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“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you... and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)
“...and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) Forty percent of the people alive today, four in ten, have no meaningful access to the Gospel. They are not unchurched. They are not nominally religious. They live in places where the message of Jesus has never arrived in a form they could understand, receive, and pass on to someone else. If they wanted to follow Christ tomorrow, they would not know where to begin, because no one near them does. That is not a statistic. It is a moral emergency. I know how easy it is to read a line like that, feel a flicker of concern, and move on to the next thing on the calendar. For most of my ministry, the nations were an idea I believed in and rarely thought about. Marietta and I were focused, almost entirely, on our own local church. Then some close friends challenged us with a question we could not shake: was the scope of our ministry large enough? God was not only interested in using our church to reach our community, they said. He wanted to use our church to reach people in the world who have no access to the Gospel at all. That challenge only deepened through travel abroad, including trips to Zambia and to South Africa for the International Conference of The Wesleyan Church. And it was shaped most of all by the Perspectives course that Marietta and I worked through together. Something shifted in those years that has not shifted back. You cannot see what God is doing across the world and keep a small map of his mission. The scope of God’s mission was never narrow. The first time God called a person to follow him, in Genesis 12, the promise was global from the opening line: “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Abram was blessed in order to be a blessing, chosen not as a destination but as a doorway. The story that runs from that promise all the way to the throne room of Revelation, where John sees “persons from every tribe and language and people and nation,” is a single story. God has been pursuing the nations from the beginning, and he has invited the church into the pursuit. When Jesus gave his disciples their assignment in Acts 1:8, he did not hand them a sequence to complete one stage at a time. He told them they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, all at once. Jerusalem did not have to be finished before Samaria could begin. The local and the global were never meant to compete for a church’s attention. They are two expressions of the same heartbeat. God loves the people down the street, and God loves the people on the other side of the world, and a healthy church learns to hold both without choosing between them. This is the insight that reframed missions in our lifetime. Ralph Winter, whose work shapes the Perspectives course, helped the church see that the Great Commission is not finished when the Gospel reaches every country. It is finished when it reaches every people. There are nations on the map that have thriving churches in their capital cities and entire peoples within their borders who have never once heard the name of Jesus. The remaining task is not mostly geographic. It is cultural and relational. It is about peoples, not just places. That is why “reached” and “unreached” are the words that matter, and why four in ten is the number that should keep us awake. I can hear the objection, because I have made it myself. We are a district of churches in central and northern Indiana. Some of our congregations are small, rural, and stretched thin. How can a church that is fighting to keep its own lights on carry the weight of the nations? Here is the honest answer. A church that is so focused on its own community that it never lifts its eyes past the county line is not being a faithful steward of its community. It is missing the full scope of the God it claims to serve. Global responsibility is not a reward for churches that have already arrived. It belongs to the discipleship of every church, the small ones included. We have plenty to do right here. Three million Hoosiers claim no religious affiliation at all. Indiana is a mission field, and we will keep saying so. But Indiana is not the end of our mission field. It is the beginning of it. So let me put a concrete step in front of you, and let me frame it honestly. Adopting an unreached people group as a church is not a budget line item you debate in November. It is a discipleship decision. When a congregation chooses a specific people, learns their name, prays for them by name, gives toward them, and asks who among us might be sent, that decision quietly reshapes everything. It changes how you pray on Sunday. It changes what your children grow up believing is normal. It changes the kind of leaders you raise up, because you are raising them for a world and not merely for a building. A church that prays for the nations slowly becomes a church that thinks like the God who made them. The Crossroads District is committed to Indiana and to the ends of the earth, and we will not settle for a vision that stops at our borders. The mission was global before we arrived. It will be global long after we are gone. The only question worth asking is whether we will join it. For reflection this week:
John Wesley did not save souls on Sunday and ignore their suffering the other six days of the week.
The movement he helped launch in 18th-century England was built on the conviction that personal holiness and social engagement are inseparable. Wesley mobilized a movement that addressed poverty, education, physical needs, and injustice alongside the conversion of individual souls. He preached in the fields and then organized his converts into small groups that held one another accountable to growth in both personal holiness and practical love of neighbor. The inner transformation he called for always produced an outward expression. You could not claim to be changed by grace and then walk past the suffering at your doorstep as if it had nothing to do with you. We are his theological heirs. The question is whether the churches we lead actually show it. The Sunday Trap There is a version of church that measures its health almost entirely by what happens inside its walls on Sunday morning: how many people attended, how the offering compared to budget, whether the music was good and the sermon was well-received. These are not unimportant things. But they are dangerously incomplete as a measure of whether a church is actually doing what Jesus sent it to do. A church can have strong Sunday attendance and almost zero community impact. It can be well-funded, well-staffed, and well-liked inside its walls while the neighborhood around it struggles in ways the congregation barely notices. That is not a healthy church. It is a well-run religious organization with a Sunday morning product. Wesleyan holiness will not let us settle there. The prophet Micah asked the question directly: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). Isaiah pressed even harder: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?" (Isaiah 58:6-7). These are not optional add-ons to the spiritual life. They are its expression. The Disciple-Making Gap Here is where I want to be honest with you about something we need to name clearly. We have done a reasonably good job of leading people to faith. We have done a much less consistent job of forming those people into disciples who live on mission. And the gap between those two outcomes is not minor. It is where the movement stalls. Jesus did not call people to a private spiritual experience. He called them to follow him into participation in his mission. His words to the first disciples were not "believe in me and attend services." They were: "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" (Mark 1:17). Evangelism and mission were not two separate lanes in his ministry. They were the same road. Dietrich Bonhoeffer named what happens when we separate them. When the church's message is only about forgiveness without the full weight of transformation, it produces what he called cheap grace: believers who were told they were saved without being invited to be changed. His corrective is pointed. The call of Jesus is always a call to discipleship. Not a call to subscribe to a set of doctrines, but a call to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow. A disciple is not a disciple until they are making disciples. That is not a high bar for the spiritually ambitious few. It is the ordinary destination of Christian formation for every person in your congregation. What a Missional Church Actually Looks Like Missional living is not a special calling for a subset of your congregation. It is the ordinary expression of Christian discipleship for all of it. Every person who follows Jesus carries the same commission Matthew 28 gives to all of them: "Go and make disciples of all nations." What changes is the context. For some of your people, it is their neighborhood. For others, their workplace, their school, their network of relationships. Missional living is not primarily about programming. It is about people who have been formed by grace and sent by Jesus showing up differently in every corner of the world they already occupy. This is what it looks like at scale: crime rates lower because peacemakers are present. Marriages stronger because the church invests in them before they break. Poverty addressed because generosity is a way of life, not a December project. Neighborhoods renewed because the people of God have decided that what happens outside their walls matters as much as what happens inside them. That is not a fantasy. It is what the movement looks like when it runs at full strength. A Missional Challenge This week, identify one specific need in your community that your church is uniquely positioned to address with the hope of the Gospel. Not a need you have noticed in general. One specific, nameable need. Then ask yourself a second question: What would it take to move from awareness to action within the next ninety days? Start there. See what God does with it. This week, The Wesleyan Church’s General Conference is gathering in the same spirit it always has: the connectional church, across geography and generations, discerning together what God is calling his people to do. There is something worth pausing to honor in that. No local congregation fulfills the Great Commission alone. The connectional church is a reminder that we are accountable not just to our congregation but to something larger, a shared mission with stakes that outlast any single generation. That accountability is not a burden. It is a gift.
And it is precisely the theme of this issue. The Master Does Not Ask How Hard You Worked In the parable of the talents, the master returns and calls his servants to account. The evaluation is not complicated. He does not ask how many strategies they attempted. He does not inquire about the hours logged or the effort invested. He looks at one thing: what was produced with what was entrusted. Two servants present results. One buries his talent and returns it untouched. The difference between the first two servants and the third is not that the third lacked capability or opportunity. The text gives us the reason: fear. He was afraid of the master, afraid of failure, afraid of the risk that honest stewardship requires. So he protected what he had been given rather than deploying it. And the master’s response is unambiguous. Playing it safe with what belongs to someone else is not faithfulness. It is a failure of stewardship. Jesus says it plainly in John 15: “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.” Fruit is not incidental to the mission. It is the point. Two Different Scoreboards Most churches are running two scoreboards simultaneously, and only one of them is the right one. The management scoreboard tracks attendance, budget, committee meetings, and program participation. These numbers matter. You cannot lead an organization without them. But they tell you how the institution is functioning, not whether it is fulfilling its purpose. A church can fill every seat, balance every budget, and staff every committee while producing almost nothing of kingdom consequence. The mission scoreboard asks different questions. How many people are coming to faith in Jesus Christ? How many disciples are being baptized? How many leaders are being developed and released into ministry? How many new churches are being planted? How much substantive difference is this congregation making in the community around it? Those are the metrics that matter to the Owner. This is not a criticism of administration or careful financial stewardship. Those things are necessary. But they are means to an end, not the end itself. A pastor who can tell you every budget line item but cannot tell you how many people came to faith in the last twelve months has mistaken the management scoreboard for the mission scoreboard. The master does not celebrate a balanced ledger. He celebrates fruit. Faithful Is Not Always Large This is where the parable requires careful handling, because it is easy to read it as an argument for bigness. It is not. God does not measure fruitfulness the way the world measures success. A small congregation in a rural community, faithfully seeing people come to faith, developing young leaders, and serving its neighbors with the hope of the Gospel, may be far more fruitful by kingdom standards than a large church running dozens of programs that produce nominal Christianity and passive consumers rather than active disciples. The question is not size. The question is fruit. A small church that is genuinely making disciples, baptizing new believers, and sending people into the community as everyday missionaries is doing exactly what Jesus commissioned. A large church that has confused organizational activity with kingdom fruitfulness is not. The standard is not comparison with the church across town. The standard is what is being produced with what has been entrusted. The Discipline of Honest Evaluation This is why regular, honest evaluation is not a secular business practice imported into church life. It is a spiritual discipline. A pastor who refuses to evaluate is not being humble. They are avoiding accountability. Humility says, “I want to look clearly at what God has entrusted to me and steward it well.” Avoidance says, “I would rather not know.” Those are not the same posture. Honest evaluation asks: What is working? What is genuinely producing kingdom fruit? What is consuming resources without producing results? What needs to be redirected, redesigned, or released? These are hard questions. They can surface uncomfortable answers. But a leader who will not ask them is a steward who has buried the talent, playing it safe with what belongs to Someone else. Kent Wilson writes that a steward accepts responsibility for achieving the desired results of the owner, for redirecting nonproducing resources, and, if necessary, for ending nonfruitful investments. That is not harsh management language. That is faithful stewardship. The courage to look honestly at what your church is actually producing is not discouragement. It is faithfulness. A Leadership Practice for This Week Set aside thirty minutes this week to evaluate the last twelve months in your church against mission metrics, not just management metrics. Where is the genuine fruit? Name it and celebrate it, loudly and specifically. Where are you consuming resources without producing kingdom results? Name that honestly too, not as condemnation, but as clarity. Bring that honest picture to God before you bring it to your board. Let him speak into what he sees. He is the Owner, and he is not afraid of the truth about your church. He is already working in it. The question is whether you are willing to look. There is a kind of church that is remarkably busy.
The calendar is full. The committees meet. The programs run. The pastor preaches every Sunday, visits the hospital on Wednesdays, attends the board meeting on Thursdays, and squeezes sermon prep into whatever is left. People are engaged. Volunteers are serving. The lights are on and the doors are open. And yet, if you were to sit down with that pastor and ask a simple question: What is this church trying to accomplish, and are you accomplishing it? The answer would take a long time to arrive, and it would not be particularly clear when it did. This is the clarity problem. And it is the most common leadership failure in the local church today. The Two Questions Every Church Must Answer In Habakkuk 2:2, God gives the prophet a striking instruction: “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.” There is something important in that image. Clarity is not just for the leader who carries the vision. It is for the person running ahead to announce it. If your vision requires your personal presence to explain, it is not yet clear enough. The writer of Proverbs puts it even more starkly: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Not struggle. Not underperform. Perish. The stakes of clarity are that high. Every church needs to be able to answer two questions with confidence and without a committee meeting to arrive at the answer: Who are we? And what is God calling us to do? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the load-bearing walls of everything else a church attempts. Identity and direction are not the results of good programming. They are the foundation beneath it. When those two questions are left unanswered, the result is not stability. The result is drift. What Happens Without Clarity Churches that have not done the hard work of answering those two questions do not simply pause and wait. They fill the vacuum with activity. They look around at what other churches are doing, churches with different histories, different communities, different gifts, and different callings, and they borrow those strategies wholesale. They implement them badly, because every strategy is built for a specific context, and they wonder why it did not work here. The problem was never the strategy. The problem was that the church did not know itself well enough to know what kind of strategy it needed. There is no universal template for a healthy, effective church. There never has been. The church at Antioch did not look like the church at Jerusalem. The church at Philippi did not function like the church at Corinth. Every congregation has a theological DNA that is uniquely its own. Every congregation exists in a specific community with a specific history, specific neighbors, specific needs, and specific opportunities. The work of discerning who you are and what God is calling you to do is not something a consultant from the outside can hand you. It requires prayer, honest self-examination, community engagement, and the courageous willingness to say: We are not going to do everything. We are going to do what God made us to do. Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Discipline There is a tendency in some ministry cultures to treat strategic planning as a concession to the secular world, something that pragmatic churches do and Spirit-led churches don’t. This is a false choice, and it misreads both the Scripture and church history. Strategic planning in the local church is not a secular business practice with a prayer attached to the front. It is a spiritual exercise. The integration of prayer, discernment, and wise planning is not a compromise between the divine and the human. It is the normal mode of a church that takes both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of human leadership seriously. The Spirit directs. Leaders plan. Neither replaces the other. A church that only prays and never plans is presuming on God. A church that only plans and never prays is working in its own strength. The church that holds both, that sits before God long enough to hear direction and then has the courage to move in that direction with intentionality and accountability, is the church that finds its way through the clarity problem. Before you discuss programs, budgets, or staffing, you must discuss identity and direction. Before you talk about what you are going to do, you must be clear about who you are and why you exist. Clarity at the top creates alignment through the whole organization. Confusion at the top produces frustration at every level. What the District Is Here to Do This is not a challenge the district is simply handing to its churches from a distance. We are doing this work ourselves. Right now, the Crossroads District is walking through a vision integration process led by Catapult, pressing into those same two questions for our own ministry: Who are we, and what is God calling us to do in this next season? We are not asking our churches to pursue clarity while we operate on autopilot. We are pursuing it alongside you. And because we believe this work is essential for every congregation, we are committed to coming alongside each church in the district to help its leadership team engage the same process. We have a set of exercises designed to facilitate the right conversations for a pastor and board or leadership team to work through so they can answer the questions of identity and direction together. This is not a template to copy but a guided process for discovering what is uniquely true about your church, your community, and your calling. If you want help finding clarity for your congregation’s ministry, reach out. That is exactly the kind of work we are here to do with you. Reflection Questions
There are two ways a pastor can fail the people in their care, and they look nothing like each other.
The first is the pastor who leads from the top down. This pastor has the vision, sets the pace, makes the calls, and expects the congregation to follow. There is energy here, and often real movement. But over time, people in this kind of church begin to feel like assets being deployed rather than souls being developed. The leader has direction but no tenderness. The flock moves, but not because they trust the shepherd. They move because they have learned not to argue. The second failure looks more spiritual on the surface. This is the pastor who has confused humility with passivity. This pastor defers to every opinion, avoids every hard conversation, and frames their reluctance to lead as a commitment to “letting the Holy Spirit move.” There is warmth here, and people feel heard. But nothing ever changes. The church drifts from one season to the next without direction, without challenge, without anyone willing to say, “This is where we are going, and we need to go there together.” Both of these are distortions. And both are common. The calling Jesus gives his leaders is more demanding than either of these, because it asks us to hold two roles at the same time, roles that pull in different directions, without collapsing into one at the expense of the other. The servant takes their place under the people. Jesus drew the picture plainly in Mark 10. The disciples were still sorting out who would be greatest in the Kingdom, and Jesus reframed the entire question. “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant…even as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” That is not a call to self-deprecation. It is a call to a particular kind of strength: the strength that lowers itself in order to lift others. Servant leadership is less about the lowering of the leader and more about the elevation of those being led. It looks like asking before telling. It looks like developing before deploying. It looks like staying genuinely curious about the people in your congregation, not as attendance numbers to grow or problems to manage, but as people made in the image of God, with stories and gifts and callings that deserve to be drawn out. A pastor with this posture asks the long-time member what they sense God doing in their life. They listen to the volunteer who is burning out before reassigning them. They take the time to understand why the family in the third row has been attending for two years and still doesn’t feel like they belong. The servant is present to people, not just the mission. And paradoxically, that presence is what creates the trust that makes the mission possible. The shepherd takes their place in front of the people. Peter’s instruction to the elders of the early church is equally direct: “Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.” The shepherd leads. That is not optional. Shepherds move the flock toward water and away from danger. They seek the one who wanders. They call the congregation to movement when movement is required. They guard the flock against threats, including the threat of comfortable stagnation. A pastor who never takes a clear position is not practicing humility. They are abdicating responsibility. A church that has no one willing to name the vision, call out the hard truth, or challenge the congregation toward the harder and better thing is not a humble church. It is a leaderless one. And a leaderless church does not thrive. It drifts. The shepherd role requires the courage to lead, which means the courage to be misunderstood, to call the church forward when not everyone is ready, and to hold the vision steady when the pressure to return to what is comfortable becomes intense. Shepherds do not simply follow wherever the sheep want to go. The integration is the calling. Servant without shepherd becomes a passive people-pleaser who never moves anyone anywhere. Shepherd without servant becomes a domineering leader who moves people through force rather than through trust. But the pastor who holds both roles together, genuinely and not just rhetorically, creates something that neither role can produce on its own: a community that is both cared for and called forward. This is not a balancing act. It is not about being a servant on Tuesdays and a shepherd on Thursdays. It is about leading from a posture that asks before it tells, develops before it deploys, and then has the courage to say, “This is where we are going,” precisely because the people in that room already know they are loved. The most effective leaders I have encountered embody this integration. They are curious and caring with individuals, and courageous and clear with the congregation as a whole. They are not the same in every setting, but they are consistently themselves: servant and shepherd, all the way through. A question worth sitting with: Which side of this tension do you lean toward naturally? Most of us know the answer without much reflection. Some of us are natural servants who need to find our courage. Others are natural leaders who need to slow down and learn to listen. The growth edge is almost always on the side we have been avoiding. Leadership Challenge: This week, have one conversation with someone in your congregation that you approach entirely as a curious servant, no agenda, no outcome you are trying to produce, just genuine curiosity about who they are, what they carry, and what God is doing in their life. Ask. Listen. Stay longer than you planned to. Notice what you learn that you didn’t expect. |
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