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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. 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. "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things." Joshua 3:5
You are days away from Easter Sunday. By the time you read this, you are probably already in that particular kind of holy intensity that pastors know well — the final sermon details, the logistics of a bigger crowd, the quiet prayer that this Sunday would be more than just a well-attended service. That this Sunday, something would actually happen in people. I want to start there. Because I think it matters that this conversation begins on Easter week. Everything I want to say to you over the next thirteen weeks grows out of what we celebrate this Sunday: that death does not get the final word. That God raises what appears to be finished. That the same power that rolled away the stone is available — not just in first-century Jerusalem, but in your church, in your community, in your leadership, right now. I believe that. I hope you do too. Something Greater Is Possible For the next thirteen weeks — from today through June 22, the week before District Conference — Leadership Matters is going to be building toward something specific. Not just delivering content week to week, but developing a shared set of convictions about what the Crossroads District is called to be and do in this next season. I want to name that from the beginning, because you deserve to know where we are headed. Here is the premise I am starting with: the Crossroads District has more potential than it is currently realizing — and this is the moment to step into it. That is not a criticism. It is an invitation. And it is rooted in what I genuinely see when I look across this district. What I See I see 105 churches in central and northern Indiana. Some of them are genuinely thriving — growing, planting, sending, making disciples who make disciples. When I sit with those pastors, I leave the conversation energized and grateful. I also see pastors carrying weight they were never meant to carry alone — spiritually thin, emotionally stretched, without someone consistently investing in them and asking the hard questions. When pastors fail to thrive, their congregations eventually feel it. And I care too much about you and about your people to let that continue without doing something about it. I see churches with real heart and genuine love for God who have drifted — sometimes gradually, sometimes without even noticing — from mission into maintenance. Not because they stopped caring, but because they lost clarity about who they are and what God is specifically calling them to do. Unclear churches don't pursue the mission — they default to managing the preferences of the people already in the room. And churches built around preferences eventually produce consumers, not disciples. I believe most of our pastors know, somewhere deep down, that something more is possible. I see a disciple-making deficit that we have to name honestly. We have done a reasonable job of leading people to faith. We have not done as well at forming those people into disciples who make other disciples. A disciple, by definition, is someone who does what Jesus did — including fishing for others. That gap between where most of our churches are and what Jesus actually commissioned us to produce is real. And I believe it can be closed. And here is what I want you to hear most clearly: I see a district with everything it needs to be something genuinely extraordinary. We have adequate funding — the result of years of wise, faithful stewardship. We have a network of 105 congregations across one of the most accessible mission fields in the country. We have the theological clarity of our Wesleyan heritage, which has always believed that the Gospel transforms people and communities and the world. We have relationships of trust, built over years of shared ministry, that no program can manufacture. We are not starting from nothing. We are not in the wilderness. We are standing at a threshold — and there is something worth stepping toward on the other side. The Joshua 3 Moment The night before the Israelites crossed the Jordan, God gave them an unusual instruction: "Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things." He did not tell them the crossing would be easy. He did not hand them a detailed plan. He asked them to prepare themselves — spiritually, intentionally — for the possibility that what was coming was worth being ready for. I think that is our invitation right now. Not a crisis to manage. Not a problem to solve. A threshold to cross. And the question in front of us is simply whether we will step forward into the future God has been preparing for us — or whether we will stay where we are because it is familiar and the crossing feels uncertain. What the Next Thirteen Weeks Are About Starting next week and moving through June 22, we are going to build a shared language and a shared set of convictions together. We are going to talk about what it means for pastors to truly thrive — not just survive ministry but flourish in it. We are going to wrestle with what church clarity actually looks like and why so many of our congregations are living below their kingdom potential. We are going to talk about communities that need the church to show up as more than a Sunday morning program, and about a world that is waiting for the Church to take the Great Commission seriously. By June 27, when we gather for District Conference, I want every pastor and key leader in this district to be able to say with clarity and conviction: this is what we believe, this is where we are going, and this is why it matters. One More Thing, Before Sunday You are about to proclaim the victory that Jesus won through the resurrection. You are going to stand in front of your congregation — some of them people you have prayed over for years, some of them walking through your doors for the first time — and you are going to tell them that the tomb is empty, that death lost, that the future is open, and that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is alive and active right now. Preach it like you believe it. Because everything else — every leadership conversation we will have over the next thirteen weeks — is downstream from that. The best days of this district are ahead. I believe that with everything I have. HE IS RISEN! Let's proclaim it to everyone in Central and Northern Indiana! Reflection for the Week Take a few unhurried minutes before or after Easter Sunday with these three questions:
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