By the Way: Extreme ownership

By Rev. Roland Weisbrot on November 22, 2025.

Several years ago, I read the book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by retired Navy SEAL operators Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Aside from getting to peak into the unfamiliar and fascinating world of elite special military forces, this book also provided some very interesting commentary on the nature and role of leadership.

In the minds of Willink and Babin, one of the things that made the SEALs so effective was the leadership model of “extreme ownership.”

What this meant, they explained, was that leaders in the SEALs were expected to take responsibility for everything, they were not allowed to pass the responsibility on or blame someone else for a failure. In other words, the buck stopped with them and no one else.

When I apply this principle to a Christian context, I cannot help but recall the words of Jesus in the feeding of the 5000 as recorded in the Gospel of Mark: “Late in the afternoon his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late.

Send the crowds away so they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.’

But Jesus said, ‘You feed them.’ ‘With what?’ they asked. ‘We’d have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people!’

‘How much bread do you have?’ he asked. ‘Go and find out.’ They came back and reported, ‘We have five loaves of bread and two fish'” (6:35-38, NLT).

Here we see Jesus taking ownership over the crowds that had come to listen to Him, and He took the opportunity to teach ownership and responsibility to His disciples.

Jesus is clear, ‘”you feed them,'” in other words, take responsibility and use what you have, as limited as it may be, to fulfill the needs of those around you.

So often we as Christians see the needs of others and think “someone should do something about that”; what we learn here, I believe, is that Jesus says to all of us, “you do something about it'” – take ownership, take responsibility, serve others in love.

Rev. Roland Weisbrot is lead pastor of Victory Lutheran Church

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