When God Moves to the Margins: Why the Next Leaders Will Not Look Like the Last
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Editor’s Note: This piece reflects a prophetic insight received in a corporate setting that illuminated a deeply personal calling. It explores how God is dismantling traditional leadership pipelines and raising leaders from the margins, not as a corrective but as a necessary rebuilding of His Church.
I had not planned for this moment to undo me.
I was sitting in the conference hall, notebook open, listening.
Not searching for a word.
Not straining to discern.
When a female prophet took the stage and began to speak about a place she had recently visited.
Hexham.
The moment she said it, something in me tightened.
Hexham is not just a place on a map for me.
It is layered.
Personal.
Charged.
She spoke about a move of God happening there.
Unexpected.
Disruptive.
Uncomfortable.
Historically, she said, the church had been a very middle-class congregation.
Ordered.
Familiar.
Predictable.
And then something shifted.
Suddenly, people began pouring in who did not fit the culture.
People from brokenness.
From poverty.
From rough edges and lived trauma.
People who did not know the rules.
People who did not speak the language.
And the leadership did not know what to do with them.
She did not say it with accusation.
She said it with grief.
Because when God moves like this, it exposes something.
The prophet continued.
“The Lord says: look to the margins and the edges.
Call to the Lord, and you will find that the Lord is with you there.
The least and the last are being called up into leadership.
Powerful leadership will come from the rough and ready.
Traditional leadership will not like this shaking and will want it to go back to normal.”
I stopped writing.
Because I knew.
Not intellectually.
Not symbolically.
I knew in my bones.
This was not just a word about something happening somewhere else.
It was a word about me.
The Margins Are Where I Have Been Standing
I have lived on the margins.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
I have stood outside systems that did not know what to do with me.
I have carried callings that did not fit polite frameworks.
I have been too much, too intense, too uncontainable.
And then, inconveniently, too broken.
Too poor.
Too undone.
Too honest.
I am not the sort of person who emerges from a neat leadership pipeline.
I am the sort who arrives after collapse.
And as she spoke, something clicked into place with frightening clarity.
God was not apologising for this.
He was revealing it.
Rough and Ready Is Not a Defect
What struck me most was not the mention of broken people entering the church.
It was the phrase “called up into leadership.”
Not healed first.
Not polished first.
Not sanitised first.
Called up as they are being formed.
This is where traditional leadership begins to panic.
Because it threatens order.
It disrupts hierarchy.
It does not ask permission.
When God raises leaders from the margins, He bypasses the usual gatekeepers.
And that makes people uncomfortable.
Because these leaders do not carry institutional confidence.
They carry authority forged in fire.
They do not lead from theory.
They lead from survival.
From obedience.
From having nothing left to lose.
Why This Word Undid Me
I realised something sitting there.
I had spent years wondering why I did not fit anywhere I tried to land.
Why my voice unsettled systems.
Why my story did not translate easily.
Why I was often seen as too much or hard to place.
And suddenly I understood.
I was never meant to fit.
I was meant to emerge.
From the edges.
From the wilderness.
From the places leadership rarely looks.
Because it does not like what it might find there.
The Lord was not asking me to move closer to the centre.
He was saying:
Stay where I found you.
I am moving there.
The Church Is Being Rebuilt, Not Repaired
This was not a word about renewal.
It was a word about replacement.
Not of people.
Of structures.
When the margins start filling with life, it means the centre has gone rigid.
And when God raises leaders from the least and the last, it is because the old wineskins can no longer hold what He is doing.
This is not rebellion.
It is re-formation.
Acts 2 did not begin in a temple.
It began in an upper room.
With ordinary people.
Filled with fire.
Speaking languages they had not been trained to speak.
I Left Knowing This
I did not leave Convergence feeling elevated.
I left feeling located.
Seen.
Explained.
The grief I carried that morning now had a shape.
The shaking in my body now had a context.
And the quiet sense of commissioning I had been resisting suddenly made sense.
God is not building from the top down.
He is building from the edges in.
And this time, He is not asking the margins to assimilate.
He is asking them to lead.
“God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.”
1 Corinthians 1:28“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.”
Psalm 118:22
With fire and grace,
This message carries fire. Pass it on. 👇🏻
Victoria Player is the founder of Daughter of Thunder, a movement awakening spiritually sensitive women to truth, purpose, and divine power in a world that’s lost its compass. After walking through her own season of fire and rebuilding, she now writes and speaks to those who sense there’s more — guiding them from confusion to clarity, from awakening to assignment.
“I don’t bow to Babylon — I walk with the Lion.” — Daughter of Thunder
