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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:
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