The world’s best teachers do not want followers for their own sake. They want colleagues. Successors. Equals. They hope that one day their students will no longer need them.
Whether we understand him as the Son of God, a prophetic teacher or one of history’s great moral visionaries, the man we call Jesus of Nazareth embodied this exact educational style. He gathered ordinary people, taught them, challenged them and then entrusted them with the work. Long before they felt qualified, he sent them out to teach, heal, reconcile and build communities of compassion.
The movement he began was never intended to depend upon his physical presence alone. He expected the people around him to carry the work forward.
The purpose of a teacher should never be to become indispensable. Indispensability is what cult leaders foster. It is what pastors, priests, ministers and gurus create when they operate from ego rather than love. The work of a truly grounded spiritual teacher is to help other human beings discover capacities they did not know they possessed.
Good parents understand this instinct as well. The deepest hope of a loving parent is not to have a child who depends upon them forever. It is to raise someone capable of expressing their own wisdom — their own style of kindness, courage and discernment. We hope they eventually make good decisions independently. We hope they solve problems we never imagined. We hope they become not merely our equals, but our betters.
Love is not measured by how much dependence it creates, but by how much freedom it nurtures.
I have been a stained-glass artist for 26 years. For several years recently, I had been thinking about creating a stained-glass project for our church. But I didn’t want simply to design and fabricate a window myself and then present it to the congregation as something I had made for them. I wanted the church to experience the making of it.
That idea eventually became a large stained-glass work now installed in our fellowship hall. Nearly 60 members and friends participated in its creation. Virtually none had ever so much as cut a piece of glass before.
The teaching method I used was intentionally simple. There was no registration to participate, no cost. The whole thing would be done revolving-door style. That way anyone could poke their head in and see what’s going on and do a little bit of the project. I would teach certain people how to perform a part of the work, like cutting, or grinding, or foiling the glass, and when new people arrived, they would become the teachers.
Before long, knowledge was moving from hand to hand throughout the room. Someone who had entered uncertain of their own ability might be showing another newcomer what to do only an hour later.
That was not merely a convenient way to organize the work. It was part of the meaning of the work. The window could only truly belong to the community if the knowledge required to make it also belonged to the community.
My role was not to remain the indispensable expert at the center of the room. It was to help create a room full of teachers. I still remained the central educational source, but it made the project easier while at the same time, empowering everyone.
Perhaps that is why the finished window means so much to us. It doesn’t represent the artistic achievement of one person. It embodies a community discovering that wisdom — and beauty — multiply when they are entrusted to others.
The same is true of spiritual communities. A healthy congregation should never exist merely to gather admirers around a minister, a theology or even a tradition. It exists to help people become more fully themselves: more compassionate, more curious, more courageous, more capable of flourishing and definitely more peaceful. It should help people become more capable of bringing healing wherever they go.
The measure of a congregation is not simply how many people sit in its pews on Sunday morning. It is how many people leave believing they have something sacred to offer the world.
That is why the world’s wisdom traditions so often return to similar themes. The Buddha did not ask people to stop thinking for themselves. Socrates asked questions rather than merely delivering certainty. The Hebrew prophets continually reminded people that justice belonged in the streets, not only in the temple. Jesus did not simply ask people to admire him. He taught them a way of living and sent them out to practice it themselves.
Different traditions. A noticeably similar pattern.
There is also a caution here worth remembering. Any system of thought — any “ology,” ideology, or spiritual teaching — that suggests only a select few can truly understand it should be approached with extreme skepticism. So should any community in which belonging requires us to narrow our curiosity, silence our questions or surrender our discernment in exchange for certainty.
There is no such thing as religious certainty. There is faith. There is trust. There is wisdom accumulated through centuries of human experience. There are ideas we may find deeply compelling. But certainty is often the costume fear wears when it wants to control the room.
Wisdom that is alive invites participation. It invites debate rather than exclusion, questions rather than silence. True wisdom strengthens our capacity to engage the world, not withdraw from it.
A simple test might be this: Does the teaching make us more open, more compassionate and more able to stand on our own feet while meeting others with dignity? Or does it make us more frightened, dependent and more suspicious of anyone who thinks differently? And where have we seen this before?
The body sometimes registers the distinction before the mind can explain it. We may feel ourselves constricting under a teaching that asks us to become smaller. We may sense an opening when an idea gives us permission to become more fully alive. Those feelings are not infallible, but they are worth noticing. Discernment includes paying attention to what a teaching is actually producing within us.
The greatest teachers eventually disappear amid the many strands of their teachings — not because they lack confidence in themselves, but because they possess such great confidence in us.
There is a temptation in every generation to hand our responsibility over to someone else. We want someone to tell us what is true, what is right, and what comes next. Following can feel easier than developing a mind and conscience of our own.
But spiritual maturity asks more of us. It asks us to become people whose lives embody the wisdom we admire. It asks us to stop merely praising compassion and begin practicing it; to stop worshiping courage from a distance and become courageous ourselves.
That may be the overarching purpose of every worthy spiritual teaching: not merely to provide answers for the questions we already have, but to help us develop the wisdom with which we might encounter questions we have not imagined yet. Every new horizon gives birth to new opportunities for expansion.
The point is to become the kind of person today from whom others can safely learn tomorrow.
The world does not need more personalities to idolize. It needs more ordinary people willing to practice extraordinary compassion.
The best teachers know this. Their greatest success is not measured by the size of their following. It is measured by the number of people who eventually stand beside them rather than behind them.
And that was the invitation all along.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
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