The House Is Not the Point

I first read about him when I was 10. Maybe 12.  He’s the first person mentioned in Humston’s Glemings. A hard-bound book with the Humston family tree written out in generation by generation paragraphs.

He came back to my mind earlier this year.  So, I did some deeper scouring. First I found his sermon, first preached in 1588.  The entire thing in a British Archive.  Then his  clergy record turned up— Church of England. His name was Robert Humston. And sometime that year, just weeks after the Spanish Armada had scattered and England had exhaled, he stood up and preached from Hebrews 3:3.

“The builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself.”

I’ve been sitting with that verse ever since.

Think about the moment he preached it. England had just survived something that had no business going the way it did. The greatest naval force in the world — one hundred and thirty ships — sent to crush a small island nation. And it didn’t. Storms came. Ships sank. England stood.

A lesser preacher might have made England the hero.

Robert Humston pointed somewhere else.

The house survived. But glory belongs to the Builder. More on Robert later.

I think about that a lot in my own work. I’ve spent thirty-plus years creating moments designed to do one thing: get past the cynicism. C.S. Lewis called it stealing past the watchful dragons — those accumulated layers of disappointment and disillusionment that make people cross their arms at anything that asks them to believe something.

When it works — when I watch someone’s face shift from guarded to genuinely open — I don’t feel like I did something.

I feel like something was done through me.

That’s an important distinction. Especially for leaders.

The most dangerous moment in any leader’s life isn’t failure. It’s the moment after something genuinely works. When the room responds. When the initiative lands. When the people follow. That moment has a gravitational pull — it wants you to believe you’re the reason.

You’re not the reason. You’re the house.

Eugene Peterson spent a career arguing that the pastor’s job isn’t to manufacture transcendence — it’s to help people see what’s already there. The glory was never yours to generate. You just had to get out of the way long enough for people to encounter it.

Robert Humston figured that out in 1588. The sermon is 438 years old.

We’re still learning it.

The best leaders I’ve ever observed share one quiet habit: they’re genuinely more interested in what God — or something much larger than themselves — is doing than in what they’re doing. Their work is excellent because it’s not about them. They lead with imagination precisely because they’re not trying to protect a reputation. There’s nothing to protect. They’re just the house.

The best thing you’ll ever build will point past you. That’s the whole idea.

Lead from there.

Leading With Imagination,