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You Were Never Meant to Carry It All

May 12, 2026 / / 0 Comments

There’s a strange tension that nobody really prepares you for when the thing you’re leading grows past what you can personally hold.

For a pastor, it’s the congregation. For a manager, it’s the team. For a parent, it might just be the family table getting louder and more complicated. But the tension is the same: at some point, the people under your care outnumber your personal bandwidth and something has to give.

I’m going to talk about this from where I live, which is pastoral ministry. But I’d be surprised if this doesn’t land somewhere closer to home for you too.

At 100 people, you can know pretty much everyone. And no just their names. You know their stories. You know whose kid is struggling in school, who just lost a parent, who is quietly carrying a diagnosis they haven’t told many people yet. You show up in hospital rooms and it feels personal because it is personal. The weight is real, but it’s also relational in a way that is deeply human.

Then somewhere along the way, the number grows.

150…175…200…

And something subtly shifts.

You still know names. You still recognize faces. You still show up in the hospital rooms and sit in the living rooms and pray at the bedsides. I remember walking into the nursing home room for the first time in a couple of months. The elders had been doing these visits and when I walked in I felt like there was a part of the story I was missing. It’s a hard tension to wrestle with. But the illusion that you can personally carry everyone in the same way quietly disappears. Not because you care less. Not because you’re less faithful. But because you are now human in a system that has outgrown individual capacity.

That’s the part nobody likes to say out loud.

Because people assume more growth just means more ministry success. And in one sense, it is. More people hearing the message. More families connected. More lives being formed in community. That matters deeply.

But growth also introduces a kind of pastoral ache. At 100, you shepherd people closely. At 200, you begin to shepherd systems that shepherd people. And that transition is not clean. It feels like loss even when it’s healthy.

You start to realize you can no longer be the primary caregiver for every need. You can’t be the first responder to every crisis. You can’t sit in every hospital room, attend every meeting, or personally track every story with the same depth.

And if you try, something breaks. And that something is usually you.

This is where a lot of leaders get stuck. Because the instinct is to fight the loss of intimacy by working harder. More visits. More hours. More personal coverage. But that math doesn’t scale. It eventually collapses under its own weight. You become the greatest limiting factor to the spread of what you’re actually trying to build.

The harder truth is this: healthy churches don’t grow past the shepherd’s capacity. They grow into shared shepherding.

That’s where elders matter. That’s where lay leaders matter. That’s where growth groups stop being a program and start becoming the real pastoral backbone of the church. Not because the pastor is stepping away, but because the pastor was never meant to carry it all alone in the first place.

Entrusting this kind of relational capital to someone else is hard, even if it’s a very qualified and gifted elder. It feels like you’re abandoning someone when in reality you’re giving them a level of care you can’t give them. And you’re enlarging their circle of people who show care for them at the same time. 

The New Testament doesn’t describe a solo shepherd model. It describes a body. A shared responsibility. A distributed care network where the “one another” commands actually become how people are known, prayed for, and carried.

But even knowing that doesn’t remove the tension.

Because there are still names. Still faces. Still stories you wish you had more bandwidth to sit with. There are still funerals where you wish you had more conversations before the loss. Still hospital rooms where you wish you weren’t walking in as one of many voices, but as the voice they know best.

And yet the call remains.

Faithfulness doesn’t always look like depth with every individual. Sometimes it looks like building a structure where depth can still exist even when you can’t personally provide all of it. That’s the shift. Not from care to no care. But from personal care alone to shared pastoral care multiplied through others.

And if we’re honest, that takes a kind of humility that leadership doesn’t always naturally produce. Because it means releasing the illusion that presence equals exclusivity. It means trusting others with stories you wish you could hold more closely yourself. It means believing that the Spirit of God is not confined to your schedule or your proximity.

There’s no clean ending to this tension. No neat resolution where everything feels balanced and satisfying.

There’s just the ongoing work of showing up, staying faithful, raising up others, and learning to accept that shepherding more people will always mean carrying things you cannot personally carry at the same depth you once did.

And maybe that’s the point. Not to replicate 100-person care at 200. But to build a church where 200 people are actually being shepherded…just not by one person alone.

That’s the hard part.

And also, the necessary one.

You’re Not Actually Hungry for What You Think You’re Hungry For

May 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Why the thing you’re chasing to fill the void probably isn’t the thing

Somewhere out there right now, someone is ordering an embarrassingly expensive pizza delivery.

We’ve all been there. Hungry, slightly irrational, willing to spend money or time or energy we don’t really have just to scratch the itch. The hunger takes over and suddenly the math stops mattering.

But here’s the thing I’ve been sitting with lately: most of us are walking around with that same irrational hunger all the time. Just not for food. We’re hungry for something. We’re just not always sure what it is. And we keep trying to fill it with things that don’t actually work.

The Cracker Problem

This Sunday I was preaching through a passage in John’s gospel where Jesus makes one of the most audacious statements in human history. He says: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry.”

I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that when most people hear that, they either nod politely or quietly wonder if it’s actually true. Because most of us have tried the “Jesus thing” at some point and still ended up hungry. Still ended up tired, or lonely, or empty, or anxious, or chasing something we couldn’t quite name.

So either Jesus is wrong, or we’ve been eating the wrong thing.

I think it’s usually the second one.

We come to Jesus asking for crackers – quick fixes, parking spots, a way out of the thing we’re in – and then we’re surprised when we’re hungry again an hour later. Crackers do that. Bread doesn’t.

What Hunger Actually Feels Like

It shows up in a lot of different ways. Maybe it’s the thing you check first thing in the morning. Is it your phone, your email, the number in your bank account? Maybe it’s the credential you’re chasing, the relationship you’re trying to hold together, the approval you’re still waiting on from someone who may never give it.

Maybe it’s more subtle than that. Maybe it’s just a low-grade restlessness you can’t shake. A feeling that something’s missing but you can’t quite locate it.

You know that feeling? That’s hunger. Not the Snickers-bar kind. The deeper kind.

Augustine, a guy who spent a good chunk of his life trying to fill that void with all the wrong things before becoming one of history’s most important Christian writers, put it this way: “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” He was talking to God. And he knew from personal experience what it felt like to try everything else first.

The Difference Between Crackers and Bread

In the passage I was preaching from, Jesus has just done something remarkable. He fed over 10,000 people with a little boy’s lunch. Five small loaves and two fish. The crowd is amazed. They follow him across the lake. They want more.

And Jesus essentially says: I know why you’re here. You’re here because I fed you yesterday. You’re not here because you believe anything about who I am. You just want more food.

Then he says something that reframes the whole thing. The bread your ancestors ate in the wilderness. You know the miraculous manna, the daily provision. They ate it and they died. I’m offering you bread that leads to a different kind of life entirely.

The crackers are anything that gives you a temporary hit of what you want and sometimes need in the moment. The bread is the thing that actually satisfies.

A promotion can feel like bread. So can a new relationship, a fresh start, a better city, a cleaner diet, a fuller inbox, a bigger platform. And none of those things are bad. But they’re crackers. They work for a while and then you’re hungry again.

The claim Jesus is making is that he’s different in kind, not just in degree. Not just a better cracker. Actually bread. The sustaining kind.

The Part That Costs Something

Here’s the part of Sunday’s message I couldn’t get away from. To illustrate what he means by “bread of life,” Jesus uses the image of wheat. Wheat berries straight off the stalk are kind of gross. I know I grew up chewing them as a kid with my grandpa. You can do it, but it’s not exactly a meal. And it’s not really all that tasty either.

You know how grain becomes bread? It gets plucked, sifted, pounded, ground down, beaten, and baked.

Not long after Jesus called himself the bread of life, he was arrested, beaten, tortured, and killed. The same language. The same process. Ground down to nothing and placed in a grave.

And then, just like bread rising, he didn’t stay there. He rose.

I’m not asking you to believe that right now if you don’t. But I’m pointing at it because it matters for the claim. Jesus isn’t just offering a philosophy or a set of principles that might help with the hunger. He’s saying he went through something on your behalf so that the hunger could actually be answered.

So What Are You Hungry For?

Genuinely. Not the Sunday school answer, not the polished version. What’s the thing you keep reaching for that never quite satisfies? What’s the void you’ve been trying to fill with crackers?

I’m not going to tell you Jesus is a magic fix for your specific situation. He’s not a slot machine. Believing in him doesn’t mean your marriage gets easier, your diagnosis goes away, or your finances sort themselves out.

What it means is that underneath all of those things, there’s a hunger that those things can’t touch. And there’s a claim on the table that says that hunger has an answer.

Stop turning to creation to fill the void that only the Creator can fill.

I don’t know where you’re at with any of this. Maybe you’ve believed it for years and you’re still working out what it means. Maybe you’ve never given it a serious thought. Maybe you had a bad experience with church and you’re reading this with one eyebrow raised.

All of that is fair. But I’d rather you sit with the honest question than walk away with a polite nod.

What are you hungry for? And is what you’re eating actually working?

What Twenty-Six Years Taught Me About Fighting

May 9, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I don’t always fight fair.

I wish I could say I do. I wish I could say I’m the calm one, the steady one, the one who slows everything down when emotions rise. But one of the hardest things I’ve had to admit over twenty-six years of marriage is that I can turn a disagreement into a contest. And worse, I can convince myself that being right is the same thing as being loving.

It isn’t.

There are things you only learn by staying. Not by winning arguments. Not by reading books. Not even by going to counseling, though that’s worth doing. You learn some things by sitting in the aftermath of a fight that went too far. The moment when the house gets quiet in that way that isn’t peaceful. It’s just heavy.

Twenty-six years of marriage will do that to you.

In the early years, I thought conflict was something to get through quickly. Solve it. Fix it. Move on. But marriage doesn’t work like that. You don’t solve people. You learn them. You carry them. You sometimes sit in the tension longer than you want to, because the alternative of walking away emotionally, checking out and calling it peace when it’s really just surrender – that is far worse.

Here’s what I didn’t know at year five that I wish I did. Conflict doesn’t usually break marriages in one dramatic moment. It erodes them in repeated patterns. Same argument. Different day. Same tone. Same wounds touched in slightly different ways.

What changes over time isn’t that you stop fighting. It’s that you start recognizing what kind of fighter you are.

I had to learn that I was the kind who escalated to win. I could press until I landed the final word. Until I had “clarified” my point in a way that left no room for disagreement. I’ve stood close enough to the edge of something serious in my own heart to know how real that drift is. The sharp words. The silence that stretches longer than it should. The temptation to mentally check out.

Marriage doesn’t survive people who need to win all the time. It survives people who learn to lay their weapons down mid-fight and say, “This matters more than my version of being right.”

That’s not natural for me. That’s learned. Sometimes the hard way. Sometimes after the words are already out and there’s no taking them back.

There’s a strange moment that comes after a long marriage argument where you’re sitting in the same room, both of you aware that something just shifted. Not always broken. But bent. And you have a choice: double down or soften.

I used to double down. Sometimes still do.

Now, not perfectly, but more than I used to, I try to soften. Not because I’m less convinced I’m right in the moment, but because I’m more convinced that being right isn’t the point.

Staying is the point.

And here’s what staying actually looks like, in my experience: it’s rarely dramatic. It’s someone getting up and making coffee anyway. It’s “Can we try that again?” It’s the decision not to let yesterday dictate the tone of today. Sometimes it’s just the absence of leaving.

We don’t talk enough about that kind of faithfulness. The kind that stays in the room after the words are said. The kind that doesn’t storm out to prove a point. The kind that learns, slowly, that love is not the absence of conflict. It’s what you do inside it.

If I could go back to year-five me, I don’t think I’d give advice. Advice is too clean for what this actually is.

I’d probably just say: You’re going to want to win some things that will cost you more than they’re worth.

Because in the long haul of marriage, you don’t just remember the fights you had.

You remember the fights you almost let define you.

The Fights Worth Having

May 7, 2026 / / 0 Comments

We had one of those conversations. You know the kind.

It starts over something small. Something that, if you wrote it down, later wouldn’t even sound worth mentioning. Tone was off. Timing was bad. Somebody said something a little sharper than they meant to. And before long, you’re not talking about that thing anymore. You’re talking about everything.

I could feel it happening in real time. Part of me wanted to win. Part of me wanted to shut it down. And part of me, if I’m being honest, just wanted to walk away and not deal with it at all.

That’s the crossroads every leader faces eventually. Push harder, pull back, or check out.

We didn’t check out. We stayed in it. Not perfectly, not always gracefully, but we stayed. And somewhere in the middle of all that back-and-forth, the real thing finally surfaced. Not the surface frustration, but the deeper thing underneath it.

Sometimes it sounds like: I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing or I’ve never seen it that way before, can you tell me more? And that’s when everything shifts. Because at that point, you’re not fighting against each other. You’re fighting for something.

That’s taken me a long time to learn.

Not every hard conversation in leadership is the same. Some of them are just noise. Frustration looking for somewhere to land. The kind where an hour later you can’t remember what started it. Those conversations don’t build anything. They just leave a small dent and a little distance between people who have to keep working together.

But then there are the other ones. The ones you’d rather avoid because you know they’re going to cost something. The ones where someone has to say what’s actually underneath. Where you risk being misunderstood for a minute so you can be understood in the long run.

Those are the fights worth having.

I’ve heard a noise under the hood of my truck before and just turned the radio up. Kept driving and hoped it would go away. That works right up until it doesn’t. The same thing happens in churches and leadership contexts. You can avoid the hard conversation for a season. Keep things light, keep things moving, don’t push too hard. But over time, things drift. Little gaps become bigger ones. And eventually you’re not fighting. But you’re not really building anything either.

No conflict, but no depth.

Leadership that actually grows doesn’t avoid conflict. It just learns which fights matter. It lets some things go. It doesn’t chase every irritation or need to win every point. But when something real is on the line – vision, trust, direction, the health of the people you’re leading – real leadership steps into it.

Not to prove something. To protect something.

That’s what I’m still learning, even now. Some battles just aren’t worth the energy, and I’ve spent plenty of time and energy on the wrong ones. But the right ones, the ones where something deeper is at stake, those are the moments that shape a team, a culture, a church.

When you come out the other side, when you’ve said the hard thing and heard the real thing and worked your way back toward a team centered focus, something has changed. More understanding. More trust. More unity than there was before.

Not because the conflict happened, but because you didn’t waste it.

Stewardship Means Structure (Part 2): The Final 3 Moves We Can’t Ignore

May 6, 2026 / / 0 Comments

If we’re going to stop managing decline and actually start stewarding the mission, then we have to finish what we started.

The first three moves were about people, partnership, and process.

These final three are about focus, funding, and fruit.

And if we miss these, we’ll keep spinning our wheels no matter how many conversations we have.

4. Activate Synod and District Resources (Beyond Just Two Lanes)

If we’re being honest, maybe even a little optimistically honest, we have to admit that at best we’ve put most of our energy into two categories:

  • Church planting
  • Church revitalization

Both matter. Both are needed. But they are not the whole picture.

There are dozens of congregations sitting in the middle:

  • Not healthy enough to plant
  • Not dying fast enough to trigger revitalization
  • But absolutely in need of intentional direction and support

And too often… they get neither.

What If We Broadened the Strategy?

What if we leveraged existing district and synod resources to:

  • Strengthen already healthy, growing churches so they can multiply impact
  • Support partnership models between congregations
  • Guide mergers, adoptions, and multi-site expressions
  • Help churches reimagine facility usage and community engagement

Not everything fits neatly into “plant” or “revitalize.” And if that’s all we fund, that’s all we’ll get.

Let’s Be Clear About What This Is (and Is Not)

This is not about:

  • Traditional vs. contemporary worship
  • Liturgical vs. non-liturgical styles
  • Personal preferences or ministry flavor

This is about viability:

  • Financial sustainability
  • Leadership capacity
  • Property stewardship
  • Missional effectiveness

Those are the real issues that need to be addressed.

And One More Thing We Need to Say Out Loud

Yes, Jesus is Lord of the Church. Absolutely. That is not a question at all.

But that doesn’t mean every local expression of the Church will remain open forever. Perhaps a better way to look at it is the difference between Church and local congregations.

The Church remains forever, but congregations have closed before. And they will close again.

Not because Jesus failed, but because missions shift, communities change, and stewardship matters.

Faithfulness is not measured by how long a building stays open. It’s measured by whether we’re aligned with the mission of making disciples.

5. Fund Strategy, Not Just Survival

We need to rethink how we use money. Because right now, too often, funding decisions are driven by one question:

“How do we help this congregation stay open a little longer?”

That’s not strategy. That’s delay. What if we asked instead:

“Where will this investment lead to actual Gospel impact?”

That changes everything.

What Strategic Funding Could Look Like

  • Investing in churches that are actively reaching their communities
  • Supporting leadership teams that are intentionally discipling people
  • Funding partnership efforts that multiply impact
  • Providing grants for mergers, relaunches, or replanting efforts
  • Backing churches willing to try something different for the sake of the mission

This isn’t about favoritism. It’s about fruitfulness.

Look. Pouring resources into a model that isn’t producing disciples isn’t generosity. It’s poor stewardship.

At some point, we have to stop resourcing what was…and start investing in what could be or maybe better yet what should be!

6. Measure What Actually Matters (Not Just Attendance)

If we’re serious about stewardship, then we have to get serious about metrics. Because what we measure shapes what we value. And for too long, the primary metric has been simple:

“How many people showed up?”

Sure attendance matters. But it’s not the mission.

The Mission Is Clear

Jesus didn’t say: “Go and gather crowds.”

He said: “Go therefore and make disciples…” (Matthew 28:19, ESV)

That’s the target. So the question becomes: Are we measuring that?

When discipleship is happening, you should see a pattern:

  • Worship attendance grows →
  • Bible engagement deepens →
  • More people begin serving →
  • More people invite others and talk about Jesus →
  • New people come – and the cycle continues

If one grows but the others don’t, then something is off. And there’s a health issue that needs to be addressed.

Because discipleship isn’t a single metric. It’s a movement.

This is far from a “butts in seats” issue. It’s a discipleship issue. You can grow attendance and still be shallow. You can maintain membership and still be stagnant.

But when you make disciples? Everything else begins to move.

What Needs to Change

  • Track engagement, not just attendance
  • Measure serving and participation, not just presence
  • Celebrate life change, not just numbers
  • Ask regularly: Are we actually making disciples?

Because that’s the one thing Jesus explicitly told His Church to do. It’s about making disciples, not assembling crowds for an hour on a Sunday.

Let’s Wrap This Up

If we’re going to take stewardship seriously, then we have to align:

  • Our resources with mission
  • Our structures with reality
  • Our metrics with discipleship

This isn’t about tweaking the system. It’s about re-centering the mission.

And that’s going to take:

  • Broader thinking
  • Braver decisions
  • And a willingness to let go of what no longer serves the Gospel

Not because we don’t care about the Church, but because we care too much to lose what’s most important.

He Just Wants Your Lunch

May 4, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I have a confession. I used to throw breadcrumbs at the altar.

Not metaphorically, literally. During my vicarage, I was assigned a stewardship sermon and I showed up with a baguette, broke off pieces representing every budget line in a family’s life. By the end I had a pile of crumbs. And I threw them at the altar table to make the point. The altar guild nearly staged a walkout.

The point I was trying to make, maybe in a questionable way, was the same point John 6 makes infinitely better. We give Jesus the crumbs and act surprised when he does something miraculous with them.

The Setup Nobody Talks About

To understand John 6, you have to read Mark 6 first. Because John doesn’t give you the backstory. He just drops you into the miracle. Mark tells you what came right before it.

Three things happened to Jesus immediately before he fed 10,000 people on a hillside:

He was rejected in his hometown. The people who watched him grow up couldn’t reconcile the carpenter’s son with the one doing miracles. A prophet without honor.

He sent his disciples out with nothing. No bag. No money. No food. Total dependence. They came back probably more confused than when they left.

His cousin and dear friend was beheaded. John the Baptist was murdered for standing up for what was right. And Jesus was grieving.

He was running on empty. And then approximately 10,000 hungry people showed up.

Why John Mentions the Passover

John inserts what looks like a throwaway line: “the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand.” But that’s not a throwaway. John never wastes words.

He’s pointing us back to the original scarcity moment. Israel in Egypt, oppressed and underfed, never quite enough. And then the shift to the wilderness, where they asked out loud: can God set a table in the desert?

The answer then was manna. Bread from heaven. The answer on that hillside was 10,000 fed with a kid’s lunch. The answer for you today is similar.

John is threading the needle from Exodus to this hillside to right now. Every scarcity moment in the story of God’s people has the same resolution. He provides, and he provides in excess.

The Lunch Nobody Wanted to Give

Philip ran the math. A year’s wages couldn’t cover this crowd. The disciples went looking for food among 10,000 people and came back with a little boy’s lunch.

Barley loaves were the bread of the poor. Bait fish. Not the fish you eat, the fish you use to catch the fish you eat. The absolute bottom of the food chain.

And Jesus said: thank you, Father. This is so much.

I’ve been thinking about that response all week. He received the most insufficient offering imaginable and his first instinct was gratitude. Not calculation. Not problem-solving. Gratitude. Because he already knew what he was going to do with it.

The Widow’s Mite and the Boy’s Lunch

Jesus has a consistent pattern in Scripture. He watches what everyone else dismisses as insufficient and calls it more than enough.

The widow drops one small coin in the treasury. The crowd drops bags that clang. Jesus tells his disciples she gave more than all of them because she gave everything she had.

The little boy hands over five loaves and two fish. The disciples are embarrassed to even present it. But Jesus uses it and is able to feed a city.

Jesus can do immensely more with a faithfully given crumb than he can with a hoarded chunk of bread.

Why 12 Baskets?

When everyone had eaten their fill, Jesus said: gather up the fragments so nothing is lost. And they were able to fill 12 baskets.

John is precise with that number because details matter to him. Twelve tribes. Twelve apostles. Twelve foundations under the New Jerusalem. Twelve gates. The 144,000 – twelve times twelve times a thousand – representing all of God’s people across all time.

Twelve baskets isn’t a headcount. It’s a declaration. God provides for all his people, in every generation, beyond the moment that needed it, with enough left over to take home and give away.

What’s Your Lunch?

We all have one. Something we’re holding in our hands that we’ve already decided is not enough. Not enough talent, not enough money, not enough time, not enough faith, not enough whatever it is you feel most deficient in today.

The miracle of John 6 isn’t really about bread. It’s about what happens when you hand over the not-enough and let Jesus be the one who does the math.

Jesus doesn’t need your abundance. He just wants your lunch.

So what are you holding back?

What’s the lunch in your life right now. You know, that thing you’re holding back because you’ve already decided it’s not enough?

26 Years In… and Still Under the Hood

May 1, 2026 / / 0 Comments

After five trips to the auto parts store to fix the front end of my 1986 truck, my wife asked me if this was going to be a money pit. The honest answer was: I’m not 100% sure, but these little things are what make the truck run like it should. None of the repairs were urgent. But with each adjustment, it ran smoother. Started easier. Felt safer going down the road.

That conversation got me thinking about marriage.

I’ve done a lot of pre-marriage work lately, helping couples prepare for their big day. The one thing I keep saying in those meetings is that marriage is a lifelong commitment, not a one-and-done event. It takes little adjustments, day in and day out, to keep the relationship growing. To feel what’s smoothing out. To hear the knock before it becomes a problem.

From my seat in life, we’re twenty-six years in and still under the hood. Not because something is constantly wrong. But because something is always being worked on.

If you’ve ever owned a project vehicle, you know the deal. You don’t “finish” it. You don’t reach a point where you say, “Excellent, that’s done forever.” You drive it, you listen to it, you pay attention and eventually you’re back under the hood. Because something always needs a little tightening, a little adjusting, a little more attention.

Marriage works the same way.

The myth nobody says out loud

We all assume there’s a point where marriage just settles. You find your stride, you coast for a season, but if you’re honest, you can’t stay there long before something needs a closer look.

You won’t get to a place where the communication is perfect all the time. Where the rhythms are locked in and unchangeable. Where the friction is gone for good. Like you finally fixed the last thing.

But that day doesn’t come. Not because your marriage is broken because it’s alive. And living things grow and change and need attention.

Every season reveals something new

There were years when the issue was time. One year you’re running your teenager to the high school ultimate frisbee match while your spouse is picking up your youngest from daycare, someone has to get home before the package gets stolen off the porch, and nobody has any idea what’s for dinner or whether anything was even set out to thaw. That was our marriage for a season. Loud, fast, and always one step behind.

Then life shifts. The kids get older. The schedule changes shape. And what once was a time problem becomes something else – maybe stress, or expectations, or a subtle drift in direction you didn’t notice until it had been going on for a while.

Same marriage. Different layer. New chapter.

It’s like fixing the starter on the truck only to find the alternator’s tired too. Not failure. Just the next thing.

Staying under the hood is the point

Early on, it feels like something is wrong when you have to keep working on your marriage. Later on, you realize: that is the marriage.

It’s the conversations you didn’t feel like having. The small adjustments no one else sees. Choosing to lean in when it would be easier to coast.

My wife is great at hearing a tone in my voice that I didn’t even know was there. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when she needs a moment, just some quiet time, no agenda, no conversation. These aren’t dramatic moments. Nobody’s posting about them. But this is where the strength comes from. Quiet, consistent, ongoing attention.

After enough years, you start catching things earlier. You sense the tension building before it becomes an argument. You notice the subtle disconnect before it has time to widen. And instead of waiting, you pop the hood sooner. Not with panic. Not with blame. Just with awareness.

Something as simple as: Hey something feels a little off. Let’s take a look.

26 years in

My brother once asked how we have such a strong marriage. My honest answer at the time was that I didn’t really know we did. But the longer this marriage runs down the road, the clearer it gets.

The strength isn’t how much power you have at the starting line. It’s how much attention you give it as you go.

We still tackle home projects together. We’re still showing up, still learning, still adjusting, still choosing each other. Still under the hood, not because it’s broken, but because that’s what a living marriage looks like.

And honestly?

That’s how you know it’s running.

The Slow Fade Can Wait

April 30, 2026 / / 0 Comments
Landscape pic of a job complete.

Something about turning 50 makes people start talking to you like you just got drafted into the final quarter of life. They don’t say it that bluntly, of course. It’s softer than that. It’s wrapped in concern and casual comments that all seem to point in the same direction. “Make sure you’re taking it easy now.” “You’ll start to feel it.” “Things change at this stage.” The world quietly hands you a script and expects you to start reading from it: welcome to the slow fade. I just don’t buy it.

The other day, that whole narrative just didn’t hold up.

I got up at 4:30am. Not because I had to get up, not because my body forced me to, but because that’s what I do. Coffee, quiet, into the day. I put in a solid ten hours of work – meetings, conversations, decisions, the normal rhythm of life and ministry. Nothing flashy, just steady, focused work.

Then I came home, and six yards of mulch were sitting in the driveway like a dare.

You know that moment. You can walk past it, tell yourself you’ll get to it later, maybe this weekend, maybe when you have more time. Or you can just go. So I went. Quick change. Clark Kent to, ok let’s be honest not Superman, but at least a version of me willing to get after it. So I grabbed the tools and went to work.

I edged every bed around the house, around the trees that somehow seem to multiply every year. Then it was load after load of triple shredded goodness. Dump, spread, smooth it out, repeat. Six yards is a lot until you decide it isn’t. By the time it was done, everything looked the way it should. Clean lines, fresh edges, mulch laid down smooth enough to make you stop for a second and just take it in.

I cleaned up, put everything away and realized it was still light outside.

Which meant there was still time.

So I grabbed the mower and went back at it. Back and forth across the yard, cutting clean lines, weaving around trees, edging the driveway, laying down those diagonal stripes that don’t actually matter to anyone but me. There’s something about finishing a job all the way. Not halfway, not good enough, but all the way through.

By the time I wrapped up, I took the dog for a quick run down to the end of the road to burn off whatever energy she had left, and if I’m being honest, whatever I had left in the tank as well. When I finally slowed down to walk back up the driveway, the thought hit me: so this is what slowing down is supposed to feel like?

Because if that’s the case, I think I’m doing just fine.

I’m not pretending time doesn’t move forward. It does. I feel it in ways I didn’t at 25. And I’m not interested in being reckless or trying to prove something. But I am interested in not surrendering early. I’m not interested in handing over ground I was never actually forced to give up. I’m not interested in letting someone else’s ceiling quietly become my own.

So yeah, 50 is here. And if this is the final quarter, I’m not jogging out the clock.

I’ll get up early, work hard, take care of what’s in front of me, and push when it would be easier not to. I’ll finish what I start. Heck I might even finish what someone else starts.

I’ll add the stripes to the lawn even when nobody’s asking for them.

Stewardship Means Structure: 3 Moves We Can Make Right Now

April 29, 2026 / / 1 Comment

If we’re serious about moving from calling out the problem to actually changing the trajectory, then we need to get practical.

Not someday.
Not when things get worse.
Now.

In the last post, I outlined six pathways forward. Let’s take the first three and press into what they actually look like on the ground because if we don’t define them, they’ll stay ideas instead of action.

1. Deploy Real Transition Teams (Not Just Advice. Actual Help)

Right now, when a church starts to struggle, the “support system” often looks like this:

  • A meeting or two
  • Some general encouragement
  • Maybe a suggestion or two

And then… they’re largely on their own.

That’s not enough.

What a Transition Team Could Actually Look Like

Imagine instead a designated transition team that walks with a congregation for a defined season (6-18 months for starters). This team would be made up of:

  • A seasoned pastor with revitalization or merger experience
  • A trained lay leader (governance, finance, or organizational leadership)
  • A district representative who knows available resources and processes
  • A facilitator/coach who can lead hard conversations without emotional entanglement

This isn’t a task force that decides things. It’s a team that guides, clarifies, and moves the process forward.

What They Would Do

  • Conduct a real assessment of congregational health (not just attendance numbers)
  • Lead structured conversations with leadership and members
  • Lay out clear pathways: revitalization, partnership, merger, or closure
  • Help create a timeline with actual next steps
  • Keep the mission front and center when emotions run high

The Reality We’re Ignoring

We already have people who could do this. Within the district and synod structure, there are:

  • Circuit visitors
  • District presidents and vice presidents
  • Mission and ministry staff
  • Experienced pastors who have navigated these waters before

The issue isn’t a lack of people. It’s a lack of intentional deployment.

What if instead of waiting for churches to hit crisis mode these teams were proactively assigned when early warning signs appeared?

That’s not control. That’s care.

2. Normalize and Resource Church-to-Church Partnerships

This one is HUGE.

And honestly, it exposes something deeper in us. Because the resistance here isn’t logistical. It’s personal.

We like “our church.”
Our programs.
Our people.
Our traditions.

But the mission has never been about ours. Jesus even said he came to seek and to save the lost – disconnected – not here yet ones.

The Current Reality

In the same community, you’ll often find:

  • Multiple churches running under-resourced ministries
  • Multiple VBS programs competing for the same handful of kids
  • Multiple part-time staff stretched thin
  • Multiple congregations quietly declining separately

And we call that independence. But it’s often just inefficiency.

What Partnership Could Actually Look Like

  • Shared staffing
    • One pastor across multiple congregations
    • Shared Directors of Christian Education or Family Life
    • Joint outreach coordinators
  • Shared ministry efforts
    • One strong, community-wide VBS instead of five struggling ones
    • Combined youth groups
    • Joint outreach events that actually reach critical mass
  • Adoptive relationships
    • A healthier church helping lead and support a smaller one
    • Multi-site or campus models where it makes sense

Let’s Be Blunt

There is no Kingdom reason for five churches in one town to each run a half-effective ministry when together they could create something far stronger.

Sometimes our desire to “have our piece” of ministry is less about mission and more about control.

But if the Gospel is the goal, then collaboration isn’t optional. It’s essential.

What Needs to Change

We don’t just need permission for partnership.

We need active encouragement and resourcing:

  • Clear frameworks for how to share staff legally and financially
  • Templates for partnership agreements
  • Coaching for leaders navigating shared ministry
  • Stories that normalize this as wise, not desperate

Because right now, too many churches think partnership means failure. In reality, it might be the most faithful step forward.

3. Build a Best Practices Playbook for Hard Conversations

Look. I get it. Most churches don’t avoid hard decisions because they don’t care. They avoid them because they don’t know how to navigate them.

So they stall.
Or they argue.
Or they pretend things are fine.

The Questions We’re Avoiding

  • When is it time to seriously consider merging or even closing?
  • What does faithfulness look like in decline?
  • How do we honor the past without being held hostage by it?
  • Who actually gets to make these decisions and how?
  • What happens to the building, the money, the legacy?

These are heavy questions. And without guidance, they can feel overwhelming.

What a Playbook Could and Maybe Should Include

First, it is not a theological essay. It should be a practical, step-by-step guide:

1. Discernment Phase

  • Key indicators that change is necessary
  • Assessment tools (attendance across more than just worship, ministry engagement, financial health, community reach)
  • Questions every leadership team must wrestle with

2. Conversation Phase

  • How to structure congregational meetings
  • How to handle conflict and emotional responses
  • How to communicate clearly without causing panic

3. Decision Pathways

  • What revitalization actually requires
  • What partnership looks like in practice
  • What a healthy merger process entails
  • What faithful closure looks like (yes, that too)

4. Practical Logistics

  • Legal and constitutional considerations
  • Financial processes
  • Property decisions
  • Denominational procedures

5. Pastoral Care

  • Caring for members through grief and change
  • Honoring the legacy of a congregation
  • Keeping the Gospel central through every step

Why This Matters

Right now, every church feels like they’re reinventing the wheel. They don’t have to. We already have the experience. We already have the stories. We just haven’t organized them into something usable.

And until we do, churches will keep defaulting to inaction because inaction feels safer than the unknown.

Final Thought

None of this requires a theological shift. Our very theological identity and synodical polity actually allow and even was built for this! It just requires a structural and cultural shift.

  • Deploy people we already have
  • Work together instead of apart (anyone know what synod actually means)
  • Equip churches to face reality with clarity and courage

This is what stewardship looks like.

Not just naming the problem. But building pathways forward that churches can actually walk.

Next week, we’ll tackle the final three:

  • Activating synod and district resources more effectively
  • Funding strategy instead of survival
  • And telling better stories that redefine what success really looks like

I firmly believe we’re not done. Not even close!

A Few Weeks After Easter

April 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Grab that cup of coffee or whatever beverage suits you this time of day. I want to talk about something that doesn’t get said out loud very often in ministry circles, but probably should.

Before we dig in too deeply here this one is a shout out to my ministry friends. I’ve been there. I know the feeling. While my ministry now isn’t this way, it wasn’t too long ago that I had to listen to my own advice – which is why I’m sharing this with you today.

Easter Sunday is one of the best days of the year to be in ministry. Busy but the best kind of busy!

The room is full. Not just full, but full-full. Cars wrapping around the lot. Extra chairs in the aisles. Don’t tell the fire inspector. Familiar faces you haven’t seen in months sitting next to guests you’ve never met. The music is faster, a little louder, and the singing…wow the singing is on point. There’s this moment, usually somewhere in the opening hymn, where you can actually feel it. The room comes alive. It seems like everyone brought someone. Everyone is leaning in. And you’re standing up front thinking, now this is why I do this.

I’ve had those mornings. They’re real, and they’re genuinely good.

And then two or three weeks pass.

The lot has open spots again. The second row is half empty. The singing is…well, it’s fine. It’s your people. But it’s noticeably quieter than it was. The energy that felt almost electric three weeks ago has settled back into something more familiar, more ordinary. Normal.

Nobody warns you about the whiplash. This is not taught in any seminary class that I took.

I’m not talking about the numbers. I mean the feeling. The emotional and spiritual disorientation that comes from going, in the span of a few weeks, from the highest-energy Sunday of the year to what feels like the congregation just sort of… exhaled. Ministry leaders don’t always have language for it. It doesn’t feel like grief exactly, but it’s in that neighborhood. It doesn’t feel like discouragement exactly, but it can get there fast if you’re not careful.

Here’s what makes it harder: you can’t really talk about it. I mean seriously you can’t stand up on a Sunday in May and say “Hey, it felt way better in here three weeks ago.” You can’t let your team see you struggling with it because the room that’s in front of you is full of real people with real lives, and they need you present, not pining for a different version of the room. So you tuck it away. You preach as well as you can. You shake hands at the door. And somewhere underneath all of that, you’re quietly wrestling with something you can’t quite name.

I want to name it. Because I think a lot of ministry leaders carry this alone, and they don’t need to.

A few things that have helped me:

Remember what Easter actually measures. Easter attendance is a snapshot of curiosity and relationship, not a ceiling or a floor. The people who came because a family member invited them…that’s not nothing. That’s a door cracking open. The question isn’t why didn’t they come back, it’s what are we doing the other 51 Sundays that makes it worth coming back to? Easter doesn’t set the ceiling. It shows you what’s possible.

Name the thing to yourself. You don’t have to perform resilience. If the drop hits you then let it hit you, name it for what it is, and don’t spiritualize it into something it’s not. The emotional weight of caring deeply about a room full of people in need of the good news of Jesus is not a weakness. It’s actually evidence that you’re the right person for the job.

Anchor to the people in the room. One of the disciplines I keep coming back to is to stop looking at what’s missing and look at who’s there. There are people in your congregation on a random Sunday in May who are holding things together by a thread. They’re navigating rocky marriages, diagnoses, doubts and they showed up anyway. That room is not a consolation prize. It’s a gift.

Stay connected to your why, not your how many. The “how many” will fluctuate for your entire ministry. It always has. It always will. The leaders who make it to the long end of this work are almost always the ones who found something deeper than merely attendance metrics to stand on. Not because numbers don’t matter, because they do, but because numbers alone will eat you alive if you let them.

This one’s for the leaders who had a great Easter and then felt strangely quiet about it two weeks later. You’re not alone in that. And the ordinary Sunday in front of you? It matters more than it feels like it does right now. I think Mordecai’s words to Esther belong to all of us who get caught up in last week instead of loving the people in front of us this week. You were placed here for such a time as this.

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