Last Monday I asked you to name your Sabbath day for the fall and to tell your board you are keeping it. This week we go longer than a day, because a weekly Sabbath keeps a pastor steady, but it cannot do everything. Some restoration only comes through extended withdrawal, and Scripture is not shy about saying so.

Luke tucks it into one sentence that is easy to read past: “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16). Pay attention to the tense. Not “he withdrew once, early on.” He would withdraw. It was his habit. And Luke places that sentence exactly where we would least expect it, right after telling us the crowds were growing and more people were coming to hear him and to be healed. At the moment momentum would lead us to stay, Jesus left. If the Son of God built long withdrawals into a ministry that lasted three years, I do not know how the rest of us plan to skip them across a ministry that lasts thirty.

Elijah shows us what happens when a leader tries. First Kings 19 finds him a day’s journey into the wilderness, fresh off the greatest public victory of his life at Carmel, asking God to let him die. What God does next should shape how every pastor thinks about exhaustion. There is no rebuke. There is no leadership lesson. There is sleep, and food, and more sleep, and more food, and a word of plain mercy: “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7). Only after the rest does the word of the Lord come at Horeb. God treated the prophet’s depletion as real, and he treated rest as the remedy.

So let me distinguish two practices that pastors routinely blur together. They do different work, and neither can substitute for the other.

A vacation is rest and delight with the people you love. Its purpose is recreation in the older sense of the word: being re-created. That means the sermon file stays closed and the inbox stays shut. A vacation that gets eaten by guilt, sermon prep, or one more funeral is not a vacation; it is work relocated to a nicer view, and you will come home from it more tired than you left. So set the rules before you go: who covers pastoral emergencies, what actually counts as one, and when the church will hear from you again. Then keep the rules you set.

A retreat is something else. A retreat is not a vacation, and it is not a conference either. It is unhurried time alone with God for the sake of hearing again. You bring less, not more: a Bible, a journal, and enough silence for the noise of ministry to settle. Nobody is fed by your retreat on the day you take it. They are fed for months afterward by a pastor who has actually heard from God rather than one who is recycling what God said years ago. And a retreat does not require money or distance. Twenty-four hours at a camp, a retreat center, or a borrowed cabin will do.

Healthy pastors plan both into the year before the year happens. I said it when this series opened: health does not come from intentions; it comes from architecture. The year will never hand you a convenient week for either of these. Fall will fill, then Advent will arrive, then the spring calendar will be set, and the withdrawal you meant to take will quietly become the withdrawal you meant to take last year. You place these weeks on the calendar first, or the calendar places something else there for you.

We are building this into district life, not just recommending it. A pastors’ prayer retreat is coming this fall. The date will be announced soon, and when it is, I am asking you to claim it. And in 2027 we will hold the first Pastor and Spouse Retreat in the history of the Crossroads District, because our listening year told us plainly that the spouses who carry this calling alongside our pastors have too often been left outside the circle of care. A planning team for that retreat is forming now. If you or your spouse would help shape it, email the district office.

Here is the practice for this week. Open your calendar to the next twelve months and place two things on it in writing: one full vacation and one retreat. Do it before the fall schedule fills in around you. Then tell two parties what you have done: your board, so the time is protected, and your family, so the time is promised.

​Next Monday: a number from our listening year, 4.8 out of 10, and the relationships no pastor should lead without.

Last Monday I asked you to draft a one-page rule of life for your next ninety days. If you did it, I suspect I know which line gave you the most trouble. It was not the morning prayer time. Most of us can protect twenty minutes before the phone comes on. The line that gives pastors trouble is the whole day.

Sabbath is the only spiritual discipline that made the Ten Commandments. Not solitude. Not fasting. Not silence, or study, or generosity. All of those are commended in Scripture and none of them were carved into stone at Sinai. Sabbath was. It sits in that list with the same weight as the commands against stealing and lying and coveting. And it is the one command in the list that pastors have become skilled at explaining away.

We have our reasons, and they sound reasonable. Sunday is a workday. The sermon does not preach itself. Hospitals do not keep a schedule. Someone has to be reachable. Every one of those statements is true, and not one of them is an exemption.

Here is the assumption underneath most of the reasons: Sabbath is what you get when the work is done. Finish the list, clear the inbox, close the loop, and then you have earned a day. Which means the day never arrives, because ministry is not the kind of work that finishes. There is always one more call to return, one more family in crisis, one more idea for the fall. If your rest is a wage you collect for completing the work, you will never collect it.

Scripture frames it the other way around. "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exodus 20:8). The reason given is not productivity but creation: God worked six days, rested on the seventh, and blessed the day (Exodus 20:11). When Moses repeats the command in Deuteronomy, he grounds it somewhere else, in deliverance. "You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there" (Deuteronomy 5:15). Sabbath is the weekly evidence that you are not property. Slaves work without stopping because their worth is measured in output. Sons and daughters rest, because their worth was settled before they produced anything.

So a pastor who will not stop is making a theological statement, whether they intend to or not. The statement is that the church is held together by their effort. Sabbath contradicts it. One day a week you put the work down and the church does not collapse, and both you and your congregation learn something true about who is actually holding it.

Jesus did not soften the command. He recovered its purpose. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). He said it while being accused of breaking it. He kept the day and he healed on it. That is the balance we are after.

So what does this look like for people whose busiest day of the week is Sunday?

Pick a real day, and pick it on purpose. Not the leftover margin of a Friday afternoon, and not "whenever things settle down." Twenty-four hours, the same day most weeks, chosen in advance.

Then distinguish the day off from the Sabbath. A day spent on errands, oil changes, and the yard is a useful day. It is not Sabbath. Sabbath has worship, rest, and delight in it.

Decide the rules before the week tests them. What counts as work for you? Does the phone stay off, or on for emergencies only, and who gets to define an emergency? Answer those questions once, on paper, rather than every week under pressure.

Then tell your board. This is the step most pastors skip, and it is the one that makes the rest of it hold. A Sabbath nobody knows about gets rescheduled quietly. A Sabbath your board has affirmed becomes part of how your church works, and it gives the people in your congregation permission to keep one too.

One caution, the same one I gave last week. Do not turn this into another scorecard. If you miss it, you have not sinned your way out of grace. Confess your sin and then keep the next Sabbath.

Here is the challenge for this week. Name your Sabbath day for the fall before the fall names it for you. Put it on the calendar, in writing, alongside the board meetings and the sermon series. Then tell your board you are keeping it, and tell them why. If you cannot say out loud to the people who lead with you that you intend to rest one day a week, that is worth paying attention to on its own.

Next Monday we go longer than a day: vacations and retreats, and the difference between time off and actual renewal.

Today we begin something new. For the next six weeks, Leadership Matters walks through the first of our plan's four impact areas: the health of our pastors. We are calling the series The Sustainable Pastor, and it is the plan's first theme, taken first, on purpose. Everything in ministry flows from the life of the one doing it. Healthy pastors lead healthy churches, healthy churches develop leaders, and developed leaders multiply Kingdom Expressions. The sequence starts here, with you.
 
And the series starts where Jesus started, on a mountainside, choosing the twelve.
 
Mark records the moment with an order that is easy to read past. "And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach" (Mark 3:14). One appointment, two purposes. But notice the sequence. Being with him comes first. Being sent comes second. Jesus did not recruit the twelve for their output and then fit relationship in where the schedule allowed. He called them to his presence before he ever gave them an assignment.
 
Most of us affirm that order and live the reversal. The sending side of ministry arrives with deadlines attached. The sermon is due Sunday. The board meets Tuesday. The hospital calls today. Being with Jesus has no deadline at all, so it quietly goes last, and then it quietly goes missing. Nobody decides to stop praying. The calendar decides for them, one reasonable yes at a time.
 
Here is what happens when the order flips. The work of God gets done on fumes. For a while, nobody notices, because competence can imitate life longer than we like to admit. You can preach from old wells, lead from muscle memory, and care for people out of professional habit. But eventually the work consumes the worker. The listening year told us our pastors are carrying ministry alone, and the loneliest version of alone is doing the work of God at a distance from God.
 
Jesus refused that version of ministry, and he was busier than any of us. Mark shows him at the height of demand, the whole city gathered at the door the evening before, and then: "And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed" (Mark 1:35). The crowds had not shrunk. The needs had not softened. He withdrew anyway, because being with the Father was not what he did after the mission. It was where the mission came from.
 
So the practical question for this series is not whether you believe any of this. You do. The question is what will hold the "being with" in place when September arrives and the calendar starts throwing punches. And here is the conviction this whole series rests on: health does not come from intentions. It comes from architecture.
 
That is where a rule of life comes in. The term is old, but the idea is plain: a rule of life is a short, written plan for the habits that keep you connected to God, built into the calendar before ministry fills it. Not a monastic fantasy. A trellis. A vine does not grow better by trying harder; it grows better with something to grow on. A rule of life simply decides, in advance and in writing, when you will pray, when you will sit in Scripture for your own soul rather than for Sunday, when you will be silent, and when you will rest. Then those appointments get guarded the way you would guard any appointment with someone you answer to. Because you are keeping them with God.
 
Keep it to one page. Three headings are enough: daily, weekly, and seasonal. Under daily, perhaps a fixed morning time of prayer and Scripture before the phone comes on. Under weekly, a Sabbath and an unhurried hour of silence. Under seasonal, a retreat day each quarter. Yours will look different from mine, and it should. The only rule about a rule of life is that a modest one you keep will form you more than an ambitious one you abandon by Labor Day.
 
One warning as you write it. A rule of life is not another performance to grade yourself on. It is not a second job. It is the structure that protects the first calling, the one Jesus issued on that mountainside before he sent anyone anywhere: be with me. If your rule becomes a source of guilt instead of grace, shrink it until it becomes keepable, and remember that the goal was never the trellis. The goal is the vine.
 
This week's leadership practice: draft a one-page rule of life for your next ninety days. Daily, weekly, seasonal. Write it before August fills in. Then share it with one person who will ask you about it in September, because a rule nobody knows about is an intention, and we have already seen what happens to those.
 
Next Monday, the series continues with the discipline pastors are most skilled at explaining away: Sabbath.

​A vision that ends in applause has failed. A vision that ends in action has a chance.

Three weeks after District Conference, that line is no longer a caution about some future possibility. It is a live question sitting in front of every church in this district. At conference we laid out a five-year plan, built from a year of listening to our pastors and churches and shaped by the team our district board appointed to work alongside Catapult. This is the plan that will guide our efforts. Last week I handed you the map. So only one question remains, and it is the one I would ask if I could sit in on your next board meeting: what changes on Monday?

Jesus pressed this exact point at the close of his sermon in Luke 6, and he did not press it gently. "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46). Then he told the story of the two builders. Both heard the same words. Both faced the same storm. The difference between the house that stood and the house that fell was not information, and it was not intention. It was that one of them "hears my words and does them" (Luke 6:47). James says the same thing with fewer syllables: "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves" (James 1:22). Notice who gets deceived. Not the neighbors. The hearers themselves. It is entirely possible for a church to agree with everything and change nothing, and to feel faithful the whole time.

Before I go further, one distinction matters. Jesus was talking about his words. Not mine, and not a district plan. A strategy document does not belong in that sentence, and I am not asking you to treat one like Scripture. The reason the passage still presses on us is this: the plan exists for one purpose, to help our churches do what Jesus actually commanded, to make disciples. If we nod along at the Great Commission and change nothing about how we pursue it, we are the hearers James is worried about. The plan is not the word we are called to obey. It is a set of tools for obeying the word we already have.

So the question for your church is not "what do we think of the district plan?" The question is: what does obedience ask of us first?

Here is the good news. The first steps are not grand. Every action step we named at conference is something a real church can take in an ordinary week.

A cohort sign-up. For the first time, cohorts are open to staff pastors. Signing up takes one conversation and a few minutes.

A Great Commission Plan conversation. You do not need a finished plan this month. You need thirty minutes at your next board meeting on its three parts: making disciples who make disciples, impact in your community, and the global mission of God. Just start the conversation.

The global engagement inventory. Spend one honest hour asking what your church is actually doing among the nations, and how much of it reaches the unreached. If the answer is little or none, the Kethra Project and the Nasim Project are waiting for you.

One name, prayed for. Ahead of the first Encounter Event, ask the Lord to show you one person in your congregation who could gather disciples into a Kingdom Expression. Then pray for that person by name.

A hand raised for the Disciple-Making Lab. We need eight to ten pilot churches. If your church knows it needs a disciple-making pathway, going first is not a risk. It is a head start.

None of these requires a capital campaign, a consultant, or a season of study. Each one requires a decision made and then acted on. Intentions did not decide which house stood in the storm. The building did.

Keep the destination in front of you while you choose. By 2031: every Crossroads pastor has access to coaching, cohorts, and formation. Every Crossroads church has a Great Commission Plan and a developing leader for their next Kingdom Expression. A moonshot five years out is reached the same way a house survives a storm, by what gets built this week. The four impact areas give you the places to build: the health of our pastors, the health of our churches, the development of our leaders, and the multiplication of new Kingdom Expressions.

And a word to the pastor reading this in the quiet of July, feeling like everyone else must be further along: nobody is asking you for speed. Small obedience now outruns large intentions every time. The church that takes one real step this month will be miles past the church still waiting for the right season to begin.

So here is the challenge, and it is this week's whole assignment. Choose your church's single first step under one of the four impact areas. Write it in one sentence, with one name attached and one date on it, and put it where your board will see it. Then take the step. And when you do, tell me about it, because the celebrations section of this newsletter exists for exactly that.

​Next Monday we begin the first of four series walking the plan's themes: six weeks on The Sustainable Pastor, about the rhythms, rest, and relationships that keep a pastor whole. It is the plan's first theme, taken first, on purpose. I hope you will read along, and I hope you will invite your board to read with you.

​Two weeks ago, our district said yes to a plan. This week I want to hand you the map: CLICK HERE TO VIEW

When God gave Habakkuk a vision, he attached an instruction to it: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it” (Habakkuk 2:2). God did not want the vision admired. He wanted it written down clearly enough that his people could read it and act on it. The same needs to be true of the five-year plan we launched together at District Conference. It should not live in a binder on a shelf at the district office. It should be plain enough that a pastor, a board member, or a brand-new leader can pick it up and run with it.

So let me make it plain.

Start with the destination. Here is the moonshot, and I intend to repeat it until every one of us can say it from memory. By 2031: every Crossroads pastor has access to coaching, cohorts, and formation. Every Crossroads church has a Great Commission Plan and a developing leader for their next Kingdom Expression.

Everything the district does for the next five years climbs toward those two sentences. And the climb moves on four impact areas: the health of our pastors, the health of our churches, the development of our leaders, and the multiplication of new Kingdom Expressions.

Notice the order, because it matters. These four are a sequence, not a menu. Healthy pastors lead healthy churches. Healthy churches develop leaders. Developed leaders multiply new Kingdom Expressions. You cannot skip a step and expect the next one to hold. A church cannot develop leaders it does not have, and a pastor running on empty cannot build a healthy congregation, no matter how good the plan is. Paul describes the church as a body “joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly,” so that it “builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16). When each part is working properly. That is the logic of the four themes. Pastor, church, leader, multiplication: each one supplies the next.

Underneath all four runs one engine, and I want to name it now because it is our focus for this first year: disciple-making. Making disciples who make disciples is what turns a healthy pastor into a healthy church, a healthy church into a pipeline of leaders, and a pipeline of leaders into new Kingdom Expressions. It is the work the plan exists to serve, and the Disciple-Making Lab is where that focus will land this year. You will hear much more about the Lab this fall.

Now, here is why I am giving you the map in July. This newsletter is going to walk the whole plan with you, one theme at a time, between now and the end of the year. Consider this issue the table of contents.

Beginning July 27, we will spend six weeks on the first theme in a series called The Sustainable Pastor: the rhythms, rest, and relationships that keep a pastor whole, because everything in ministry flows from the life of the one doing it. In September and October, eight weeks on the Marks of a Healthy Church: what health actually is, how to assess it honestly, and how to build your church’s Great Commission Plan in its three parts. In November, five weeks on Becoming the Leader the Future Needs, timed to the season when many of us review the year and plan the next one. And through Advent, four weeks on New Kingdom Expressions, because God’s first mission move was presence, and Christmas is the right season to talk about filling our communities with the church.

Each series will stand on its own. You will be able to hand a whole series to your board, your staff, or a developing leader as one piece. Which is exactly what I hope you will do, starting now.

Because here is the honest truth about district plans: a plan owned only by the district office is a document. A plan owned by a hundred churches is a movement. The moonshot does not need your admiration. It needs your congregation’s participation, one impact area at a time.

​So here is this week’s assignment, and it is a simple one. Share this issue with your board or leadership team, and ask them one question: which of the four areas does our church most need this year? The health of your pastor. The health of your church. The development of your leaders. The multiplication of something new. Let the conversation run longer than you planned. Then hold onto the answer, because the series that addresses it is already on the calendar, and I wrote the map so you could run.

​The last thing I said to you at the close of District Conference was not an action step. It was a command Jesus gave to a room full of people who were ready to go. He had a mission for them that would reach the ends of the earth, and his instruction was to wait. "Do not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4). Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.

One week out, I want to make sure we meant it.

The conference is behind us now. The room has emptied, the reports are filed, and the moonshot we said yes to is written down where our boards can read it. July has settled in, the slowest month of the church year, when attendance dips and the building goes quiet and the calendar finally loosens its grip. This is exactly the moment the disciples faced. The teaching was finished. The commission was clear. Everything in them wanted to move. And Jesus told them to sit in an upper room and wait.

We do not like that instruction. We are builders. We have a plan now, and a plan is a call to action, and action is what leaders do. But hear what Jesus was protecting them from. He was not delaying the mission. He was fueling it. The upper room was not a waiting area before the real work began. It was the source of everything that followed. Without Pentecost, Acts is a group of frightened people with good intentions and a locked door.

I said something at the rally that I want to keep saying all summer: if the church is going to make an impact for God, it first needs a fresh encounter with God. That order is not negotiable. Encounter comes before impact. The plan is the wineskin. The Holy Spirit is the wine. We can pour ourselves into cohorts and Great Commission Plans and Kingdom Expressions, and if we attempt all of it in our own strength, we will produce a great deal of activity and very little fruit.

Consider what actually happened in that room. They devoted themselves to prayer (Acts 1:14). They were not strategizing. They were not workshopping their launch. They were waiting on God together, and when the day of Pentecost arrived, "suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2). Then, and only then, the doors opened and three thousand were added in a single day. The mission moved at the speed of the Spirit, not at the speed of their ambition.

Here is my concern for us, and it is a pastoral one. Vision is at its most vulnerable in the weeks right after it is cast. The glow fades. The ordinary returns. And the temptation is to treat the encounter as something we already had, back at the conference, in that moment when the room was full and the singing was strong. But an encounter you had in June will not fuel a mission you are living in October. The upper room is not a memory. It is a rhythm.

July is our first chance to prove we meant what we prayed. There is no conference to prepare for, no big Sunday looming, no reason to rush. That means there is no better time to do the one thing the disciples did before they did anything else. Wait on God. Ask him to fill you before he sends you.

I am practicing this myself. As many of you know, I am away with my family this week, and I am trying to let the rest be its own form of trust, a way of confessing that God runs this district and I do not. Some of you are the opposite of rested right now, using the one open stretch on the calendar to run hard and get everything done. Wherever you are, the invitation is the same. Do not go yet. Not because the mission does not matter, but because it matters too much to attempt on fumes.

We have a plan worth giving our lives to. Let us make sure we give it to God first.

​This week's practice: Before you build anything else this summer, schedule your own upper room. Put one unhurried hour on the calendar this week, guard it like an appointment, and spend it waiting on God with nothing to produce. Ask him plainly to fill you before he sends you. Then watch what he does with a leader who learned to wait.

​This weekend the Crossroads District gathered at College Wesleyan Church, and the gathering became what we had prayed it would be. We marked ten years as a district, and we stepped into the next layer of what God is building among us.

We did not arrive at this weekend by accident. For most of the past year we listened. We sat with pastors and lay leaders across central and northern Indiana and asked honest questions about the health of our churches and the health of the people who lead them. We named seven things we heard. Some of them encouraged us. Some of them were hard to say out loud. And out of that year of listening, we committed together to a road ahead with a destination worth naming.

Here is what we said yes to. By 2031, every Crossroads pastor has access to coaching, to a cohort, and to ongoing spiritual and leadership formation. And every Crossroads church has a Great Commission Plan and a developing leader ready for their next Kingdom Expression.

Read it again slowly, because a sentence like that is easy to applaud and easy to forget. Every pastor formed and connected. Every church with a plan and a leader for what comes next. That is the moonshot, and we said yes to it not as a slogan but as a commitment we intend to keep.

We could only reach for something like this because of what was built before us. For ten years this district was led and strengthened under Dr. Mark Gorveatte, and the foundation he and so many others laid is the reason we can build now. We honor a foundation by building on it, not by maintaining it. That is what this weekend was about.

I want to thank the people who carried it. College Wesleyan Church hosted us with grace. Dr. Jim Dunn, newly installed as our General Superintendent, stood with us. Michael Wood, Scott Rhyno, Dr. Carla Working, and Rev. Grace Lopez gave themselves to the details most delegates will never see. Dr. Craig Thurmon, our District Secretary, kept the careful record of all we did together. And Rev. Dan Van Duyne, who served as our District Conference Director, along with his entire team, is the reason the weekend ran as smoothly as it did. And the delegates themselves, credentialed ministers and lay leaders who drove in from every corner of the district, did the real work of a gathering like this: they showed up, they prayed, and they said yes together.

When the people of God returned from exile and began to rebuild, Nehemiah told them plainly what God had done, and they answered, "Let us rise up and build." So they strengthened their hands for the good work (Nehemiah 2:18). That is the posture I am praying we carry out of this weekend. Not relief that the conference is behind us, but resolve that the building is in front of us.

A plan affirmed in a room becomes real only when it is repeated in a hundred churches. That is why this newsletter exists, and it is where the repeating starts. Over the next six months I am going to walk us through this plan piece by piece, one theme at a time, so that what we said yes to on Saturday becomes what we actually live by January. If you want the whole plan on a single page before then, the Impact Map lays it out. The vision will not survive on the strength of a good weekend. It will survive because pastors took it home, named it to their boards, and took the first step.

So take the first step. Before July, revisit the action steps from the conference and choose yours. Sign up for a cohort. Begin a Great Commission Plan conversation with your team. Take the global engagement inventory. Identify one person you might bring to the first Encounter Event. Consider whether your church should be one of the Disciple-Making Lab pilots. Pick one. Write it down. Take the step while the gathering is still fresh, because I am confident of this: he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

We said yes together. Now we build together.

This week's step: Before the calendar turns to July, name the single action step you are taking from the conference, write it where you will see it, and tell one person you are doing it.

​Thirteen weeks ago we began this series with one conviction: that the Crossroads District is standing at a threshold, and that the moment in front of us is worth reaching for.

Over these weeks we have built something together. We named four convictions and learned to say them plainly. Pastors need to be healthy. Churches need clarity. Communities need the church. The mission is global. We talked about stewardship and the freedom of leading a church you do not own. We talked about formation, about the slow work God does in a leader over a lifetime. We talked about pastoral health, about clarity before activity, about counting fruit instead of activity, about disciples who make disciples, and about a mission that reaches from our own neighborhoods to the ends of the earth.

None of that was filler. It was preparation. Because this week, we gather.

What This Gathering Is Not

On Friday and Saturday we will conduct the business of a district. We will hold an ordination service. We will receive reports, hold elections, and present the five-year vision God has been forming in us. That work matters, and we will do it carefully.

But if all you bring to conference is your attendance, you will have missed what this is. District Conference is not a meeting you sit through. It is not a set of motions to process and a schedule to endure. It is a moment of collective discernment, the kind God's people have always needed, when they stop their scattered work long enough to stand together and ask what He is calling them to do next.

What Is Actually at Stake

I believe a district either steps into the future God has for it or it slowly settles for the past. That choice is rarely made in a single dramatic decision. It is made in a thousand quiet ones, and some of those decisions get made when we gather.

When the people of Israel returned from exile, they assembled as one in the square before the Water Gate. They asked Ezra to bring out the Book of the Law, and they stood from early morning until midday while the Word was read, and the ears of all the people were attentive (Nehemiah 8:1–3). That is a picture of a people who understood that the gathering was not a formality. It was the moment their shared identity was reformed around the Word of God.

That is what I am praying for this week. Not a successful event, but a reformed people. A district that walks out of College Wesleyan Church on Saturday more clear about who we are and more committed to where God is taking us than when we walked in.

What I Am Asking You to Bring

I am not asking you to bring your vote. I am asking you to bring your faith.

Come with expectation. Come having prayed before you arrive. Come willing to pursue the harder and better thing rather than the easier and familiar one. Come as a steward of a mission that was entrusted to you and that will outlast you. And come ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters who carry the same calling in their own corner of central and northern Indiana, because the Psalmist was right: how good and pleasant it is when God's people dwell in unity (Psalm 133:1).

I am asking you to step into what God is building here, and to bring everything you have when you come.

So let me close the way I want to begin the week, in prayer.

Father, we are days from gathering. You know each pastor and lay leader reading this, the weight they carry and the hope they are holding onto. Gather us not as an organization but as Your people. Give us attentive ears and willing hearts. Reform us around Your Word and Your mission. And give us the courage to say yes to what You are asking of us. We are not trusting in a vote or a plan. We are trusting in You. Amen.

​A Pastoral Challenge: Before you walk into conference, take time to pray and to settle one question in your own heart: what is God asking me to say yes to in this next season? Come ready to answer it. Come with expectation. And come ready to be part of what God is building among us. I will see you there.

​J. Robert Clinton spent decades studying the lives of leaders in Scripture and church history. His conclusion was sobering: most leaders do not finish well.

They begin well. Many of them sustain for a season. But finishing well, reaching the final chapter of a leadership life with deepened spiritual authority, compounded influence, and a legacy still forming in the people around them, is the exception, not the rule.

Clinton identified several reasons leaders fail to finish well: they lose their moral compass, they stop learning, they become isolated, they become more attached to their position than to their mission, or they simply drift. Not into dramatic failure, but into a quiet diminishment of everything that once made them effective.

It is an honest question, and every leader in ministry needs to face it squarely: Am I on a trajectory that leads somewhere worth arriving at?

The Measure Is Not What You Accomplished

One of the most persistent temptations in ministry is to measure a leadership life by its visible output. How many people attended. How many buildings were built. How many programs launched. How many years in the role.

None of those things are wrong to care about. But none of them are the measure of finishing well.

The apostle Paul’s summary in 2 Timothy 4:7 is notably free of metrics: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." No attendance reports. No budget totals. Just three honest statements about character, endurance, and fidelity to what he had been entrusted with.

What he is describing is not an impressive resume. It is an integrated life. A life where who he had become and what he had done were held together by the same conviction from beginning to end.

That is what finishing well looks like.

What the Long Game Actually Requires

Clinton’s research points to several consistent characteristics of leaders who finish well. They maintained a vital relationship with God into the final season of their life. They kept learning. They exercised disciplines that protected their integrity. They cultivated relationships that were genuinely mutual rather than purely functional. And they invested in the next generation with deliberate intentionality.

Notice what is not on that list. Finishing well does not require the absence of failure. Some of the leaders who finished strongest had the most painful chapters in the middle of their story. What distinguished them was not that they avoided hard seasons, but that they were formed by them rather than hardened or derailed by them.

The leader who has learned to ask, in the middle of a painful board meeting or a season of church conflict or a year when nothing seemed to work: "What is God forming in me here?" That leader is developing the kind of character that sustains a long ministry.

The leader who responds to hard seasons by protecting themselves, managing perceptions, and avoiding accountability is slowly building a very different kind of future.

The Multiplication Question

There is one more mark of finishing well that deserves its own attention: leaving leaders behind.

The measure of a leader’s legacy is not what they built. It is who they built. Leaders who finish well are surrounded, in their final seasons, by people they invested in who are themselves leading well. They multiplied. They gave away what they knew. They made room. They cared more about the mission advancing than about whether their name was on it.

Paul writes to Timothy, his spiritual son and ministry successor, with that kind of investment behind every word. He did not just complete a race. He handed the baton.

That is the question every pastor in this district needs to be asking right now, regardless of where they are in their ministry journey: Who are you developing? Who is watching you up close and learning something that will carry them further than you could go on your own?

If the answer is unclear, that is a place to begin.

A Word on Being Mid-Career

I am writing this not as someone who has arrived. I am mid-career, not late-career. I am not reflecting on a finished race. I am pressing toward what finishing well will eventually require of me.

That means I am still in the process Clinton describes. Still being formed. Still learning what it costs to lead with integrity over the long haul. Still asking whether my deepest commitments are to the mission or to my own position within it.

What I do know is that the habits I form now are the foundation for who I will be at the end. The disciplines I either protect or abandon in this decade will show up in what I have to give in the next one. And the leaders I invest in now will be the ones still carrying this work forward long after I have moved on.

That is not a morbid thought. It is one of the most motivating ones I know.

The Conference Is Coming

Twelve days from now, we gather as a district at conference. Not primarily to conduct business, though we will do that. We gather as a community of leaders who are all somewhere on this same long road, still becoming, still being formed, still pressing toward something worth arriving at.

When you walk into that room, I hope you carry this question with you: What kind of leader do I want to be at the end? And what does that require of me right now?

Start there. Let God work with that.

​Pastoral Challenge: Take one hour this week to write your own "finish well" vision. Not what you want to have accomplished, but who you want to have become. What you want to be true about your faith, your integrity, your family, and the leaders you leave behind. Write it out. Be honest. Let it be a compass for the next season.

"So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature." (Ephesians 4:11-13)

Eleven weeks ago, we started a conversation. I told you we were standing at a threshold, that the Crossroads District was not in crisis but was not yet operating at its potential, and that something greater was possible. I said this was the moment to reach for it.

Since then, we have covered a lot of ground together.

We talked about identity before activity: you are a steward of what belongs to Jesus, and you are still becoming the leader God intends you to be. We talked about formation before fruitfulness: the leader who is not spending time with Jesus before being sent by Jesus will run dry, and no amount of strategy will fix a formation problem. We talked about clarity before momentum: churches that drift are usually not lazy, they are unclear, and the courage to answer two hard questions, who are we and what is God calling us to do, is the beginning of everything. We talked about counting the right things: stewardship is evaluated at the level of results, not effort, and the willingness to look honestly at what your church is actually producing is not discouragement, it is faithfulness. We talked about making disciples who make disciples, about communities that need the church to be more than a Sunday event, and about the four in ten people in the world who still do not have meaningful access to the Gospel.

That is a lot to hold. So let me pull back to the wide lens and name what all of it adds up to.

This is who we are.

We are a district of churches that believes healthy pastors lead healthy congregations. Not pastors who are merely managing their schedules, but pastors who are thriving spiritually, emotionally, and relationally. Pastors who are with Jesus before they are sent by Jesus. Pastors who serve first and shepherd always, not because it is the path of least resistance but because it is the posture of the One they follow. When a pastor is genuinely healthy, it changes everything downstream. The people in the pew notice. The board senses it. The community feels it. Pastoral health is not a personal benefit. It is a missional strategy.

We are a district of churches that believes clarity is not a luxury, it is a calling. Churches that do not know who they are borrow other people's strategies and wonder why they do not work. Churches that do know who they are align their resources, their energy, and their people around a common answer to the question God has been asking them all along. That kind of clarity does not come from a conference or a consultant. It comes from prayerful, honest, courageous discernment. And it produces something irreplaceable: a congregation that moves together with purpose.

We are a district of churches that believes communities need the church to show up. Not just on Sunday mornings, but on Monday mornings, in neighborhoods and schools and workplaces. The Wesleyan tradition has never separated personal holiness from social engagement, and we are not going to start now. A disciple is not a disciple until they are making disciples, and disciples who are being made are learning to live on mission, addressing real needs with the hope of the Gospel. The church that exists only for what happens inside its walls is not yet operating at the full scope of its calling.

And we are a district of churches that believes the mission is global. The Great Commission does not end at the county line. Every congregation in this district, regardless of size or resources, carries a share of the responsibility for the people who have never heard the name of Jesus. Local and global mission are not competing priorities. They are two expressions of the same heartbeat.

These four convictions are not programs. They are not initiatives or slogans. They are what I believe to be true about what the Crossroads District is called to be as a network of churches. Taken together, they describe a movement, not an institution. A movement of leaders who know who they are before God, who are formed and still forming, who serve and shepherd with courage, who lead toward clarity, who make disciples who make disciples, and who carry the whole world on their hearts.

We are nineteen days from District Conference. Between now and then, I want to invite you to do something specific.

Take an honest look at where your church stands against each of these four convictions. Not to create anxiety, not to generate a to-do list, but to pray with clarity. Where is your congregation thriving? Where is it still becoming? What is the one thing God might be inviting you to say yes to in this next season?

Come to conference knowing the answer to that question. We will not gather to sit through reports. We will gather as a people who have been thinking, praying, and discerning together, and who are ready to step further into the future God has for us.

This is who we are.

For Your Reflection:

1. Of the four convictions we have developed over these eleven weeks, which one represents the greatest gap between where your church is now and where it is called to be? 
2. What would it look like for your congregation to take one concrete step toward that conviction in the next ninety days?
3. As you approach District Conference, what is the one thing you most need God to do in your own leadership before you arrive?