Repeating Yourself Is a Spiritual Discipline
Lencioni says leaders need to repeat key messages until they themselves are sick of saying them. Pastors who think they are repeating too much are usually not repeating enough.
There is an old piece of preaching advice that goes like this. Tell them what you are going to say. Say it. Then tell them what you said.
It sounds like a joke about boring preachers. It is also, it turns out, the heart of organizational discipline. In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni argues that leaders need to repeat their key messages roughly seven times before people start to internalize them. He goes further. Most leaders quit repeating somewhere around the third time, when it starts to feel redundant. That is exactly when the message is finally beginning to land.
Pastors should know this better than anyone.
The Church Has Always Repeated Itself
The lectionary repeats. The creeds repeat. The Lord’s Prayer repeats. The Eucharistic prayer repeats. The benediction repeats, week after week, for centuries. The church has built an entire formation system on repetition. We do not say the Apostles’ Creed because we have forgotten it. We say it because saying it is how we are formed by it.
Deuteronomy 6 makes this explicit. After Israel hears the Shema, “Israel, listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord!” (Deuteronomy 6:4), Moses tells the people what to do with it. “Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The instruction is repetition. Constant, relentless, contextual repetition. Sitting at home, out and about, lying down, getting up. The four conditions of human life. There is no time when repetition of the central truth is supposed to stop.
That is not a strategy. That is formation.
Why We Resist Repetition
Most leaders, including most pastors, resist repetition. Three reasons recur.
First, we worry about being boring. Saying the same thing twice in three months feels uninspired. We want to seem fresh, creative, never recycling material. We forget that a church’s job is not to entertain its members but to form them, and formation requires repetition.
Second, we believe announcement equals adoption. We said the new mission once at a Board meeting. We mentioned the values at a staff retreat. We assume the message has landed because we have transmitted it. Lencioni’s research suggests that is rarely true. People hear what is repeated. Single-sentence transmissions evaporate.
Third, we get tired. Repetition takes effort. When the leader is tired of saying something, it is tempting to stop saying it. That is exactly the wrong moment. The leader’s fatigue with the message is a sign that it is finally beginning to take. Stop now and the formation collapses.
What to Repeat
Repetition is only useful if what gets repeated is true. Empty phrases repeated produce empty cultures. Substantive clarity repeated produces formation.
For McPherson First, some of that clarity is in place and some is not. Mission: to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Values: love boldly, serve joyfully, lead courageously. Thematic goal for this year: grow engagement. Those are settled, and those are what we repeat now. In sermons, in worship, in newsletters, in Board meetings, in staff conversations, in casual hallway exchanges. Every week. For years.
What we have not settled is what makes our approach distinctive: the standing commitments that would filter our decisions rather than simply describe our hopes. We named three priorities at a planning retreat in March and called them strategic anchors, and we have since realized that a priority you can finish and an anchor you steer by are different things. So that question is open. Repeating an answer we have not reached would be its own kind of dishonesty. Repeat what is true, and keep working on the rest.
This is the part that is harder than it sounds. Repetition does not mean robotic recitation. It means returning to the same core language often enough that the language begins to shape the room. When a staff member says “this fits with growing engagement,” they are doing the formation work. When a Board member says “this is faithful stewardship of our resources,” they are doing it. When a parishioner asks at coffee hour “is this part of how we love boldly,” they are doing it.
The pastor cannot do this alone. The pastor goes first, and the rest of the body picks it up.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A few practical commitments make repetition possible.
Core language belongs in liturgy. Not as a sermon insert, but woven into prayers, calls to worship, benedictions, words of institution. Sunday morning is the highest-stakes repetition the church has.
Core language belongs in Board agendas. Not as performance, but as a way of grounding decisions in what we have already affirmed. Every motion can be tested against the mission, the values, the rallying cry. That is what they exist for.
Core language belongs in staff conversations. The annual review references the values. The weekly check-in references the rallying cry. The new staff orientation begins with what the church is for.
And core language belongs in everyday speech. Not as a slogan, but as a vocabulary that has soaked into how the leadership team thinks about everything. A pastor who has internalized the mission talks about the mission without trying.
This is slow work. Months turn into years. But the church that has repeated its core language faithfully for five years knows who it is in a way that the church that revised its values last quarter does not.
A Question for Between Now and August 24
The Board takes up Disciplines 3 and 4 on August 24. Between now and then, here is the question to sit with.
What does my community already repeat well? What is reinforced through worship, calendar, communication, conversation? And what is left to chance, mentioned once and never returned to?
If you cannot name the core language of the community you serve, that is a useful diagnosis. The work is to put substantive clarity in place and then to repeat it until you are sick of it. Then keep repeating it, because that is when it begins to land.
The next post lands August 26, exploring how human systems either reinforce or quietly erode the clarity a community has worked to articulate.
Glad you are reading along.