2 Timothy 2

This is our Sunday teaching from Senior Pastor, Tom Thompson. Recorded live at our service in Harris Academy Purley, Croydon on Sunday 1st June, 2025. Below you can find the full talk audio, and a summary article.

Want to lead a Connect Group session on this teaching? The notes are here!

Talk Summary: Leading Through the Hardship

There’s a kind of leadership the world rarely celebrates—one that doesn’t begin on a stage or with a title, but in the hidden, painful, and ordinary places of life. It’s the kind of leadership the Bible consistently honours: faithfulness in suffering, courage in obscurity, and love that keeps going, even when it’s costly.

In 2 Timothy, Paul urges his young protégé: Don’t be ashamed of the gospel—or of me, even though I suffer for it. That word ashamed cuts deep. Shame is subtle. It creeps in when our prayers aren’t answered the way we hoped. When we feel weak or unseen. When suffering lingers and voices around us (or within us) suggest we’ve failed.

But Paul is clear. We haven’t been given a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-control. Shame is the enemy’s strategy to stop us living out that calling. And leadership in the kingdom means confronting that shame—refusing to let hardship make us retreat.

Paul gives three pictures to hold on to: the soldier, who chooses obedience over comfort; the athlete, who plays by the rules, however painful; and the farmer, whose slow, unseen work produces a harvest in time. All three endure. All three suffer. All three lead.

Leadership might look like choosing to serve when it would be easier not to. Showing up again when you’re tired. Praying for someone even while your own heart is breaking. Opening your home. Carrying chairs. Offering forgiveness. Living faithfully when no one’s watching.

And yet, this is how the Kingdom comes—in healing power, yes, but also in the grace to endure. Both are glorious. Both reveal Jesus.

You don’t need to have it all together to lead. But you do need to keep going. Keep trusting. Keep choosing love, obedience, and courage over fear and shame.

This is the invitation of Jesus: not to lead without suffering, but to lead through it, trusting that your endurance will open the door for others to encounter eternal glory in Christ.

And that is leadership worth stepping into.