Several years ago, I started asking a question that made me uncomfortable: Am I primarily a pastor? A preacher? Or a leader? For most of my early ministry, I would have instinctively said pastor. Maybe preacher. Leadership felt secondary, almost suspiciously corporate or overly pragmatic. But the longer I led a church, the more I began to see something unsettling and clarifying at the same time: many churches do not struggle because they lack good preaching. They struggle bec

A few years ago, in the middle of leading a healthy, active, program-heavy church, my leadership team and I asked a question that should have been obvious long before we asked it: What is our discipleship strategy? We had programs. We had curriculum. We had volunteers and events and good intentions. But we did not have a clear answer to that question. And once we asked it honestly, we could not un-ask it. That question sent me into one of the deepest seasons of study and refl

At 6:19 pm, the sun was setting over the canyon. I looked back to the southeast from my perch on the Hermit Trail and saw blaze orange glowing off the cliffs of the North Rim, the rocks on fire with the reflection of the setting sun. That was the last pleasant moment of my day, and I had a lot of day still in front of me. Only a few miles remained, but many vertical feet, and hours of cold, rainy trudging. Climbing out of the Grand Canyon on the Hermit Trail requires a final