There are places in Caputo’s theological language where I would want to make distinctions or add qualifications, particularly when words such as faith and miracle are extended into the language of organizational development. Yet his central instincts about leadership intersect with several important biblical themes. Scripture does not prescribe modern democratic governance as the singular biblical model, but it repeatedly challenges forms of authority that accumulate power for their own sake. Jesus’ teaching on leadership is particularly important here. In Mark 10:42–45, after James and John seek privileged positions in the kingdom, Jesus points to the political structures familiar to the disciples: “those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.” The verbs are significant. Katakyrieuō carries the sense of exercising mastery or domination, while katexousiazō emphasizes the forceful exercise of authority. Jesus’ response is emphatic: ouch houtōs de estin en hymin, “but it is not so among you.”¹

Jesus does not abolish leadership in this passage; he radically alters its direction. Greatness is measured by service, and authority is directed toward the flourishing of the people under its care. Luke preserves the same teaching in the context of the Last Supper. While the disciples argue about which of them should be considered greatest, Jesus contrasts the rulers of the nations with his own kingdom and says, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:24–27). This is one of the clearest examples of what we often describe as the upside-down kingdom of Jesus. The kingdom does not simply replace one hierarchy with another hierarchy occupied by better people. Jesus questions the assumptions beneath hierarchy itself: greatness descends, authority serves, and the one who leads takes the posture normally assigned to the least important person in the room.

John 13 makes the same point narratively. Jesus knows that the Father has given “all things” into his hands, yet his response to that authority is to rise from the table, wrap himself in a towel, and wash his disciples’ feet. The action is striking precisely because Jesus is not relinquishing authority. He is showing what divine authority looks like when it becomes visible. The one who possesses genuine authority uses it to serve, cleanse, prepare, and dignify others. Caputo’s leadership model is not identical to Johannine Christology, of course, but his insistence that leaders can use authority to release the capacities of others belongs within the same broad moral world.

This becomes especially evident when Caputo describes the movement of decision-making closer to teachers and classrooms. He repeatedly emphasizes that leaders did not simply remove structure and walk away. Teachers were trained, supported, given resources, and then trusted to exercise responsibility. Freedom without formation can become chaos, but control without freedom can prevent maturity. The New Testament often holds the two together. Paul’s description of leadership in Ephesians 4 is a useful example. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph 4:11–12). The noun katartismos carries the idea of preparing, furnishing, or bringing something into proper working condition.² Leaders therefore do not exist primarily to perform the work while everyone else watches. Their work includes preparing the larger body to participate.

Paul’s argument reaches its climax in Ephesians 4:16, where the body grows as “each part does its work.” That is remarkably close to one of the best features of Caputo’s story. His teachers became more creative because leadership created space for them to exercise gifts already present among them. Parents discovered ways to contribute. Students encountered classrooms shaped by experimentation, art, nature, mathematics, technology, theater, and community participation. Caputo describes the school less as a machine executing a centralized program and more as an environment in which many people learned to contribute to a shared life.

First Corinthians 12 provides another important biblical parallel. Paul describes the church as one body composed of many differentiated members. The Spirit distributes charismata, gifts of grace, among the whole community. No single member possesses everything necessary for the body’s life. The eye needs the hand, the head needs the feet, and even the members that appear weaker are described as indispensable.³ The point is not democracy in the modern political sense, but interdependence. Healthy communities are structured in ways that recognize that meaningful contribution is distributed broadly rather than concentrated narrowly.

Caputo eventually uses the metaphor of a jazz ensemble to describe what happened at Key Largo. The school was not an orchestra controlled at every moment by one conductor. It had a common theme, but participants were given room to improvise within it. That metaphor is perhaps closer to Paul’s body language than Caputo himself intended. Biblical unity does not require sameness. In Paul’s communities, unity exists because people with different gifts remain coordinated around a common Lord, a common Spirit, and a common good.

The story of Moses and Jethro in Exodus 18 offers an older biblical example of the same leadership problem. Moses has become the single point through which the disputes of Israel must pass, and Jethro immediately sees that the arrangement is unsustainable: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod 18:17). The problem is not that Moses lacks authority but that authority has become unnecessarily concentrated. Jethro’s solution is to identify ʾanšê-ḥayil, capable and trustworthy people, and entrust genuine responsibility to them.⁴ Moses continues to lead, but leadership becomes distributed. The result is not the abandonment of authority but the multiplication of responsible leadership.

Caputo’s experience with school discipline reveals a similar movement. The faculty eventually concluded that student behavior could not simply be treated as a problem for the principal to solve. Discipline had to become part of the shared life of the community. Caputo writes that they began to understand discipline less as controlling children and more as creating a community in which teachers, parents, and students shared responsibility for how they lived and learned together. The biblical word paideia is useful here. Often translated “discipline,” it can refer more broadly to education, training, and the formation of character. Hebrews 12 and Ephesians 6:4 both use the term in a formative rather than merely punitive sense. Biblical discipline is ultimately concerned with what kind of person is being formed.

That concern with formation may be one of the strongest points of contact between Caputo’s educational philosophy and a Christian vision of leadership. Good leadership does not merely produce compliance. It develops people who can increasingly carry responsibility themselves. Paul can tell the Roman believers that they are “competent to instruct one another” (Rom 15:14), and in 1 Corinthians 14 he imagines a gathered community in which multiple people arrive prepared to contribute, while everything is ordered toward oikodomē, the building up of the whole body. The New Testament picture is neither authoritarian nor anarchic. It is ordered participation.

Caputo repeatedly argues that trust became a catalyst for this kind of maturity. Teachers who were entrusted with meaningful authority became more willing to assume responsibility, solve problems, and contribute creatively. This should not be confused with the idea that people are inherently trustworthy in every circumstance or that accountability is unnecessary. Scripture is far too realistic about human nature for that. Yet Christian leadership also cannot remain permanently suspicious of the people it claims to be forming. Eventually disciples must be permitted to act, decide, fail, learn, and mature.

Jesus himself demonstrates this pattern. He teaches the Twelve, corrects them repeatedly, gives them authority, sends them out, receives them back, and continues their formation. Luke 9–10 is particularly instructive because Jesus’ ministry begins to reproduce itself through others. They are entrusted with real participation in the mission before they fully understand everything they are doing. The kingdom advances through people whom Jesus is still forming.

This makes Caputo’s story more interesting than a simple argument for educational democracy. At its strongest, The Once and Future School is asking what authority is actually supposed to accomplish. If leadership exists primarily to preserve the leader’s control, Caputo’s experiment will always appear dangerous. If leadership exists to cultivate mature people capable of contributing to a shared mission, then distributed responsibility becomes not a threat to authority but one of its proper outcomes.

There is also something distinctly kingdom-shaped in Caputo’s insistence that the people closest to the work should be heard. The movement of Jesus consistently dignifies people whose voices were easily overlooked by conventional structures: children, women, the poor, the sick, Samaritans, tax collectors, and others located outside the centers of social prestige. This does not mean that every voice possesses equal wisdom in every matter. It does mean that proximity to status is not the same thing as proximity to truth. The kingdom repeatedly overturns assumptions about where wisdom, faithfulness, and significance will be found.

Perhaps that is one reason Caputo’s experience remains worth considering. The most important transformation at Key Largo was not architectural. It was relational and cultural. Teachers discovered greater confidence. Parents became participants. Students experienced a school that increasingly belonged to a community rather than simply being administered over one. Caputo remembers that trust began moving through the system: state leadership trusted districts, districts trusted schools, schools trusted teachers, and teachers increasingly trusted students and the communities they served.

That pattern is not a complete theology of leadership, but it is close enough to several kingdom instincts that Christian leaders should pay attention to it. Jesus consistently turns power outward. Paul understands leadership as equipping. The body of Christ depends upon the contribution of many members. Moses learns that responsible authority can be shared. Biblical freedom repeatedly becomes service rather than independence. Taken together, these themes provide a strong theological framework for appreciating what Caputo witnessed in one unusual school in the Florida Keys.

Conclusion

For the church, this may be the book’s most useful challenge. We can become very good at gathering people, teaching people, and organizing people while never actually forming them to carry responsibility in the kingdom. Jesus did something different. He called disciples close, formed them in community, entrusted them with real ministry, corrected them when they failed, and then sent them again. Discipleship was never simply the transfer of information. It was the formation of people who could increasingly participate in the life and mission of God.

That is why Caputo’s story has significance beyond Key Largo. Healthy leadership should eventually produce people who can lead, healthy teaching should produce people who can teach, and mature discipleship should produce disciples who can make disciples. A church that requires the constant presence of a few gifted leaders may be active and successful while still remaining spiritually immature. The New Testament imagines something much fuller: saints equipped for ministry, gifts released throughout the body, and ordinary people learning to carry extraordinary responsibility for the sake of others.

Perhaps the lasting gift of The Once and Future School is therefore not a particular educational model but a question every leader should be willing to ask: Are the people entrusted to us becoming more dependent upon our leadership, or are they becoming more capable of participating in the work God has given them?

The kingdom of God grows through formed people. The work of discipleship is to help form them.

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Endnotes

1. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.vv. “κατακυριεύω” and “κατεξουσιάζω”; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 415
2. BDAG, s.v. “καταρτισμός”; Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 252
3. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 918
4. Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 128 & a slight reference to William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18, AB 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 628
5. David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “to the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 436
6. Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 185
7. Edward Caputo, The Once and Future School: A Model for Democratic Leadership, Teacher Satisfaction and Student Success (Stuart, FL: Panthera Publishing, 2026).