hundred of our own leaders, representing nearly a hundred different countries, to the actual ruins of Sardis, Ephesus, and Laodicea in Turkey, and asked the harder question on-site: which of these seven diagnoses describes us right now, not some ministry nineteen centuries gone? A large nonprofit can hide behind program metrics and donor reports as easily as a congregation hides behind attendance, and these letters were written for exactly that kind of hiding.

Jesus says almost the identical thing to the religious establishment of his own day in narrower terms: a cup scrubbed clean on the outside while the inside is full of exactly what it claims to oppose (Matthew 23:25–28). The prophets had already spent centuries making the same argument from a different angle, insisting that worship divorced from how you actually treat people isn’t worship at all, just noise (Amos 5:21–24), and that the only acceptable alternative is something closer to justice rolling on, continuously, like a river that never runs dry. James puts it most plainly of all: a spring doesn’t produce both fresh water and bitter water out of the same opening (James 3:11–12). Whatever’s actually flowing out of an organization’s daily life (toward its staff, toward the people it serves) is a far more honest report than whatever it has printed on the wall.

This shows up in a specific, recognizable shape inside Christian organizations: mistreatment of staff, sometimes plainly abuse, excused because the mission is too urgent to slow down for it and the vision too important to interrupt for one more personnel problem. A leader who berates, isolates, or quietly punishes the people who raise concerns gets protected, not because anyone actually believes that’s good, but because the results look too valuable to risk losing. And when someone finally reports it, the report too often travels straight back to the person with power over their job, leaving them more exposed afterward, not less. Ezekiel named this exact failure in Israel’s shepherds, who fed themselves while the flock went hungry, who ruled the weak harshly and brutally instead of binding up the injured (Ezekiel 34:2–4). Peter’s instructions to elders run in the opposite direction on purpose: shepherd willingly, not for shameful gain, not domineering over the people in your care, but leading by example (1 Peter 5:2–3). A Christian organization that excuses cruelty toward staff because the mission demands it has the logic exactly backward.

The mission was never supposed to be purchased with the people serving it.

And here is where I want to be careful, because this is the part of the article I almost left out. We do have an enemy. Paul names a kind of opposition that isn’t ultimately reducible to any one flawed leader or broken process: something more spiritual, and more systemic, than any single villain could fully account for (Ephesians 6:12). Peter tells us to stay alert, because that adversary is real, and prowling, and especially interested in undermining work that matters to God’s kingdom (1 Peter 5:8). Every pond I’ve ever seen has a heron somewhere nearby, circling on a quiet morning, waiting for an unguarded moment, a real threat, but one that lives outside the fence, not in the water itself. That’s closer to the right picture of the adversary Peter has in mind than the language of internal politics we usually reach for when something goes wrong. I believe that. I’ve watched ministries collapse in ways that felt like more than bad management.

But notice the order James insists on, in the same breath: submit to God, and then resist the devil (James 4:7); repentance first, resistance second, never the reverse. Naming a real spiritual adversary is not, and must never become, an excuse for an organization to skip the harder work of owning what it actually did to actual people. The devil is real. He is also, conveniently, never available to sit across a table and apologize to the people we hurt. We are.

How Jesus Tends a Sick System

If the diagnosis runs this deep, the cure has to be something other than a personnel change. I think this is one reason so much of Jesus’ ministry involved confronting and repairing unhealthy systems, not merely correcting individual behavior.

When he overturns the tables in the temple, he isn’t condemning outsiders. He’s confronting the most outwardly holy institution in his world, one that had let commerce quietly corrupt the very place meant for ordinary people to meet God (Matthew 21:12–13). When he kneels to wash his disciples’ feet, and later tells them that whoever wants to be great among them must become a servant of all (Mark 10:42–45), he isn’t offering a nice sentiment about humility. He’s inverting what status means in the room, on purpose, because status-as-usual was exactly what the existing system ran on. Simon Sinek’s observation that the best leaders eat last, borrowed from how military officers serve their own troops before themselves, is really just this same inversion translated into organizational language.

My favorite case study, though, is one that almost never gets brought into these conversations: Acts 6. The early church, not yet a generation old, discovers it has been neglecting the Hellenistic widows (a group on the fringes of its own dominant culture) in the daily distribution of food. Nobody had to scandalize the apostles publicly to get this fixed. They listened, then restructured, choosing trustworthy people to address the gap directly. It’s a first-century staff-care failure, solved adaptively rather than technically, by people willing to be told they had a blind spot.

I know that blind spot personally, because I’ve lived inside it. I lead a ministry whose leadership now spans dozens of countries, languages, cultures, and theological streams, all of us orthodox and evangelical but shaped by very different histories. More than once, I have caught myself assuming (never out loud, never on purpose, but assuming all the same) that my vantage point from the United States was simply clearer than a colleague’s from the Majority World. I’ve had to repent of that quickly, more than once, the moment I saw what I was doing.

Acts 6 didn’t stay in the first century. It just changed coastlines.

What I’ve tried to practice since, especially across that kind of distance and difference, is leading from influence rather than authority: from love, investment, wisdom, and genuine listening, rather than from role, position, age, or tenure. It’s slower. And for someone with my particular temperament, it’s sometimes maddeningly slower, because there are days I would simply rather decide and move on. But it’s the posture Paul describes in Christ himself: someone who, having every right to status, didn’t grasp at it, and instead emptied himself and took the form of a servant (Philippians 2:5–8). If that’s the shape of the leader we claim to follow, it has to be the shape we’re willing to grow into ourselves, on the days it’s inconvenient, not just the days it’s easy.

Tending the Water

So what does actually changing the water look like, rather than just changing the fish? It starts with the leader’s own health, since you cannot lead people beyond the emotional and spiritual maturity you’ve actually reached yourself, and the stakes are too high to keep treating that as optional.

Start by simplifying. Habakkuk was told to write the vision plainly enough that someone running past could read it without stopping (Habakkuk 2:2); most of our strategic plans could not survive that test, and the complexity itself often becomes a place for dysfunction to hide. Listen before you strategize. James’s instruction to be quick to listen and slow to speak (James 1:19) is, among other things, organizational counsel, and most staff can tell within the first ten minutes of a “listening tour” whether the decisions have already been made. Choose sustained partnership over band-aids: a real turnaround with outside help tends to take three to five years, not a single consulting engagement, and the prophets had a name for the shortcut version: declaring “peace, peace” over a wound that was never actually healed (Jeremiah 6:14).

Be careful who you bring in to fix it: people formed by similarly dysfunctional systems often carry that water with them into the new pond without meaning to, the way I might unknowingly introduce something into mine along with a rescued fish I was glad to take in.

Build reporting structures that don’t run straight back through the leaders being reported on, either: if the only path for a mistreated staff member leads to the person who controls their job, the water will never actually get tested, no matter how many complaints get filed.

And then comes the hardest one: repentance has to be public enough to match the harm, and specific enough to be believed. Jesus tells us to leave our gift at the altar and go be reconciled first if we remember someone has something against us (Matthew 5:23–24). Zacchaeus doesn’t just feel sorry; he names an actual number and pays it back, multiplied (Luke 19:8). James tells us to confess our faults to one another, not just to God in private (James 5:16). None of this is one person’s job. Paul’s image of the body in 1 Corinthians 12 (many parts, one body, no single part carrying the whole weight alone) is, among other things, an organizational structure for healing that doesn’t rest on a single hero showing up to save everyone.

I can tell you this works, because I’ve lived both sides of it. Early in my ministry, my team came to me (several of them, together, which took more courage than I appreciated at the time) and told me I’d been deciding the direction of things and simply announcing it, rather than genuinely inviting their insight into how it got shaped. I had to sit with that. Self-evaluate. Listen, really listen, past my first defensive instinct. Repent of it, and apologize for it, not just internally but to the people I’d actually done it to. We brought in an outside consultant to help all of us build better habits going forward. It was not easy. It was good. My team knew, afterward, that I loved them and was actually listening, and the ministry grew, not only in size but in the kind of health that doesn’t show up on a chart until you’ve lived inside it for a while.

I say often that I think God works more in spite of my shortcomings than because of my gifts. He uses, in John Newton’s old phrase, a wretch like me. That’s really just another way of saying that whatever good has come out of my leadership has had a great deal more to do with grace meeting honest repentance than with anything I brought to the table on my own (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).

Healthy water eventually produces observable fruit. Staff stay longer. Trust grows. Difficult conversations happen earlier. Younger leaders emerge. People tell the truth without fear. Repentance becomes normal rather than exceptional. Organizations that are changing their water should expect these signs over time, just as a healthy pond eventually reveals itself in living things.

I can also tell you, gratefully, that none of this is theory for me right now. The congregation where I currently serve, not as staff but as a volunteer, is healthy by these same measures, and when I ask myself why, the honest answer is almost embarrassingly unglamorous: we walk people through Pete Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy materials as a normal part of our pathway toward spiritual maturity, not as crisis intervention but as ordinary discipleship, and that steady, unglamorous practice has done more for our culture over the years than any single program could.

And the mission I lead is, I believe, healthy because we are built less like a single organization with one person at the top, and more like an alliance of executive leaders (several of us, from different countries and traditions, genuinely sharing the weight of leading it forward together), the way Paul’s body actually works rather than the way an org chart usually draws it. That structure is slower by design. It’s also, I’ve come to believe, a great deal harder to quietly corrupt, because health was never meant to depend on one good person managing to stay good forever.

Coda: Return to the Pond

Every spring, I still go out and clear the debris that piled up over winter. I still check the pH. I still net the pond against the heron that circles some mornings (a real threat, but one I’ve never once mistaken for a problem with the water itself), and I still lose, now and then, a fish whose time had simply come. None of that means the pond has failed. It means I’m still doing the only kind of keeping a living thing actually allows: ongoing, unglamorous, never quite finished.

Jeremiah offers the image I keep coming back to: the person who trusts in the Lord is like a tree planted right at the water’s edge, roots reaching all the way down into the stream, unafraid even when the drought comes, leaves staying green, never failing to bear fruit (Jeremiah 17:7–8). Not a tree that never faces drought. A tree whose roots simply go deep enough into the right water that drought doesn’t get the final word.

I don’t think any of us (me very much included) gets to lead well by talent or good intentions alone. The task in front of those of us trying to build something that actually looks like the kingdom of God is too large, and the cost of getting it wrong, for the people who trusted us with their lives and careers, is too great to risk. N.T. Wright describes that kingdom as heaven’s life breaking into the present rather than a reward waiting at the end of it, which means the tending can’t be postponed until some easier season either. We need the Holy Spirit. We need the counsel of people who aren’t drinking our own water every day. We need outside eyes willing to tell us what they actually see. We need long, unhurried, honest prayer, more of it than we’re usually willing to schedule. We need a great deal, because the task is large, and whatever good comes of it, in the end, will be by the grace of God, and not really by us at all.

So before you change one more leader, one more consultant, one more strategic plan: go check your water.

As for me, I need to get back in my pond this weekend and finish cleaning out what’s left from the fall leaves. It keeps clogging the pump and the waterfall.

About the Author

Mike Harder has served in ministry leadership for nearly four decades as a pastor, missionary, consultant, and nonprofit leader, and has served as President of Concentric Global since 2019, leading an alliance of 40+ partner organizations spanning six continents. Much of what shaped this article came from forty years of pastoral counseling and executive coaching with leaders navigating the real costs of unhealthy ministry cultures. He is the author of Engage: A Youth Worker’s Guide to Mentoring and the forthcoming The Master’s Blueprint: How the Harmony of the Gospels Reveals Jesus’ Strategy for Multiplying Disciples.

Do not reproduce or distribute without written permission.