Dig Wells, Don’t Build Fences
Why the church of the coming reformation will be measured not by the strength of its boundaries but by the depth of its springs
There is a parable buried in the practice of the Australian cattlemen, and like most parables it conceals its wisdom beneath the dust of the ordinary.
Across the vast interior of this continent, where the land stretches past the horizon and the heat presses down like a hand, the rancher faces a problem that no fence can solve; the territory is simply too large, too unyielding, too expensive to enclose. To wall in such country would be an act of futility, a labour that consumes the whole of a man’s strength and yields him nothing but a perimeter he cannot defend.
And so the wisest among them have abandoned the logic of the fence altogether and embraced the logic of the well. They dig down into the hidden aquifers, the deep cool reservoirs that lie beneath the cracked surface of the earth, and they bring the water up; and the cattle, having tasted it, do not wander. They remain near the water not because a barrier compels them but because their thirst is satisfied.
The herd is held not by restriction but by refreshment; not by the threat of what lies beyond the boundary but by the abundance of what lies at the centre.
I do not introduce this image as a charming illustration to be admired and set aside; I introduce it because it names, with a precision that our ecclesiastical language has lost, the crisis confronting the church in this hour. We have become, by long habit and unexamined inheritance, a fence-building people. We have invested our energies in the construction and maintenance of boundaries, and we have grown skilled at the work; we know how to mark the line that separates the included from the excluded, the credentialed from the uncredentialed, the member from the stranger. But while we have laboured over our perimeters the springs have run dry, and a herd dies of thirst inside a perfectly maintained enclosure as surely as it dies wandering in the open country.
The question before us is not whether our fences are strong. The question is whether there is any water within them.
THE CRISIS IS NOT WHAT WE HAVE NAMED IT
When the church examines its own decline it tends to diagnose a problem of doctrine or a problem of mission; we conclude that we have believed wrongly or that we have failed to go, and we set ourselves to correcting the creed or reviving the programme. These are not trivial concerns, and I do not dismiss them; but I have become persuaded that beneath the failures of doctrine and the failures of mission there lies a deeper and more structural failure, a failure of leadership design. We have built our common life upon a faulty pattern, and the pattern reproduces its faults in everything it touches.
Consider what has happened to spiritual authority in our generation. The authority that the apostles carried was the authority of the well-digger; it flowed from their proximity to the source, from the manifest reality that those who drew near to them drew near to living water. But somewhere in the long institutionalisation of the faith we exchanged this authority for something that wears its clothing and counterfeits its voice: we exchanged authority for control.
Authority gives life; control merely manages it. Authority draws; control contains.
The two are not the same, and the difference between them is the difference between a spring and a cistern. The leader who carries authority need not enforce his position, for the water vouches for him; the leader who possesses only control must defend his position perpetually, because the moment the enforcement ceases the people scatter, having found no reason to remain.
And so we arrive at the strange spectacle of a church that is exhausting itself in the work of management while the very thing that management was meant to protect quietly evaporates. We have substituted the fathering of movements with the administering of systems. We have substituted the cultivation of presence with the enforcement of programmes and the conferring of titles. We have, in short, become very good at the wrong thing, and our competence in the wrong thing has obscured from us how completely we have abandoned the right one. The reformation that God is working in this hour is, at its root, a summons to return: to lay down the trowel of the fence-builder and take up the spade of the well-digger.
BOUNDED SETS AND CENTRED SETS
Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch have given us a vocabulary that illuminates this distinction with unusual clarity, drawing upon a contrast that originates in set theory but finds its truest application in the life of the community of faith; they speak of bounded sets and centred sets, and the two describe not merely different methods of organisation but different theologies of belonging.
A bounded set is defined by its border. It exists to answer a single question, asked and answered at the perimeter: who is in, and who is out? It establishes the line and then expends its energy patrolling it. Its markers are external and they are many—the denominational affiliation, the doctrinal subscription, the behavioural code, the cultural conformity—and membership is determined by one’s position relative to the wall. To belong is to be inside; to be outside is to be other.
A centred set operates upon an entirely different principle. It is defined not by its border but by its centre, and the question it asks is not where a person stands relative to a line but in which direction a person is moving relative to the centre. Are you oriented toward Christ? Are you moving toward Him, drawing nearer, being formed? In this configuration the energy of leadership is not spent at the edges, for there are no edges to patrol; it is spent at the centre, in the deepening and the clarifying of the source toward which all are invited to move.
A well has no perimeter. It does not concern itself with how far the cattle have ranged; it concerns itself only with the purity and the depth of its water.
The leader who grasps this stops trying to control the edges, and the cessation of that effort is itself a kind of liberation; for the policing of boundaries is endless labour, and the leader who lays it down discovers that he has been freed for the only work that finally matters, which is the work of cultivating a Christ-saturated environment where the living water rises. Our Lord Himself established the principle in His conversation at the well in Samaria, where He declared to the woman:
“Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14, ESV)
Here is the entire vocation of spiritual leadership compressed into a sentence: we are not the water, and we were never meant to be; Jesus is the well, and our calling is simply to lead the thirsty to Him and then to step aside that they might drink.
THE APOSTOLIC PATTERN WAS NEVER AN EMPIRE
When we turn from our inherited assumptions to the actual record of apostolic leadership in the New Testament, we encounter something that ought to unsettle us, for it bears almost no resemblance to the structures we have erected in its name. We look at Paul and Barnabas, at Priscilla and Aquila, at the whole company of those who carried the gospel across the Mediterranean world, and we do not find empires; we find movements. We do not find central headquarters issuing directives to compliant branches; we find decentralised communities bound together by something stronger than organisational hierarchy. The relationships among them were built upon trust rather than positional control, upon covenant partnership rather than denominational bureaucracy; and the instinct of these leaders, when they raised up others, was not to retain them but to release them, not to hoard the platform but to multiply the platforms by giving them away.
This was the fivefold ministry functioning as it was designed to function, which is to say functioning as spiritual family rather than as institutional apparatus. The apostle, the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor, the teacher—these were never offices to be occupied and defended; they were equipping gifts, given for the maturing of the saints and the building up of the body, and their whole orientation was outward and downward, toward the equipping of others rather than the elevation of self. The leaders of the early church were not gatekeepers stationed at the perimeter to regulate access; they were well-diggers labouring at the centre to deepen the source, drawing the people to the water of the Spirit and the water of the Word.
TEN WAYS THE WELL IS DUG
If this is the crisis and this is the calling, then the practical question presses upon us: what does it actually mean to dig a well in the soil of our own context? I offer ten disciplines—not techniques to be applied mechanically, but postures to be cultivated in the heart of the leader who would create life-giving space.
