The Five Shifts · Instalment 4 of 5: From institutional assumption to earned trust
It was summer. An outdoor cafe table, sun already hot, the shade of the trees not quite doing what I needed it to do.
I’d arrived early. Over-prepared, notes I didn’t need, background I’d already memorised, a pitch I’d rehearsed more than was probably useful. The donor had agreed to meet largely because of Liam, who had led Arrow for over a decade before a leadership transition eventually brought me to the role. Liam had built the kind of relational capital that opens doors long after the conversations that created it. I was sitting in borrowed goodwill and I knew it.
Underneath the over-preparation, a quieter question was already running. Am I enough? Not a comparison to anyone. Something more internal, the particular anxiety that lives in leaders who measure their worth by their output and their ability to deliver. I was about to find out if I could earn what I’d inherited.
Ten minutes into the conversation, something shifted.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. We found a rhythm. Some thread of shared experience or shared belief that turned a formal coffee into something more like a real conversation. Time moved differently. The sun was still hot but I’d stopped noticing.
This is the fourth in a five-part series called The Five Shifts, drawn from draft Arrow 2035 research into what faithful Christian leadership requires in Australia right now. We’ve looked at the shifts from performing credibility to embodying it, from information to formation, and from productivity to presence. This month the shift is from institutional assumption to earned trust.
There are three realities underneath that shift worth sitting with.
Reality 1: Institutional trust can be inherited but it cannot be borrowed forever
Liam led Arrow for over a decade. Countless conversations, relationships, followed-through commitments, donor lunches, alumni dinners, late-night calls with leaders in crisis. By the time I came to the role, he had built something I couldn’t have built in the months before I arrived. The goodwill was real, the open doors were real and people said yes to meetings I hadn’t yet earned.
That’s a gift and it has a shelf life.
I underestimated how quickly that would become clear. Borrowed goodwill opens the first conversation. It doesn’t survive contact with a leader who hasn’t done the work of becoming trustworthy in their own right. At some point — and it comes sooner than you expect — the institution stops being the reason people trust you. Your own character becomes the only credential that holds.
The draft Arrow 2035 research sits inside a broader shift in how Australians extend trust. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 73 per cent of Australians now hold what researchers describe as an insular mindset, retreating into smaller trusted circles and tuning out institutions they no longer believe in. Churches, schools, Christian not-for-profits: all navigating a landscape where the affiliation that once opened doors can, in some rooms, close them.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is part of this story. That mark hasn’t faded. It probably won’t. But something else is happening alongside the Royal Commission fallout. Australians aren’t just more sceptical of institutions. They’ve become attuned to the gap between stated values and visible character. They watch whether leaders actually live what they say and they’ve become, particularly among younger generations, good at detecting the difference.
The institution can open the door but it cannot make anyone trust you.
Reality 2: Trust travels through people, not organisations
Inside what I’d call the Arrow bubble, Arrow is known. Alumni recognise the name, donors have heard the story, stakeholders understand the mission. Outside that bubble — which is most of Australia — plenty of people have never heard of us. I walk into rooms regularly where I start from scratch.
Describing a leadership formation organisation is harder than it sounds. What actually opens doors isn’t the name. It’s the person. The Arrow alumni someone went to school with. The leader whose name comes up in conversation. The colleague who says you should talk to Arrow. Trust travels through relationships, not through brochures.
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that only 6 per cent of Gen Z respondents aspire to senior leadership roles. Six per cent. It would be easy to read that as apathy. It isn’t. Gen Z have grown up with real-time access to the gap between what leaders say and what leaders do. They’ve watched institutional failures play out publicly. They’re not disengaged. They’re watching differently and what they’re watching for is exactly that gap between stated values and visible character.
This has implications beyond recruitment. The credibility of Christian organisations in the next decade will be built or lost not in their communications strategies, but in the visible character of the people who lead them; how they handle a staff conflict, a financial pressure, a public mistake. When trust in a leader is lost — through poor decisions, moral failure, the slow erosion of character under pressure — the organisation loses credibility in a way that takes years to rebuild and sometimes it doesn’t rebuild at all.
I call myself a professional extrovert. I love people, genuinely. But I didn’t expect trust-building to feel this slow, even for someone who finds people energising. One relationship at a time, often in rooms where nobody knows your name, it has to be chosen, returned to, and some days it costs more than others.
Reality 3: Earned trust is built in small moments, not large ones
Back to that cafe table.
Ten minutes in, something changed. Not because of a compelling pitch. We just found each other as people — some shared thread I can’t even remember now — and the conversation moved from formal to genuine. I stopped performing and something settled.
The internal question — am I enough? — doesn’t get answered by performing well. It gets quieted, slowly and imperfectly, by showing up honestly and finding that honest showing-up is enough.
That’s what earned trust actually looks like in practice. A series of small moments, crucible moments, where character either holds or it doesn’t. A conversation where genuine presence replaces the mental rehearsal of what you want to say next. A decision made consistently with the values you say you hold, when nobody important is watching. Sometimes just admitting you don’t know, in a room where certainty would have been easier.
John 15 has been sitting with me through this season. Before Jesus laid down his life for the world, he gave his attention to whoever was before him. He noticed the overlooked. He welcomed interruptions. He lingered long enough that people felt seen. The trust people placed in him wasn’t built on institutional credibility or positional authority — it accumulated in small moments of holy attention, one conversation at a time. Paying attention to the people God places in front of me — a donor coffee, an Arrow alumni conversation, a room where nobody knows my name yet — that’s available to me in every meeting I walk into.
The leaders who will carry real credibility by 2035 won’t necessarily be the ones with the most impressive organisations behind them. They’ll be the ones whose character held in the crucible moments, most of which nobody ever saw.
That cafe meeting ended. The sun was still hot and I drove home with something I hadn’t arrived with. Quieter than certainty. Not quite resolution.
The goodwill Liam built was a gift I’m still grateful for. What I’m still working out is what I’m building now, in my own right, one conversation at a time.
A question to sit with: where in your leadership are you relying on borrowed trust — institutional, positional, or inherited — and what would it look like to begin earning what you’ve been given?
Next month: Instalment 5 of 5, the shift from solo leadership to shared leadership.
A note on process: I use AI tools to support my writing. The ideas, stories, and voice are my own.
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