Long before my childhood began to segue into adulthood, I became fully aware of my grandmother Addie and the social splendor that surrounded her. She was the lead matriarch of a small mill town called Sedro-Woolley.

When I close my eyes, I remember her as a fixture and mixture of quirks, folklore and triviality. She was always at her best during Thanksgiving supper when she would boast of a father who worked 14-hour days for a bucket of milk or syrup as a paycheck.

Then came the tale of how she and Grandpa used pig parts to replace a blown head gasket during a 1931 honeymoon drive from Oklahoma to Iowa. According to Grandma, the newlyweds celebrated their safe arrival in Des Moines by enjoying a meal of bacon hot off the engine.

I just giggled and believed every word.

More than half a century separated us in age, but we shared a sacred sameness. There’s a reciprocal beauty when a proven life meets a promising life. That was our relationship. I loved her stories. She loved my discoveries. As time wore on, Grandma found safety in nesting and nostalgia. For me, it was about wings and wonder.

Even though my own abstracts of destiny, purpose and servant-leadership were still two decades away, that early bond with my grandmother became the rational and emotional framing for how I would assemble my models of leadership and Kingdom life. I somehow knew that honor and energy would need each other for a lifetime. Everything to come would emerge from this one foundational idea.

Honor and energy are not enemy combatants competing for restricted air space; God meant for them to coexist and harmonize. He intended for honor and energy to occupy one bandwidth, not two. Nothing will flourish, especially when it comes to the local church, until these dual ingredients sensibly and pragmatically synergize. Older believers and leaders place a high value on honor (something proven), while younger believers and leaders place higher value on energy (something innovative). But over and over, Scripture seamlessly blends honor with energy as a collective force.

Acts 2 is a beautiful interlacing of history with the present day. The Day of Pentecost reflects the inseparable bone-and-marrow relationship between honor and energy. When the bystanders publicly tried to intimidate Peter over the obnoxious and sudden invasion of heaven in downtown Jerusalem, he quickly defended the honor of the Prophet Joel. He said that someone else had played a role in the events of the day, declaring: “this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:16). Peter was honoring the original source and sequence.

Joel’s prophecy was given centuries earlier; yet the sights and sounds were intensely contemporary — so much so that the hearers were pierced to the heart. They cried out to Peter for direction. It was impossible for Peter’s preaching and presentation skills alone to create this kind of mass transparency and impact; it was, in fact, a Spirit-empowered continuum of Joel’s message. This was one sermon, not two. The only thing separating Joel and Peter was a human timeline. In other words, honor and energy were equal partners during the birth and convergence of the Church Age.

Change is never tidy; it’s disruptive. Transition is complicated because it’s hard to locate the relationships. The instincts for control are always strongest when there’s a vacuum of leadership. Without sound theology and functional love, a congregation will quickly deconstruct and partition honor from energy, losing all the conduits of community and communication in the process.

A spiteful church transition can turn a healthy congregational family into a toxic flow chart overnight. When this happens, the older crowd sees the younger crowd as rogue, and the younger crowd sees the older crowd as rigid. Sadly, this rogue vs. rigid standoff is occurring in churches all over America.

Energy is a biblical concept. It’s not reserved for the young alone. Caleb, at age 85, told Joshua he felt no different than he did at 40: “So here I am today, eighty-five years old! I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then” (Joshua 14:10,11).

The Prophet Haggai wrote about the Lord stirring up the enthusiasm and energy of the governor, the high priest and the whole remnant of Israel (Haggai 1:14). As Israel returned from captivity to rebuild the ancient lands colonized by Babylon, thus fulfilling the prophetic predictions of Jeremiah from years earlier, the people discovered a huge missing element to their efforts. Their work was honorable, but they lacked the energy levels to pull it off. The Lord poured out a new energy on Zerubbabel and Joshua and filled them with the zeal, enthusiasm and power to successfully carry out Jeremiah’s prophecy.    

We face similar spiritual campaigns today as we strive to honor the voice of the Lord and the voices of those who came prior to us in the sequence of God’s ongoing assignments that can span generations. It takes the kind of energy Haggai wrote about to complete the task. God often gives this kind of natural energy to each generation as they arrive on the scene and become mature enough to take on the heavy lifting for the Kingdom. Joel prophetically describes a type of generational distribution of responsibility: “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (Joel 2:28).

No one can accurately foretell the weight and wear of each cosmic dimension, but each generation clearly has unique and differing roles and characteristics. As each generation remains faithful, Kingdom congruency flourishes. The beauty is that each generation keeps developing and maturing, and, like David, grows from kid to king.

From Kid David to King David
According to 1 Chronicles 29:28, “He [David] died at a good old age, having enjoyed long life, wealth and honor. His son Solomon succeeded him as king.”

When we think of David, we imagine a younger man, not someone elderly. King David was first kid David. He was a member of the sheep police. He medicated his boredom with target practice, plucking ammunition from a brook without a single set of eyes there to notice. Slaying trees with a sling is a tough way to kill time, especially when you have a passion for taking on giants. But that is nothing new. Every youthful, energetic generation must embrace this phase of life and leadership, remembering that leadership happens over time — not overnight.

The energy generation struggles for self-promotion. The honor generation struggles for self-perseveration. Relationship is the path to solving both of those dilemmas.

For many younger “energy” leaders, the conflict between seed and speed is relentless. Many younger leaders fail because they see leadership as a competition. They are desperate to be first to the marketplace with a product, or to become a cultural thought leader on certain topics. But great leadership is anti-speed. When it comes to the kingdom of God, fast is slow, and slow is fast. The more we strive, the less it actualizes.

The science of God’s kingdom is agriculture, not technology. It takes the same amount of time to grow an apple today as it did in the days of Jesus. Young leaders must pace themselves, not simply to avoid burnout, but because they’ve come to understand that substance and wisdom grow like tree bark. No one can go deep in a day.

From Energy to Honor
For the energy generation, it’s important to remember that great leaders pay attention, while poor leaders seek attention. In their quest for early success, many energy leaders face deep insecurity when they see a peer gaining recognition. The honor generation has been around long enough to know that another person’s success doesn’t steal your potential. There is plenty of wind in the harbor to sail every ship, as long as the sail is up. The fastest way to taste the contents of your heart is to hear your competition complimented.

King Saul’s paranoia skyrocketed when the women of Israel danced and sang, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7). The thought of someone else getting excessive attention drove Saul senseless. Swept out to sea by jealousy, Saul’s influence was over. Attention seekers have a short shelf life when it comes to leadership. Great leaders pay attention to themselves and to the world around them, not for the purpose of applause, but to acquire and absorb anything and everything that might help them transform into something new.

For many energy-only leaders, the modern messaging of faithfulness is code for futility. The honor generation sees it differently. For the energy-only crowd, being told that faithful repetition is the fastest path to results feels manipulative. A lot of young leaders just aren’t buying it like their fathers did. The message feels too institutional, like a one-directional win for the guy in charge and no one else.

Spending valuable developmental years alongside someone who doesn’t embody your future ambitions is too ambiguous. This makes no sense to an expectant generation of all-access leaders. It’s like being asked to load up for a long ride in a parked car. So a new set of questions has emerged for the future-centric leader. But there’s also a dark side effect — a dishonesty that some young leaders need to own.

For some, all the human elements of career mapping have supplanted simple trust in God for the future. For many of our young leaders, there’s an unholy urgency to leverage the seen world instead of walking by faith after the unseen. This is how the energy generation feels safe about tomorrow. It’s facts or flight. And frankly, I can’t blame them for the struggle.

Helping young leaders see the meaning and influence hidden inside the little behaviors they begrudge is a tough sell. Young leaders must learn that obscurity is not a leadership disease. When it comes to spiritual formation, there is a universal link between advancement and growth through adversity.

Biblical leadership is not about becoming the expert or the executive. It’s about being the example. But becoming a sincere leader is a prodigal’s process, and therein lies the challenge.

Over and over, Scripture seamlessly blends honor with energy as a collective force.

The best thing about climbing mountains is that you cannot fake your way to the top. If you can manipulate your way there, it doesn’t represent a true accomplishment or result in real growth.

In 1 Timothy 4:12, Paul says, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.” The word “example” comes from the Greek word tupos. It means “to form by a blow or impression of a figure or image — to become the template of something.”

Becoming a fixed imprint or image, like the face of a president stamped on a coin, is a violent process. It has to be for the image to endure. Spiritual formation, or becoming an example, is about getting the image of Christ stamped on you in such a way that people will recognize Christ’s value both in you and on you. The person they first meet and the person they get to know over time are the same person.

I’ve watched young leaders roll their eyes when asked to do things that feel fake. Back during my Bible college days, my homiletics syllabus said I had to preach a canned sermon to pass the class. So there I stood, sick and sweaty, before a fake congregation, asking for a fake response after my fake sermon. It was an exercise in make-believe.

Two years later, I graduated and found my way onto a church staff where I assisted with the 8 a.m. service. My job was to give announcements between the offering and the sermon. This amounted to greeting a small crowd of long-faced churchgoers, followed by welcoming mythical guests to a service entirely void of visitors. My emotions told me the whole thing was a waste of my time and talents. I wanted to preach for real instead of experiencing more of the same. Little did I realize at the time that I was growing and cultivating my speaking talents.

We’ve all met a leader, or have been the leader, who feels trapped in a malicious and suspicious world. We have felt the relentless inadequacy that comes as we compare ourselves to other leaders on the Internet. We are noticeably wounded, with scabs instead of scars covering our injuries. Picking at ourselves as we do, we never have a chance to heal.

When I began in leadership, I occasionally encountered older leaders who fit this description as well. They enjoyed telling their memoirs of misery to anyone gullible enough to listen. Once passionate and purposed, they had become splintered, void of optimism and critical of everyone past, present and future. Nobody loves a good leadership war story more than me, but woe stories turn me off. Whenever I hear one of these stories, the last thing I feel is pity. The first thing I feel is poisoned. If you are in such a place, you need to shift your perspective before it’s too late.

Longevity and Brevity
We’re all born between the dimensions of longevity and brevity. At some point in the journey, we hit a tipping point where personal feelings of longevity (I have a long, full life ahead) give way to feelings of brevity (I’m now measuring my days). While it’s natural as human beings to define our lives by longevity and brevity, both perspectives are terribly flawed. God calls us to minister and lead from the perspective of eternity, not by the deceptive measurements of longevity and brevity.     

The need to secure a place as a thought leader as fast as possible poses a difficulty for the energy generation. The idea of remaining overlooked and unheralded, while others receive recognition and gain promotions, can become a heavy burden. The energy generation struggles for self-promotion. The honor generation struggles for self-perseveration. Relationship is the path to solving both of those dilemmas.

For the energy-only generation, the older crowd represents the point on the timeline when relevancy is lost. Their idea of honor is to allow the older crowd to remain present in some kind of pseudo “leadership-hospice.” This is nothing more than counterfeit honor. For the honor-only generation, youthfulness represents an uprising of dangerous independence and a kind of impulsiveness that ends up wasting time and money.

The digital divide has only widened this perception gap between honor and energy. I confess I’m a digital immigrant when it comes to technology. Other than a new garage door opener and a microwave, I spent the first half of my adult life tech free. The idea of assimilating multiple apps with the same ease that I maneuvered a phone book or a Thomas Guide (for those under 40, that is a detailed driving map that “smart” people used to carry in their cars) feels exhausting. So the honor generation just backpedals when they feel ignorant.

With all of these variables at work, the local church is still a wonderful possibility and chemistry of honor and energy. Each element serves and interacts with the other. One cannot exist without the other. Each creates the other. But once honor and energy compete for the same space, a church becomes sidetracked and ineffective.

There’s genuine complexity when it comes to how best to honor those who have contributed both years and tears to the church. Are we obligated to someone because of tenure? Does aging mean seasoning? Do years of service equal wisdom?

The same complexity exists when attempting to raise up and empower a new generation of leaders. Are we obligated to the destiny of a young man or woman with an unproven life? Is vision the best demonstration of character? Should we ever hold back a young leader for the sole purpose of teaching him or her patience?

If we will allow the Holy Spirit to show us the true patterns of biblical honor and energy, the above questions will no longer stress nor distract us as the local church, but they will instead prompt us to pursue intentional relationships marked by the reciprocal beauty of the proven and the promising.

Scott Hagan is co-founder and director of Real Life Churches in Sacramento, California.

This article originally appeared in the February/March 2017 edition of Influence Magazine and has been used with permission.