“Until I get there, focus on reading the Scriptures to the church, encouraging the believers, and teaching them” (1 Timothy 4:13, NLT).

The laminated agenda has nine items. Headcount. The customer who is about to walk. The product date that will not move. If a verse appears at all, it sits in the footer of the last slide, a garnish on a meal the room has already eaten. The leader who suggested opening with a passage last quarter was thanked and then scheduled after the fire. The fire never ended. The book never opened.

Paul would not let Timothy run the room that way.

This month we are walking through Paul’s final letters to Timothy, the closest thing the Bible has to a leadership mentorship manual passed from a veteran to his protégé. Yesterday he told a young leader how to become an example: speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity. Today he tells him what belongs at the center of that example once it is in motion. Not a vision deck. Not a new program. The book, read out loud, then used to strengthen people, then taught until they can stand in it without him.

The context matters. Paul is not in Ephesus. He hopes to come. “Until I get there” is the sentence of a mentor who knows the gap his absence creates. False teachers in the city already had volume. They could fill a silence with novelty. Timothy’s temptation, with the apostle offstage, is to hold the room with his own voice. Paul cuts that off. Do not improvise a center. Keep the existing word in front of the people. Read it. Encourage them from it. Teach it. The three verbs are not a worship-service checklist for a modern church staff. They are the order of a leader who refuses to become the text.

That is the principle. A community that never returns to a word larger than its last meeting will be governed by whoever talks loudest this week. The integrated believer hears this as Scripture first: the public reading of the Bible is not a liturgical garnish. It is how a people remember they did not invent themselves. The reader still exploring can take the honest version of the same claim. Every team has a founding text, even if nobody has opened it since onboarding. Values on the wall. A charter. A promise made to customers and staff. When that text is never read, the leader’s mood becomes the constitution. Paul is not giving Timothy a branding move. He is putting the young man under a word he did not write, then telling him to put the church under it too.

Israel had already learned this the hard way. When the law described a future king, it did not start with charisma. “When he sits on the throne as king, he must copy for himself this body of instruction on a scroll in the presence of the Levitical priests” (Deuteronomy 17:18, NLT). The next verse is the daily regimen: “He must always keep that copy with him and read it daily as long as he lives. That way he will learn to fear the Lord his God by obeying all the terms of these instructions and decrees” (Deuteronomy 17:19, NLT). The person with the most power was the one required to stay a student. He copied the law with his own hand. He kept the copy close. He read it daily. The point was not a literacy program. The point was to keep a king from believing he had become the source. I am not installing Deuteronomy as your employee handbook. I am pointing at the same refusal Paul is making in Ephesus. Authority that will not sit under a word it did not write becomes self-referential. Self-referential authority is how a competent leader becomes the problem the room is afraid to name.

Public reading is not the same thing as a quote on a slide. In Nehemiah’s generation, after the wall was up and the people stood in the square, the recovery was not a new strategy. It was the old book, opened where everyone could hear it. “They read from the Book of the Law of God and clearly explained the meaning of what was being read, helping the people understand each passage” (Nehemiah 8:8, NLT). Read. Then explain. Then help people understand. That is Paul’s three verbs in an earlier key. Encouragement without the text becomes flattery. Teaching without the text becomes the teacher’s personality. Reading without explanation becomes a ritual nobody can obey because nobody knows what they heard. Timothy is told to do all three, in that company, until Paul arrives. The arrival never made the instruction obsolete. The church kept the order because the absence of the apostle is now the normal condition of every room you lead.

Bring it into Tuesday afternoon. Look at the first meeting you will run this week. What actually opens it? If you lead a church staff, a ministry team, or any group that claims the Bible as its rule, the first agenda item is a passage read aloud. Not a verse you already planned to use as proof. A passage. Let the room hear it before they hear you. Sit with it long enough that the fire on item two has to wait. Then encourage: name what the text gives the people in front of you, not what it lets you demand. Then teach: one clear sentence about what it means, in context, before you ask anyone to do anything. If you lead in a shop that will not open 1 Timothy at nine in the morning, do not fake a chapel. That helps no one. Open the book in the hours you control, before you walk into that room. Then, in the room, put the actual governing standard for the decision on the table before the newest opinion. The policy you already published. The promise you already made. The charter nobody has read since the offsite. The Christian move and the secular cousin are not the same act. They share a spine. The leader refuses to let improvisation outrun the text.

I will be honest about the difficulty. Opening with Scripture feels inefficient to a room that is already late. In a secular workplace it can feel like a category error, and sometimes it is. Forcing a Bible reading on people who did not ask for one is not courage. It is using the book as a power play. Paul is writing to a church. He is not handing Timothy a technique for baptizing a sales forecast. The cost on the other side is quieter and more common. You skip the reading because the escalation is real, and you tell yourself you will come back to the book when the week calms down. The week does not calm down. The room learns that the text is optional and the fire is lord. I have run that meeting. The agenda looked responsible. The people left with my adrenaline and no word that could outlast it.

The Field Manual at the end of this month will put this order into the Personal Training Plan: read, encourage, teach, before the rest of the work. Today is the public page of that order. Tomorrow Paul turns from the agenda to the gift Timothy is tempted to set down: “Do not neglect the spiritual gift you received through the prophecy spoken over you when the elders of the church laid their hands on you” (1 Timothy 4:14, NLT). The book in the center is not a substitute for the gift. It is what keeps the gift from becoming a performance. The young leader in Ephesus did not need a better opening joke. He needed a text larger than his absence, and a mentor who loved him enough to tell him to open it first.

Leadership Challenge: What is actually first on the agenda of the first meeting you will run this week? If it is not a text larger than your last idea, change the order once: a passage read aloud if you lead people of faith, or the governing standard for the decision if you do not. Protect the first ten minutes from the fire that will try to eat them.

I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now