The Difference Between Announcing Resurrection and Inhabiting It
[Paid subscribers: this is the leadership application of Monday’s article on Ezekiel 37. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s free and worth starting there.]
Monday’s article made one argument: the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision are not a metaphor for the dead. They are a metaphor for the living who have lost the ruach (the breath, the wind, the Spirit) that was supposed to be moving freely through them.
The exiles in Babylon were not corpses. They were people going through the motions of daily life while something inside had gone rigid.
This is a precise description of a specific leadership condition. And it is worth naming clearly now before Palm Sunday, before Holy Week, before Easter Sunday.
The Performance Path Through Holy Week
There is a version of leading Holy Week that is entirely possible to execute from a dry place.
You know what it looks like. The services are well-designed. The sermons are theologically sound. The music is moving. You say true things with appropriate pastoral weight. People leave feeling something.
And you go home wondering why you feel nothing.
This is the Performance Path applied to the liturgical calendar. You have mastered the form so thoroughly that you can produce the output without inhabiting the content. The body is reconstructed and standing. There is just no breath in it.
The Performance Path is not a moral failure. It is an operating system problem. The system can run the application without being connected to the power source that was supposed to animate the whole thing.
Todd Hall’s relational spirituality research frames it this way: when our attachment to God operates conditionally (when we access the relationship primarily to obtain its outputs), the connection becomes transactional. The ruach moves through a transaction in a way it does not move through a relationship.
You can preach the resurrection. You can announce it with conviction. You can even feel something in the moment. But the difference between announcing resurrection and inhabiting it is the difference between knowing the text and having been in the valley.
What PART Reveals Here
The four dimensions of the PART Framework each show up differently in the dry-bones condition of pre-Holy-Week leadership.
Personal Wholeness. The dryness usually has an address inside you that is more specific than “I’m tired.” There is often a particular grief being carried: a relationship that did not go the way you hoped, a ministry that did not land, a season that cost more than you budgeted. Personal Wholeness asks: what specifically has gone dry, and are you naming it to anyone? The exiles named it: our bones are dried up, our hope is lost. The naming is not despair. It is the beginning of the prophetic address.
Adaptive Resilience. The week before Holy Week is a period of intense pressure. Every adaptive challenge you have been managing across the year arrives simultaneously with the highest-stakes message you will deliver. Adaptive Resilience asks: Have you built anything into the next 11 days that isn't just more output? Not vacation. Not escape. The space to let the “bone-rattling” happen: to let the disconnected things find their way back toward each other before Easter Sunday.
Relational Connection. Ezekiel prophesied in the valley, not from a distance. He was inside the same space as the dry bones. Relational Connection asks: Are you near enough to your own interior life to prophesy to it? And are you near enough to one or two people who can witness what is actually happening in you this week, not just what you are producing?
Technical Competence. Here is the place most pastors want to land in Holy Week: better planning, cleaner execution, more efficient systems. Technical Competence matters. But it is the fourth dimension, not the first. Structural readiness is not the same as inhabited life. The bones in the valley came together before the breath arrived. Form precedes breath…but form is not breath. Do not mistake one for the other.
