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There is a cost that rarely shows up in the budget, never makes it into the annual report, and almost never gets discussed at a board meeting. But it is the most expensive thing in ministry.
It is a depleted pastor. I am not talking about burnout in the clinical sense, though that is real and it happens. I am talking about something more subtle and far more common: the pastor who is still showing up, still preaching, still attending the meetings, but who has been running on empty for longer than they can honestly remember. The pastor whose quiet time has slowly become a sermon prep session. Whose prayer has become a professional activity rather than a personal one. Whose inner life has gone quiet in a way they have learned to manage but never quite address. That pastor is not simply struggling personally. They are a liability to every person in their care. Consider what actually happens when a pastor is spiritually depleted. Decision-making gets cloudy, and the pastor increasingly reacts to pressure rather than leading from conviction. Preaching becomes effortful in a different way, technically functional but spiritually thin. Relational patience erodes, and the people closest to the pastor (staff, family, close friends) bear the weight of that first. Anxiety spreads quietly through the culture of the church, because congregations are extraordinarily sensitive to the internal state of the person leading them. And in the worst cases, which happen with alarming regularity, depletion becomes the runway for moral failure or the quiet decision to simply leave the ministry altogether. Every one of those outcomes costs the church something it cannot easily recover. This is why I want to make a leadership case, not a self-care case, for the health of the pastor. Mark 3:14 contains one of the most important sentences in the New Testament for anyone in ministry: “He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach.” That sentence has a sequence, and the sequence is not accidental. Being with Jesus comes before being sent by Jesus. The relationship precedes the mission. The staying is what makes the sending sustainable. Jesus did not recruit twelve talented individuals and deploy them immediately into ministry work. He called them to himself. He ate with them, walked with them, sat with them, prayed with them. Their formation happened in proximity to him, and only from that proximity did he release them to go. The ministry they eventually did was the overflow of what they had received in his presence. That architecture of being before doing is not a model for a twelve-person cohort in first-century Galilee. It is the essential structure of Christian ministry in every generation, including this one. The problem, of course, is that ministry is relentless. There is always a sermon to prepare, a crisis to manage, a meeting to attend, a family to visit, a budget to review. These are not bad things; they are the ordinary responsibilities of pastoral leadership. But they are extraordinarily good at crowding out the one thing that makes all of them sustainable. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in Life Together, made the point with precision: the quality of the time spent with others is entirely dependent on the quality of the time spent alone before God. There is no shortcut and no workaround. The pastor who allows the demands of ministry to displace time with Jesus is not simply a poor time manager. They are building on a foundation that will not hold. Jesus said it plainly in John 15: “Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine.” Fruitfulness is not the product of effort or strategy. It is the product of connection. A branch disconnected from the vine does not produce less fruit; it produces nothing. I have sat across the table from enough pastors in coaching conversations to know that the drift away from intimacy with Jesus is almost never a dramatic departure. It is a slow erosion. One busy season bleeds into the next. The spiritual disciplines that once anchored the day get compressed, then condensed, then quietly skipped. What started as a temporary accommodation becomes a permanent pattern. And at some point, the pastor realizes they are doing ministry from a place of emptiness, preaching what they are not experiencing, teaching what they are not practicing, leading people toward a depth they themselves have lost. I am not writing this to produce guilt. I am writing it because the health of the pastor is the single most important factor in the health of the church, and therefore the single most important investment the Crossroads District can make. This is not a soft program or an optional benefit for pastors who happen to have bandwidth for it. Shepherding the shepherds is the highest-leverage work this district does. When we invest in coaching relationships, create pastoral cohorts, and prioritize the personal wellbeing of our pastors, we are not doing something nice. We are doing something strategic. We are protecting every congregation in this district by protecting the people who lead them. Healthy churches require healthy leaders. Healthy leaders begin with a consistent, deep, unhurried life with God. So here is the question I want to leave with you, and I mean it as a genuine pastoral invitation: If someone followed your calendar for one week, watched how you actually spent your time, and observed what you prioritized before other things crowded in, what would they conclude about the state of your relationship with Jesus? Take that question seriously. It may be the most important leadership assessment you do this year. Reflection Questions
There is a feeling most pastors carry but rarely name out loud.
It usually surfaces somewhere in the middle of ministry, not at the beginning, when everything feels charged with possibility, and not necessarily at the end, when there is something to look back on. It surfaces in the middle, somewhere between the person you thought you would be by now and the person you actually are. The gap feels like failure. It is not. It is formation. The apostle Paul understood this better than most. He did not write from the comfortable vantage point of arrival. He wrote from the road. “I want to know Christ,” he said, and then, almost immediately: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3:10, 12). The man who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, who had been caught up to the third heaven, who had planted churches across the known world, was still becoming. He was pressing on. He was being held by the One who had taken hold of him, and he was running toward something he had not yet reached. That is not a concession. That is the whole point. Two Rails, Both Moving Here is the truth I have come to believe about leadership development: it is not a conference you attend or a credential you earn. It is a journey you take over the course of a lifetime, on two rails that must both be moving at the same time: spiritual formation and leadership capacity. Most leaders naturally favor one rail over the other. The pastor who is spiritually deep but cannot lead a group of people toward a shared vision will produce sincere, passionate, frustrated ministry that never fully reaches its potential. The energy is there; the movement is not. On the other hand, the pastor who can lead well but is spiritually shallow will eventually run out of genuine fuel. At best, they coast on competence. At worst, they drift into the kind of moral failure that devastates congregations and families when no one is looking. Both rails have to move. Not at the same speed every season. There are seasons when God is doing deep interior work and the leadership development needs to be patient. But both have to be in motion. Robert Clinton, who spent decades studying how God shapes leaders over a lifetime, argued that the leaders who finish well are those who never stop being formed. They keep learning. They keep pressing. They stay teachable long past the point where most people decide they already know enough. The leaders who stall are often the ones who stopped treating their development as ongoing and started treating it as complete. What God Uses Here is the part that should change how you read your own story: the process items God uses to develop leaders are rarely the ones on the conference brochure. It is the board meeting that went badly and took two years to recover from. It is the church plant that didn’t work the way you planned it. It is the season of doubt when nothing felt certain and prayer felt like talking to the ceiling. It is the painful relationship that exposed something in you that you didn’t know was there. It is the diagnosis, the loss, the betrayal, the long plateau that felt like stagnation. Clinton calls these “process items,” the specific, often painful circumstances through which God shapes a leader’s character and expands their capacity. The leader who learns to read their story through that lens stops being crushed by hard seasons. They start asking a different question; not why is this happening to me? but what is God forming in me through this? That is not a passive posture. That is not resignation. It is the active, faith-filled choice to believe that God is at work in the formation process even when the process is hard. Dallas Willard described spiritual formation as the intentional process of being transformed into the kind of person who naturally and easily does what Jesus would do. That kind of transformation does not happen in a weekend. It happens over years of sustained cooperation with the Holy Spirit, through disciplines practiced and abandoned and practiced again, through community that holds us accountable and challenges us to grow, through the slow, patient work of God in the ordinary material of our lives. You are not behind. You are being formed. What This Asks of You The most dangerous leadership posture is the one that mistakes experience for arrival. The pastor who graduated twenty-five years ago and has been drawing from the same well ever since is not stable. They are stagnant. The well that is not replenished runs dry eventually, and congregations are depending on leaders who have something to give. The Crossroads District is committed to providing coaching relationships, pastoral cohorts, and development experiences precisely because we believe that leadership development is ongoing. Not remedial. Not corrective. Ongoing. For every pastor, at every stage, in every season. We want to build a culture in which continuing to grow is not the exception but the expectation, and in which asking for help is not a sign of weakness but a mark of wisdom. But the district can only provide the opportunity. The decision to keep pressing belongs to you. Paul pressed. Not because he had failed to arrive, but because he understood that the journey was the point and that the One who had taken hold of him was still leading him forward. So are you still pressing? Are both rails moving? This Week’s Reflection Take a few minutes to sit with these questions honestly:
You can usually tell the difference within the first ten minutes of a conversation.
The pastor who owns the church talks about it a certain way. My church. My vision. My people. What I have built. They speak of transitions with anxiety and critics with defensiveness. They protect their turf and guard their influence. They make decisions based on what keeps them secure rather than what keeps the mission moving. They are not bad people; many of them genuinely love God and love their congregation. But somewhere along the way, a subtle and dangerous shift took place. The church stopped being something they were entrusted with and became something they possessed. This is not a fringe problem. It is one of the most common and most quietly destructive dynamics in pastoral ministry, and it shows up at every level of leadership, from the smallest rural congregation to the most prominent platform in the denomination. There is a better way to hold the work. It begins with a single, load-bearing conviction: the church belongs to Jesus, not to you. The Difference Between Owning and Stewarding A steward is a person who manages resources belonging to someone else in order to achieve that person’s objectives. The word appears throughout Scripture, from the parables to Paul’s letters, and it always carries the same fundamental weight: you have been trusted with what is not yours. Jesus made this picture vivid in Matthew 25. A man going on a journey calls his servants, entrusts his wealth to them, and leaves. The servants do not own the money. They hold it in trust, with the expectation that they will manage it faithfully and return it, with interest, to the one who entrusted it. The question the parable presses on every leader is not how much do you have? but what are you doing with what was entrusted to you? Paul drew the same line in 1 Corinthians 4:2: “It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.” Not impressive. Not celebrated. Not successful by any metric the world recognizes. Faithful to the Owner’s agenda, the Owner’s objectives, the Owner’s mission. R. Scott Rodin, whose work on steward leadership has shaped my own thinking considerably, argues that this shift does not begin with better habits or improved management practices. It begins with the transformation of the leader’s heart. The leader must first be rightly positioned before God, genuinely submitted to him as Owner, before they can lead with integrity. Everything else is technique layered over a compromised foundation. The heart has to come first. The Surprising Freedom of Not Being the Owner Here is what I have come to believe: the posture of the steward is not a burden. It is a liberation. When you own the church, you have to protect it. You have to defend it from criticism, insulate it from failure, manage every perception, and preserve what you have built at nearly any cost. That is exhausting work, and it is work that slowly squeezes the life out of a leader. You cannot take genuine risks when you own the outcome. You cannot be transparent about failure when your identity is wrapped up in the results. You cannot release things that are not bearing fruit when letting go feels like losing a piece of yourself. The steward is free from all of that. The steward does not have to protect what they never owned. They are free to take risks, because the risk is in service of the Owner’s mission, not their own reputation. They are free to acknowledge failure, because failure is information about how to be more faithful, not a verdict on their worth. They are free to release programs, structures, and approaches that are not producing fruit, because their loyalty is to what the Owner values, not to what they built. The steward asks a different question than the owner asks. The owner asks: What is best for me and what I have built? The steward asks: What would the Owner approve of? That single question, asked consistently and honestly, reorients everything. Open Hands in a Grasping World In the Crossroads District, this conviction has practical weight. Every pastor holds their congregation in trust, not in title. Every board member holds their governance role as a stewardship responsibility, not a seat of privilege. Every dollar in the budget is God’s money, managed by God’s stewards, for God’s purposes. Every person in the pew is a person Christ died for, not an attendance figure or a ministry unit. When we lead from that posture, we protect ourselves from the pride, possessiveness, and self-preservation that quietly destroy so many ministries. We open ourselves to the kind of bold, risky, faith-filled leadership that stewards are free to exercise precisely because they know it is not theirs to lose. Kent Wilson put it plainly: stewardship is the management of resources belonging to another in order to achieve the Owner’s objectives. The steward’s job is not to set the agenda. It is to be faithful to the agenda of the One who owns the work. That is the only agenda worth serving. For Your Reflection This Week
The prophet Habakkuk received a word from God and was told to do something specific with it: write it down. Make it plain. Put it where people can read it on the run.
“Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.” — Habakkuk 2:2 There is something instructive there for leaders. Clarity is not accidental. Vision doesn’t communicate itself. The work of articulating what you believe — plainly, specifically, memorably — is itself a leadership act. So let me be plain. There are four things I believe about the Crossroads District. Not four programs we are launching. Not four initiatives we are evaluating. Four convictions: settled beliefs about what is true, what matters, and what God is calling us to pursue together. These convictions will shape everything we do in this next season. Every coaching call, every training event, every resource we invest, every conversation I have with a pastor or board — it all flows from here. I want you to know what they are. I want you to be able to say them. I want them to become our shared language. Conviction One: Pastors Need to Be Healthy I have been in ministry long enough to know that a pastor who is running on empty is a liability — not because they don’t care, but because you cannot give what you do not have. Spiritually depleted pastors preach depleted sermons, make clouded decisions, and create anxious cultures. The emotional and relational health of the person in the pulpit shapes the health of everyone in the pew. This is why I believe the highest-leverage investment the Crossroads District can make is in the human beings who stand in our 105 pulpits every week. Not in programs. Not in buildings. In people. In pastors who are spiritually alive, emotionally grounded, and relationally connected — people who are genuinely thriving, not just surviving. When this conviction is missing, churches stagnate regardless of strategy. When it is present, everything else becomes possible. Conviction Two: Churches Need Clarity Ask the average congregation member what their church is uniquely called to do in their community, and most of the time you will get a shrug. Ask the pastor, and you might get a borrowed vision statement from a conference they attended three years ago. The biggest challenge facing most of our churches is not a lack of commitment. It is a lack of clarity. Busy churches are not necessarily effective churches. Activity is not the same as mission. And borrowed vision always fits someone else’s church better than yours. Every congregation in this district deserves to know who they are and what God is specifically calling them to do. When that clarity is missing, churches drift. Resources get scattered. Leaders grow frustrated. Good people work hard at the wrong things. When clarity is present, everything aligns. Energy compounds. Momentum builds. People know why they are here. Conviction Three: Communities Need the Church John Wesley didn’t just preach for the conversion of souls. He mobilized a movement that cared for the poor, advanced education, addressed physical needs, and challenged injustices like slavery. For Wesley, personal holiness and social engagement were not competing priorities. They were inseparable expressions of a heart transformed by the love of God. We are his theological heirs. Wesleyan holiness has always had an outward dimension. A church that exists only for what happens inside its walls on Sunday morning is not fulfilling the full scope of its calling. Our communities — the cities and towns and neighborhoods where our 105 churches are planted — are waiting for the church of Jesus Christ to show up as more than a Sunday crowd. They need churches that address real needs with the real hope of the Gospel, that make communities demonstrably better because they are present. When this conviction is missing, churches become inward and institutional. When it is present, the church becomes what it was always meant to be: a community-transforming movement. Conviction Four: The Mission Is Global Here is a number I cannot get out of my head: four in ten. Four in ten people on this planet today have no meaningful access to the Gospel. They are not simply unchurched. They live in contexts where the message of Jesus has not yet arrived in a form they can understand and receive. Indiana is not the end of our mission field. It is the beginning. That is not a statistic. That is a moral emergency, and it is the responsibility of every church in this district to respond to it. I am not suggesting that every church needs to send a mission team this year. I am saying that every church needs to raise its eyes past its own community and ask what God is calling it to do for the nations. The Great Commission does not stop at the Indiana state line. A church that has no heartbeat for the world is a church with a smaller God than the one Scripture describes. This conviction is personal for me. Over the last several years, international ministry travel to multiple places across the globe, completing the Perspectives course alongside Marietta, and attending the International Conference of The Wesleyan Church in Johannesburg have permanently reshaped how I see God’s mission. What I discovered is that my vision had been too narrow, too focused on North America, when God’s heart extends to every nation, tribe, and tongue. I want that enlargement for every pastor and every congregation in this district. These Are Not New Ideas I want to be honest about something. These four convictions are not original to me. They are rooted in Scripture, shaped by our Wesleyan theological heritage, and grounded in what I have been learning across nearly three decades of coaching and leading in the church. What I am doing is naming them clearly, committing to them publicly, and building everything we do around them. Habakkuk was told to write the vision plainly so that a herald may run with it. That is what I am asking you to do with these four convictions. Not just to read them, but to run with them. To let them shape how you lead your church, how you invest your time and energy, how you evaluate what is working and what is not. A Leadership Practice for This Week Set aside twenty minutes this week — not to create anxiety, but to name reality honestly as a starting point. Evaluate where your church currently stands on each of the four convictions:
Don’t answer in the abstract. Write it down. Make it plain. |
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