You Are Still Becoming

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:

• What is the hardest season you have led through in the last five years, and what do you think God was forming in you through it?
• Where are the two rails, spiritual formation and leadership capacity, in your current season? Which one needs more intentional attention right now?
• Who is walking alongside you in your development? If the answer is no one, what is that costing you?