Category: Catalyst (Page 1 of 35)

A catalyst is one that sparks something. The catalyst speaks from experience and enables others to move forward more freely. These articles are written to act as a catalyst in your life.

The Chaplaincy Trap

June 3, 2026 / / 0 Comments


The Outward Turn  ·  Part One

If your church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside your congregation know it was gone?

Sit with that question for a moment before you answer it.

Not the people on your roster. Not the families who would miss Sunday morning. Not the pastor whose livelihood depends on the doors staying open. I mean the neighbors. The apartment complex two blocks away. The single mom who drives past your building every morning on her way to work. The young couple who moved into the neighborhood last year and has no idea your church exists. The business owner on the corner whose employees walk past your parking lot every day.

Would any of them notice?

For most congregations in America, and I say this not to wound but to wake, the honest answer is no. And that’s not a condemnation of the people in those churches. Most of them are good, faithful, loving people who genuinely believe in what they’re doing. But somewhere along the way, without a single dramatic decision, without anyone choosing it on purpose, the church turned inward. And it stayed there.

That’s the chaplaincy trap. And it’s far more common, far more subtle, and far more dangerous than most church leaders are willing to admit.

How It Happens: Comfort to Competency to Identity

Nobody decides to become a chaplaincy church. It doesn’t show up on a vision statement. No board votes to stop caring about the community outside their walls. It happens incrementally, organically, almost invisibly. And it follows a remarkably consistent pattern.

It starts with comfort. A congregation naturally gravitates toward the things its people enjoy, the programs that feel meaningful, the worship style that resonates, the community events that draw a crowd from within. That’s not inherently wrong. A church should be a place where people are genuinely nourished.

But comfort, left unchecked, slides into competency. We get good at the things we do repeatedly. The choir sounds great. The Sunday school runs smoothly. The potluck is legendary. The small groups are warm and connected. These are genuine goods. But they’re all goods that serve the people already in the room.

And then, and this is the critical moment, that competency hardens into identity. What we do becomes who we are. The choir isn’t just a ministry anymore; it’s the soul of this congregation. The Sunday school isn’t just a program; it’s our heritage. And at that point, any suggestion of change doesn’t feel like a strategic conversation. It feels like an existential threat.

The drift is complete. The church now exists, functionally, to sustain itself. The budget reflects it. The calendar reflects it. The staff structure reflects it. And the community outside the walls? They have no idea the church is there because the church has no idea they exist either.

The chaplaincy trap isn’t about bad people. It’s about good people who stopped asking the most important question: who are we here for?

What It Looks Like in Practice

Pull out your church’s budget from last year. Not the vision statement on the wall the actual budget, where the actual dollars went. Ask yourself one question as you read through it:

How much of this spending is oriented toward people who are not yet in this room?

In most congregations, the honest answer is somewhere between five and fifteen percent. Everything else – staff, facilities, programs, insurance, utilities, equipment – serves the people already gathered. That’s not automatically wrong. But if nearly every dollar is pointed inward, the budget is telling you something the vision statement is not.

Now look at the calendar. Count the events from the last twelve months. Sort them into two columns: events designed primarily for the congregation, and events designed primarily to reach, serve, or welcome people who aren’t part of your church. In most congregations, the second column is nearly empty or at best populated with things like a trunk-or-treat that technically invites the community but is really designed to make insiders feel like they’re doing outreach.

Now look at your staff or volunteer leadership structure. Who has a defined role oriented specifically toward people outside the walls.  Not just hospitality to Sunday morning visitors, but intentional, sustained engagement with the surrounding community? For most churches, the answer is no one.

Budget. Calendar. Staff. These three things tell you more about a church’s actual priorities than any vision statement ever written. And in a chaplaincy church, all three point the same direction: inward.

The Theological Problem Underneath the Practical One

Here’s where I need to say something that goes beyond strategy and budgets, because the chaplaincy trap is not just a leadership failure. It is a theological one.

The church was not gathered by Christ in order to maintain itself. It was gathered in order to be sent. The Great Commission is not an addendum to the Christian life. It is its central organizing principle. The verb “go” is the first word of the gospel commission. Not “gather.” Not “sustain.” Go.

When a congregation loses its outward orientation, it doesn’t just become less effective. It becomes something subtly different from what Jesus intended the church to be. A community that exists primarily to serve its own members is a club, not a church. No matter how sincerely it worships, how soundly it preaches, how warmly it fellowships.

The Apostle Paul’s image of the body in 1 Corinthians 12 is instructive here. Every part exists for the sake of the whole. And the whole exists for the sake of the world. A body that turns all its energy inward, that consumes its own resources on its own comfort, is not healthy. It is ill. And the illness, if untreated, is fatal.

A body that consumes all its energy on its own comfort isn’t thriving. It’s sick. And a congregation that exists primarily for itself has quietly traded the Great Commission for a much smaller story.

The Way Out Is Not a Program. It’s a Posture.

If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of recognition. If some part of you is thinking yes, this is us, and I don’t know how we got here…I want to offer something more useful than guilt.

The way out of the chaplaincy trap is not a new outreach program. It’s not a rebranding effort, a new series, or a community event. Those things can be useful, but they treat the symptom rather than the disease. What actually changes a chaplaincy church is a shift in posture. It’s a fundamental reorientation of how the congregation understands its own existence.

That shift starts not with programs but with proximity. It starts with leaders. No, not just pastors, but elders, deacons, ministry chairs, and committed lay people. It’s leaders choosing to spend intentional time in the community they say they want to reach. Not with an agenda. Not with a tract. Just present. Learning names. Understanding needs. Asking questions instead of offering answers.

It starts with a budget conversation that asks not just “what do we need to sustain our ministries” but “what would we need to fund if we were serious about the people outside this building?” That conversation will be uncomfortable. It should be.

It starts with a calendar that has white space on it. Space not filled with another congregational event, but held open for something that doesn’t exist yet. New ministry rarely gets started because there’s a perfect opportunity. It gets started because someone decided to make room for it before they knew what it would become.

And it starts with the question we opened with. Asked not once, but regularly. Asked in board meetings. Asked in budget reviews. Asked in staff conversations and small group discussions.

If we ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside this room know we were gone?

If the answer is no, or even maybe, that’s not a verdict. It’s your invitation.

Leader Assessment

These questions are designed to be answered in two stages. Sit with the personal questions alone first. Honest self-assessment is the foundation of honest leadership.

Sit With These Alone First

When was the last time I had a meaningful conversation with someone in my community who has no connection to my church – not to recruit them, but simply to know them?

If I’m honest, do I spend more of my leadership energy sustaining what exists or creating space for what doesn’t yet exist?

What would I have to give up personally to lead the church toward a more outward posture? Am I willing to pay that cost?

Bring These to Your Leadership

Pull out last year’s budget and calendar. What percentage of our spending and programming was oriented toward people not yet in this congregation? What does that number tell us?

Ask the question plainly: If our church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone outside this congregation notice? What would need to change for the answer to become an unambiguous yes?

Name one specific neighborhood, demographic, or community within two miles of this building that has no meaningful connection to our church. What would it cost us in time, money, and energy to begin building one?

Next in this series: the case for merging, consolidating, and going multisite not as institutional strategy, but as the most faithful thing a dying congregation and a growing one can do for each other.

The Institution Is Not the Church

May 26, 2026 / / 1 Comment

A hard reckoning about numbers, urban deserts, and what it means when a denomination forgets the difference between preserving a structure and advancing a kingdom.

Last week I wrote about the sale of Concordia Ann Arbor and I asked a hard question about what it reveals when a denomination puts a price tag on a Gospel witness in a growing region. The response was significant. More than I expected, honestly. And that reaction itself told me something.

People are not just grieving a university. They are grieving something larger. Something they can feel but struggle to name. The sense that the institution they love is slowly becoming something other than what it was built to be. That the people in charge of it are speaking a language of stewardship and discernment that no longer quite corresponds to the language of the Great Commission.

So let’s go deeper. And let’s be honest about what the numbers actually say.

The Numbers Don’t Lie. They Just Get Ignored.

The LCMS peaked in membership in 1971 at roughly 2.88 million baptized members. As of 2024, that number stands near 1.7 million. That is a loss of over a million people. More than a third of the body in just fifty years.

But the membership number understates the problem. Weekly attendance tells a sharper story. Between 2010 and 2020, average weekly worship attendance was declining at roughly 3.35% per year. After COVID, that rate nearly doubled to 7.85% per year between 2020 and 2023. If you do your own math on this one, you can see this could potentially yield just 50,000 average weekly worshippers sometime between 2070 and 2080. At that point, the denomination will have ceased to function in any meaningful institutional sense for a long time already.

Just let that sink in for a moment. Not as a cause for despair but as a cause for honesty.

And here’s the number that should stop us cold: 45% of LCMS congregations now have average weekly attendance under 50 people. Nearly half of our churches are gatherings smaller than a high school classroom. These are not thriving mission outposts. Most of them are in managed decline, serving aging congregations, waiting on a future that isn’t coming on its own.

Meanwhile, in the Ohio District where I currently serve, baptized membership has declined from roughly 70,000 (back in the day) to approximately 54,576. That’s a loss of more than 20% even as Ohio’s population has grown and shifted toward urban and suburban centers where LCMS presence ranges from thin to invisible.

We are closing more churches than we are opening. And the churches we are opening are largely in communities that already have Lutheran options. The urban core, the very places Jesus walked into, we have largely left.

The Urban Desert in Our Own Backyard

Drive through Columbus. Drive through Cleveland. Drive through Cincinnati. Look at Detroit or pretty much any other inner city option. Then pull up the LCMS church locator and tell me what you see.

You will find Lutheran churches in the suburbs. In the exurbs. In the small towns where German immigrants settled a century ago and their grandchildren’s grandchildren are aging out of the pews. You will find Lutheran schools serving mostly families who are already Lutheran. You will find sturdy, committed congregations doing their best with what they have.

What you will not find, or rarely find, is an intentional, well-resourced, mission-focused LCMS presence in the neighborhoods where the city is actually alive. Where young people are moving. Where immigrants are building new communities. Where the spiritual hunger is real and the Gospel infrastructure is nearly absent.

The Ohio District has approximately 154 congregations, down from roughly 170 just a few years ago. The state of Ohio has 11.8 million people. The math on Gospel presence per capita is not inspiring and it gets worse when you factor in that most of those 154 congregations are not positioned anywhere near the population density that is growing.

The Ohio District’s own website has a dedicated page for church closure information. That page exists because it gets used. Regularly. Four to five closures a year in some districts. Friends that’s not an anomaly, it’s a pattern. That’s a denomination managing retreat, not advancing mission.

We Are Not the First to Face This. But We Might Be the Last to Admit It.

I want to be fair here. The trends hitting the LCMS are not unique to us. Across all Protestant denominations in America, more churches are closing than opening. Weekly church attendance in the U.S. has dropped from 42% of Americans to 30% in recent decades. The secular tide is real. Demographics are real. The cultural headwinds against institutional Christianity are real.

But “everyone is struggling” is not a strategy. It is a sedative.

The question is not whether the environment is hard. It obviously is. The question is whether our response to that environment reflects the mission we were given, or whether it reflects the priorities of an institution trying to survive on its own terms.

And here is where I have to say something uncomfortable.

When a denomination is simultaneously closing schools and churches at an accelerating rate, losing a third of its members over fifty years, watching its urban footprint evaporate, and spending significant resources on legal battles with its own universities, internal governance restructuring, and asset liquidation and the primary public narrative from leadership is about “faithful stewardship” and “prayerful discernment” something is wrong. Not with the people in the pews. Not necessarily even with the pastors in the pulpits. But with the institutional priorities of those who are steering the ship.

You cannot tell me an institution is healthy when it has a dedicated committee to help churches close, a declining count of congregations year over year, and growing urban regions with nearly no intentional Gospel presence. That is not stewardship. That is hospice.

Jesus Is Lord of the Church. That Is Not the Same as “Jesus Will Save Our Institution.”

Here is the theological core of all of this, and I want to say it carefully. The point is not to be provocative. This is true and important and pastors need to say it out loud.

Jesus Christ is Lord of the Church. The Body of Christ, you know the living, breathing, Spirit-indwelt community of believers across every nation and tribe and tongue is indestructible. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. Christ promised. And Christ keeps his promises.

But…He did not promise to preserve the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod.

He did not promise to preserve any institution, any denomination, any particular governance structure, any set of buildings, or any administrative apparatus. History is littered with denominations that once thrived and now are footnotes. The Church of Jesus Christ absorbed them and moved on. It will do the same with ours if we are not careful.

And here is the danger: when we confuse the institution with the Church, we start to make decisions that serve the institution at the expense of the mission. We consolidate campuses not to serve the Gospel but to service debt. We close urban congregations not because the mission is finished but because the building costs too much and the congregation is too small to sustain the budget. We fight legal battles over institutional control while the neighborhoods outside our offices grow more desperate for the one thing we are supposedly in business to give away.

Institutional idolatry doesn’t look like bowing to a golden calf. It looks like choosing institutional survival over missional risk. It looks like protecting assets instead of planting flags. It looks like a denomination so focused on what it is that it forgets what it is for.

What Faithful Stewardship Actually Looks Like

I am not calling for abandoning structure. Confessional Lutheranism has a theology, a liturgy, and a polity worth preserving. Order matters. Doctrine matters. The confessions matter. I believe this deeply.

But stewardship of a confessional tradition is not the same as institutionalism. True stewardship asks: what does this tradition have to give to the world? And where does the world most need what we have?

The answer to that second question is not “in the same suburbs where we’ve always been.” It is in the cities. In the neighborhoods where the Gospel is most absent. It is among the immigrants, the young adults, the working poor, the spiritually hungry people who would never walk into a Lutheran church because they have no idea what Lutheran means and no one has ever come to find them.

Luther himself was a reformer. That means he was someone who looked at a church that had become fat on its own structures and said: this is not what the Gospel requires. His courage was not primarily institutional. It was theological. It was missional. He nailed something to a door and trusted God with the outcome.

We need some of that energy right now. Not recklessness. Not the abandonment of what is true and good. But the willingness to say: if the structure is not serving the mission, the structure needs to change. Even if changing it is costly, even if it upsets people, even if it requires admitting we have been protecting the wrong things.

The Questions That Deserve a Public Answer

I will close with this. I am a pastor in the LCMS. I love this church body. I believe in Lutheran theology. I am raising families in these pews. I am baptizing people, preaching the Word, and building the kind of community I believe the Scriptures describe.

I want the institution I serve to be worthy of the mission I have been given. And right now, I need answers to some questions that are not being asked loudly enough:

What is our concrete, measurable plan for urban mission in the LCMS over the next ten years?

How many new church plants have we started in the last five years, and how does that compare to closures in the same period?

Where is the money from liquidated assets going? Is any of it being deployed into high-need, low-presence mission fields?

When we talk about “faithful stewardship,” are we measuring faithfulness by the mission of Christ, or by the solvency of the institution?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions a church body that takes its mandate seriously should be asking in public, with transparency, and with the humility to admit that the current trajectory is not good enough.

Jesus is Lord of the Church. That means he is not impressed by our organizational charts, our endowment balances, or our carefully worded governance resolutions. He is looking for people who will go. Who will cross the street. Who will plant a church in a neighborhood where no one asked for one. Who will spend the inheritance, not bury it.

The institution does not need to be preserved. The mission needs to be pursued. Those two things are not always the same, and right now, in the LCMS, I’m not sure we know the difference.

God help us to learn it before it’s too late to matter.

$60 Million and a Gutted Beacon: What the Sale of Concordia Ann Arbor Really Tells Us

May 19, 2026 / / 15 Comments

The grief is real. But the question underneath the grief is more important.

I’ve been watching the reaction to the sale of Concordia University Ann Arbor this week. The alumni posts, the lament threads, the old yearbook photos dusted off and shared one more time. For some the grief is real. Alma maters matter. The place where your faith was sharpened, where you met your spouse, where a professor looked you in the eye and said “you can do this.” That place is sacred ground in a way that defies a spreadsheet.

But I need to say something plainly, even if it’s uncomfortable:

The loss of a memory is not the issue. The loss of a mission is.

And if we stop at the nostalgia, if we cry our tears and then move on, we will have missed the harder and more essential question. And since I’ve never been one to avoid a hard question, let’s go there.

Ten Became Six. Six Became Five. What’s Next?

The Concordia University System was founded in 1992 with ten institutions. That number was itself the product of a century of church investment. These were academies built to train pastors, school teachers, deaconesses, church workers. Brick by brick, generation by generation, the LCMS built a network of places where Lutheran young people could be shaped for a life of faithful service.

Then the erosion began.

Concordia College Alabama was closed in 2018. A historically Black Lutheran college, the only one of its kind. Gone. Voices silenced as if nothing ever happened.

Concordia University Portland was then closed in 2020. Faculty and staff displaced. Five thousand students scattered. A second-largest teacher preparation program in the state of Oregon was extinguished in seconds.

Concordia College New York closed in 2021. Its campus sold to Iona College.

Concordia University Ann Arbor was absorbed into Wisconsin in 2013. Its historic Geddes Road campus of 140 acres on the Huron River in one of Michigan’s fastest-growing university corridors has since been sold to the University of Michigan this month for $60 million.

And Concordia University Texas, which tried to govern itself independently and found itself in a protracted legal battle with the Synod for the privilege. Now no longer part of the LCMS Concordia University System.

Ten institutions. Now, generously, five with full standing. And a denomination in a courtroom fight with one of its own universities.

Someone explain to me how this is a picture of flourishing.

We didn’t lose a campus. We lost a post. And the question no one wants to answer is: who gave the order to abandon it?

The Official Story and the Smell Test

The official explanation from Concordia University Wisconsin and Ann Arbor is tidy. Years of operating losses. Extended careful analysis. Prayerful discernment. Consultation with the Board of Regents. A decision to steward resources faithfully.

Those phrases are true enough, as far as they go. Small private colleges are under enormous pressure across the country. Enrollment declines, tuition dependency, bloated administrative costs. These are real structural problems in higher education, not merely invented ones.

But here’s what doesn’t add up.

When Concordia Ann Arbor’s story began to unravel in early 2024, the new university president announced the campus needed to be “reimagined.” Eleven of eighteen board members were brand new at the time. Some hadn’t even received their board orientation yet when this announcement was made. Board members who reportedly felt the financial story was being shaped to justify a predetermined conclusion. One insider described it plainly: “I think they thought they could sell CUAA to make Concordia, Wisconsin all the more viable and then were trying to weasel to tell the financial story, to make it seem like our hands are tied.”

Hands are never fully tied. Hands are positioned. And the position here looks less like stewardship and more like consolidation.

The question worth asking: was this campus sold because it was unsustainable, or was it sold because it was inconvenient to a larger plan to concentrate resources, reduce complexity, and centralize institutional power within the Synod’s preferred structures?

I don’t have a smoking gun. But I have a pattern.

The Pattern Is the Problem

Alabama. Portland. New York. Ann Arbor. Each one announced with careful language about financial realities. Each one mourned and then absorbed into the institutional memory of the Synod. Each one a place that had educated pastors, teachers, nurses, social workers, people who went into communities and built churches and taught children and loved their neighbors in the name of Jesus.

And each one: gone.

Meanwhile, the Synod’s gravitational pull has been increasingly toward centralization. A 2021 proposal was made to dissolve the Concordia University System and replace it with a new “Commission on University Education,” a structure that would give synodical leadership more direct oversight of “ecclesiastical functions” at each school. Governance battles. Legal fights. A denomination in a lawsuit with its own university in Texas.

Is anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?

The issue is not just whether individual campuses were financially viable. The issue is what vision is being pursued, and whether that vision was ever put to the church for its discernment, or whether it’s simply being executed from the top while the rest of us are handed press releases about prayerful consideration.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that $60 million from a single campus sale in a growing university corridor, in a region with a young population represents a story where every option was exhausted.

What Is the Vision? Because I Can’t Find It.

Here is what I want someone to answer publicly, clearly, and without the language of corporate discernment:

What is the LCMS’s vision for Lutheran higher education in the United States in 2030?

Is it five campuses? Three? One online platform and a seminary? Because the trajectory we’re on leads somewhere, and I want to know where church leadership believes it leads and whether they believe it’s good. Better yet is it God honoring?

If the vision is to consolidate and strengthen what remains, then fine. Make the case. Argue for it. Show your work. Tell the church what you believe a sustainable, faithful model of Lutheran higher education looks like in a disrupted landscape.

But don’t shut down beacons one by one, collect the assets, and call it stewardship. Don’t let 140 acres on the Huron River, in one of the most university-dense corridors in the Midwest, in a city that is growing, not shrinking go to the University of Michigan for $60 million while telling us there was no other way.

Because I’ll tell you what I see when I look at that sale: I see a growing area. I see a young population. I see a university-saturated culture hungry for an alternative. Looking for a place grounded in something bigger than credentials and career tracks. I see exactly the kind of context where a Lutheran witness should be leaning in, not cashing out.

And I see $60 million which, let’s be honest, is not going to build a new campus or launch a new model of mission. It’s going to service debt and fund operations somewhere else. The kingdom did not just gain $60 million. It lost a post.

The Price Tag on a Baptized Life

There’s something theologically grotesque about putting a dollar value on the loss of a place where young people were baptized into faith communities, formed in Lutheran catechesis, sent out as pastors and teachers and nurses and musicians and parents and neighbors.

I’m not being sentimental. I’m being precise.

The Great Commission is not a metaphor. “Go and make disciples” is not a strategic aspiration. It’s a mandate. And a Lutheran university, however imperfect, however financially stressed, was a mechanism for that mandate. It was a place where the church said to the next generation: we will invest in you, because you matter to the mission.

When we sell that place, not to another mission-minded institution, not to a church partner, but to the University of Michigan and we bank the $60 million and call it responsible stewardship, we have made a choice about what we value. We have revealed something about our priorities.

We have put a price on a beacon of the Gospel in a growing region. And that price was $60 million and a politically worded press release.

Has our leadership lost their way? I don’t know. But I know a leader who has lost their way will never stop to ask the question. That’s on us.

The Hard Question We Cannot Avoid

I want to be careful here, because I am not inside the rooms where these decisions were made. I don’t have access to the debt schedules or the enrollment projections or the full burden of what the board knew. Good people can make difficult calls under real constraints.

But I am a pastor in an LCMS congregation. I preach the Word. I baptize children and adults. I send people out into a world that is desperate for something true and enduring. And I need to be able to tell my congregation with a straight face that the institution we belong to is governed by people who share our priorities.

Right now, I’m not sure I can.

What I want, what I think many faithful LCMS pastors and laypeople want, is not nostalgia. It’s accountability. It’s transparency. It’s a leadership that will stop announcing decisions with pastoral language and start actually pastoring the church through the hard questions.

What is our vision for Lutheran higher education?

What happened to the proceeds from Alabama, Portland, and New York?

Who is asking whether the consolidation trend is a strategy or a slow institutional collapse dressed up as discernment?

And if the answer is that we’re down to five universities and comfortable with that trajectory, then for goodness sake just say so. Own it. Defend it. Let the church weigh in.

Because right now, it feels like the decisions are being made, the assets are being converted, and the rest of us are being handed processed grief and told to feel grateful for what remains.

We deserve better than that. And more importantly, the mission deserves better than that.

One More Thing

I am writing this not as a voice of despair, but as a voice of conviction. The church of Jesus Christ is not dependent on institutions. It has outlasted empires. It will outlast the Concordia University System and the LCMS itself if it comes to that.

But stewardship is not merely financial. It is missional. And a church that measures stewardship only by balance sheets and not by the number of pastors formed, teachers sent, communities served, lives changed has already lost something more important than a campus.

It has lost its north star. It has lost God.

God grant us leaders who know the difference. And God grant us the courage to demand they lead accordingly.

What My Chickens Are Teaching Me This Season

May 14, 2026 / / 0 Comments

If you would have told me ten years ago that I’d live on 13 acres with about twenty chickens and a substantial garden, I would likely have laughed in your face. But here we are. And I’m loving it.

But I will tell you that life on a farm, even a mini farm, isn’t for everyone. You either love it or you’re gonna hate it.

Like the night the guy who helps farm my land decided to spray the field. Nope, not with weed killer or any pesticides. This was straight up liquified hog manure. And unless you’ve smelled it, you can’t appreciate the speed with which we closed every window and door in the house.

There’s a rhythm to life on a piece of land like this. Seasons change and with every changing season you find a new pace. Then there’s the livestock. We have chickens, but other animals have similar cycles. Some seasons those little feathered velociraptors push eggs out faster than you can eat them. They forage through every open piece of ground they can find. They’ll eat just about anything. They’ll debug your garden or your fruit trees. They’ll take care of the weeds if you let them. But they’re indiscriminate, so just be careful.

But chickens aren’t always dropping those yolked shells of goodness. Some seasons they have to redirect their energy and capacity to keep warm, or to regrow feathers during molting season.

Life in many ways is like taking care of land or livestock. There are seasons to how we live.

The molting season is the one nobody likes to talk about. The chickens look terrible. Feathers are everywhere. Production drops to almost nothing, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to still get an egg a day from your flock. Until I knew better, I thought something was wrong.

But that’s the thing. Nothing is wrong. Everything is exactly right. The chicken isn’t broken. It’s just redirecting. All that energy that was going into egg production is now going somewhere less visible. Regrowth. New feathers. Renewed capacity for the season ahead.

People have molting seasons too.

There are seasons where output drops and you can’t explain why. Where you feel like you should be producing more but everything in you is just… quiet. You might even be a little featherless and rough around the edges. The seasons where you look at yourself in the mirror and think something has to be wrong.

But what if nothing is wrong? What if you’re just molting?

You probably didn’t choose this season. The chicken didn’t either. The season made that decision for it. And the chicken doesn’t fight it. It doesn’t fret because it’s losing feathers. It doesn’t panic because the egg production is down. It just molts.

There’s something humbling and freeing about that. The reality that we don’t always get to choose the season we’re in. Sometimes the quiet, stripped-down, low-output season isn’t failure. It isn’t a lack of effort or discipline. It’s just where you are.

Your job isn’t to stop the molt. It’s to recognize the disheveled mess of feathers around you and stop fighting it.

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.

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.

Don’t Quit Yet

March 20, 2026 / / 0 Comments

You’re exhausted. Everything hurts. Life feels like it’s crushing you from the inside out. Work, relationships, your dreams, maybe even your faith, everything seems to be failing at once. You’ve begged for relief, shouted for it, prayed for it, but nothing changes. And now… now you just want out.

You want it to stop. You want the pain gone. You want the struggle erased. You want someone, anyone, to make it all easier.

But here’s the thing: sometimes life doesn’t give you a way out. Sometimes the valley isn’t an accident. Sometimes the darkness isn’t a punishment. It’s where something real happens.

It’s here, in the dark, when you’re exhausted, lonely, scared, and desperate, that your soul stretches. That raw, unfiltered part of you, the part you try to hide from yourself is exposed. And in that exposure, something shifts. Maybe slowly. Maybe imperceptibly at first. But it shifts.

God’s presence doesn’t always come wrapped in light or clarity. Sometimes it comes in the quiet whisper that you almost miss. Sometimes it’s in the hand that feels invisible, guiding you step by step through the muck. Sometimes it’s in the stubborn spark that refuses to die even when you feel completely defeated.

Friend, the valley is brutal. It’s raw. It’s messy. It hurts like hell. And yet… it is exactly where resilience, courage, and clarity are born. Every tear, every sleepless night, every moment you feel like giving up is shaping something in you. Something stronger, something deeper, something unshakable.

So stay. Stay even when you’re ready to run. Stay even when it hurts. Don’t try to skip the pain or speed through it. Let it stretch you, refine you, strip you down, and show you what you’re made of.

You may come out bruised, shaken, heck maybe even broken, but you will come out changed. And when you do… you’ll finally see that even in the valley, you were never truly alone.

7 Signs a Church is Struggling and How We Thrive Anyway

March 3, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I recently came across an email from Carey Nieuwhof listing seven signs that a church is struggling. Reading through them made me breathe a little easier because this is not the church I serve. I am beyond blessed by some powerful leaders, selfless servants, bold brothers and compassionate sisters in Christ.

But these signs are real challenges for many churches, and we can learn a lot by looking at them head-on. Let’s break them down one by one and talk about what thriving looks like instead.

1. Leaders Losing Their Passion

The struggle: When pastors or leaders go through the motions, you feel it in the pews. Worship becomes routine, ministry feels stale. Sermons drone on. Songs have no energy or joy. Even the air in the room feels heavy.

Our response: At Living Word Galena, we prioritize spiritual vitality. Leaders are encouraged to feed their own relationship with Jesus first. We do this because you can’t pour from an empty cup. Passion is contagious, and we guard it fiercely. Every leader and staff member (paid and volunteer) is encouraged to spend time in Scripture, attend worship for personal spiritual gain, set healthy boundaries for commitments and service.

Action step: Encourage ongoing personal devotion, retreats, and coaching for leaders. Protect the sacred space where God fuels our fire.

2. Fear of Innovation and Change

The struggle: Sticking to “the way we’ve always done it” may feel safe, but safe doesn’t grow God’s Kingdom. Doing what we’ve done will get us what we’ve got and not a whole lot more.

Our response: We embrace creativity in worship, ministry, and outreach. From KidConnect to Littles Connect, and our growth groups, we experiment boldly while staying rooted in Scripture. This isn’t about changing things for change sake. It’s about seeing the needs in the congregation and community and with strong biblical confidence meeting those needs with creativity and passion.

Action step: Celebrate small wins, pilot new ideas, and view failures as learning opportunities not disasters. Innovation isn’t optional; it’s essential for life in Christ. New doesn’t mean the old was bad. Actually if you can build something new on the foundation of something existing, you’re setting yourself up for great success!

3. Church Management Replacing Church Leadership

The struggle: Paperwork, budgets, and meetings can easily take over the heart of leadership and leave serving people in the shadows.

Our response: We structure leadership so that mission drives management, not the other way around. Every decision starts with “Does this help families encounter Jesus?” We evaluate our building needs, worship space, instrumentation, A/V set up, building temperature, date of events…all of it is done through this lens. Does this help someone connect with Jesus more fully? Having the right framework for evaluation prevents the tail from wagging the dog!

Action step: Delegate administrative tasks, empower leaders to focus on shepherding and vision, and keep ministry first.

4. Maintenance Overtaking the Mission

The struggle: When we focus on fixing buildings, finances, or programs over reaching people, the church slowly stagnates.

Our response: Maintenance matters. That’s a given. But it can never happen at the expense of ministry. We balance stewardship with innovation, ensuring every effort serves the mission of helping people experience Jesus’ grace.

Action step: Audit your priorities. Ask: “Does this investment of time, energy, and money bring people closer to Jesus?” Be willing to do some radical things to lower maintenance for the sake of the mission. If the building is more important than the mission, then you have the wrong god already. Pause and think that one over.

5. Fixation on a Singular Personality or Talent

The struggle: Worship isn’t about one gifted singer. Leadership isn’t about one charismatic pastor. Churches that revolve around personalities crumble when those individuals leave.

Our response: We strive for team ministry. From volunteers to staff to small group leaders, everyone plays a role in helping families grow in Christ. Our goal is to give the ministry away. We give authority not permission. Authority has a clear lane in which to function whereas permission is task focused.

Action step: Develop leadership pipelines. Train, mentor, and release others so the mission isn’t dependent on one person.

6. Criticizing Younger, Upstart Leaders

The struggle: Skepticism toward fresh ideas or young leaders kills momentum before it even begins.

Our response: We invest in emerging leaders. Youth, new members, and first-time ministry leaders are encouraged to step up, experiment, and make mistakes in a safe environment. We truly believe that new reaches new. We’re not afraid to bring new faces into our teams. And young voices are always welcome!

Action step: Ask younger leaders for their vision, give them space to lead, and mentor them instead of dismissing them.

7. Personal Relationships with God on the Back Burner

The struggle: Programs, events, and strategies are useless if our hearts aren’t burning with God’s presence.

Our response: Everything begins with intimacy with Jesus. Worship, prayer, Bible study, and personal growth are non-negotiables. We cannot lead people closer to God if we are running on autopilot. No one is an island so we do a lot in community. Everyone is encouraged to be part of a group or team around the church. We take this very seriously.

Action step: Model spiritual disciplines. Make personal connection with Jesus visible and a top priority in every ministry conversation.

The Bottom Line

These seven struggles aren’t inevitable. They’re choices. And at Living Word Galena, we choose passion over apathy, mission over maintenance, innovation over fear, and Jesus over everything else.

The result? A church where leaders thrive, families grow, and the good news spreads far beyond the walls of our building.

If you’re a church leader here are two questions for you to ponder:

Which of these seven struggles could your church be facing? And how can you step into the solution today?

Because a thriving church isn’t about avoiding struggle. It’s about responding with faith, courage, and relentless focus on Jesus.

Maintenance Matters: Why the Inside is What Counts

February 24, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my old 1980s truck lately. It’s the kind of vehicle that looks solid at a glance. Rust isn’t creeping in. The paint mostly holds. And it always starts when you turn the key. Ok well most of the time it starts. From the outside, it seems fine.

But getting behind the wheel told a different story. The steering felt sloppy. I was turning that wheel nearly 6 inches in each direction and the tires didn’t turn at all. Driving down the road was a challenge to say the least.

It didn’t handle right. It wasn’t unsafe, exactly, but it wasn’t operating the way it was meant to. And the more I drove it, the more I realized: years of small, overlooked maintenance issues had added up.

Tie rod ends, ball joints, leaf springs, shocks, wheel bearings… the list goes on. Little things that weren’t obvious on the outside were wearing down the whole system. It took time, effort, and patience, and a little help from the neighbor, but now it drives like a dream. Solid inside and out.

Here’s the thing: life works the same way.

It’s easy to focus on the outside. Our jobs, our image, our success. The parts other people can see. We polish them. We maintain them. We make them look good. And from the outside, things often seem fine.

But if we never check under the hood – our habits, our mindset, our inner life – the system can start to wear out without us noticing. Sloppy steering shows up as impatience. Worn bearings show up as stress and exhaustion. Tiny misalignments in the heart show up as frustration, resentment, or emptiness.

Left unchecked these lead to broken relationships, addictive behaviors, compulsive lifestyles, and destructive actions.

Real purpose, real satisfaction, real meaning come from the inside out. You can have everything looking perfect on the surface, but if the internal parts aren’t aligned, life never drives as smoothly as it was meant to.

This week, Lent gives us a chance to do a little under-the-hood work. To pause, check the invisible parts, and tighten up what’s loose.

Because when the inside works, the outside starts working too. When your heart is in the right place, the rest of life starts following its design.

And here’s the best part: when we let Jesus take control of our life direction, the maintenance we can’t do on our own starts to happen. More of Jesus. Less of me. Suddenly, the life you’re driving every day begins to run the way it was meant to.

Joy in the Little Things

February 3, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes life’s biggest challenges can make us forget the little things that quietly bring joy and peace. This week, as the cold lingers and the world feels heavy with noise and uncertainty, I’m reminded how much comfort can come from simple, everyday blessings.

Like the reliable warmth of a good pair of Carhartts when stepping outside into the chill. It’s like a small set of armor that makes the cold manageable. Or the cozy feeling of coming back to a warm house, even when the fireplace isn’t roaring just yet. There’s peace in knowing there’s food on the table, no scrambling, just steady provision.

And for me, joy bubbles up in the anticipation of spring as the starting of seeds begins indoors, setting up my gardening station, imagining new life growing slowly but surely. It’s a quiet hope, a little miracle in the making.

Then there’s the comfort found in ritual: a fresh, steaming cup of coffee from the French press. There’s just something about its rich aroma filling the room.

Even if you don’t drink coffee these are the days when holding a hot cup of coffee just feels right!

These little things don’t fix all of our problems, but they remind us that joy can live in the small corners of everyday life. What little things bring you joy this week? Take a moment to notice them today.

Here’s to finding grace and gladness in the small things that make life sweeter.

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