Part of the difficulty, as I share my aim with what I will be building with Groundwork, is that there are more images than categories for the vision that I’m carrying. What I mean by that is I can tell you the feel and posture of the role (like the Abbot), or what we want people to experience on the other side, and maybe even what we don’t want to be about. But ultimately, most of us

Let me share just one more image as to why it is hard to put this in a specific category.

Let’s say you go to a counselor to talk about a specific aspect of your life. As you share your stories and struggles, the counselor will hear one vantage point…yours, which isn’t bad; it’s just limited. A layer deeper would be going to the same counselor with a family member, say, your spouse. The dynamic of what and how you share may change, but it also changes the picture being painted the therapist may not have heard before. They will begin to hear the relational dynamics, history, and other viewpoints that you had not been aware of, thought were important, or disregarded. Again, not bad, just being human.

But what if there was one more scenario? Remember, this is hypothetical… a parable, if you will. What if the same therapist was given a key and permission to step into your home to experience the stories they’ve been told? A reverse “What About Bob?” moment. They might notice the Amazon boxes by the front door as they walked in, the couch cushions ever-so-slightly tilted, and the dishes ready to be washed and put away. They would catch the unique smells of the home, from fresh paint to the scent of a well-loved century-old home. They might notice the layout of the house and hear voices yelling down the hallway, asking where the hairbrush is or if someone will let the dog back in (this may just be in my house). Pulling up a chair at the dining room table, they hear the day's content, not just the words; they can hear and feel the tones and facial expressions that accompany the spoken word.

They no longer just hear the stories, and certainly not from just one perspective. Access tells the story of the space of relationships. The story they hear and see allows them to understand the patterns of navigating emotions, conflict, personal stories family members tell themselves and then act on, and the “normal” that the family is actively walking in.

These things could be picked up in a counselor’s office, and the best therapist are able to guide their clients into that space through their questions, listening and ability to connect the dots. But by sitting at the table, hearing the full dynamics of the relationship and the family's conversations, rather than someone else’s interpretation of them, so much more is opened up to them than what can be accessed in the 55-minute session in their office, with a button-up singular, or even dual perspective.

Which of those scenarios gives the most full picture for the therapist to then sit with their client and name potential reality from an outside view? Access leading to true excavation sets the table for the quality of knowing and being known. Seeing more clearly doesn't guarantee change, but it gives change an honest place to begin. We are masters at BS’ing our viewpoint. There’s no shame in that statement. It is part of our protective mechanism as humans. None of us intentionally tells an incomplete story; we just tell the story as we are able to make sense of it.

That’s what makes an embedded presence so valuable. The embedded presence isn’t tyring to catch someone in the contradiction. They are, like the abbot, seeing the relationships, habits, assumptions, and everyday practices that quietly shape life together. There are things that become almost invisible to the people living inside them. But when someone is invited to be an embedded presence with us, we can’t skirt the realities of what they may see or experience. We may certainly feel uncomfortable and maybe even exposed. But what if that actually allowed the pressure to come off, and we could finally deal with the root instead of tending to the fruit?

There is no bucket or category for this if this is how I explained Groundwork in the life of church leadership. But this is what Groundwork is after. It is “someone being invited into the home.” Groundwork isn’t defined by the kind of advice it gives. It’s defined by the kind of access it’s invited into. So, I would rather use terms like “embedded contextual theologian” or “Pastoral Abbot.” And while those carry the posture, they don’t necessarily register with the listener…yet. These terms carry the patient, truthful seeing.

So would churches or pastors allow that type of access I described above? Is there a generational difference that would allow that type of access? Would there be pilot churches either crazy enough or brave enough to allow it? There is a reality where, at this point, many churches and leaders would not. It’s too uncomfortable and unknown. It requires too much trust. But for those who would say yes to engaging with our team as we ask questions, sit in meetings to listen, meet with people one-on-one, to begin seeing what is below the surface, and make connections. Perhaps those organizations would begin to carry shared language around the shared reality. That’s the hope of Groundwork and the larger work of 412 Project: that we aren’t arriving with better answers. Like the therapist in the third scenario, we hang around long enough to see what has been hiding in plain sight. When we can name the shared reality, then it becomes possible to discern a shared future. That may be one of the greatest gifts we can offer a local church. In the process, it might also prove to be the most freeing thing they could do.

Last week I was sitting with my friend Tommy. He is a well-respected fire investigator and an all-around great guy. We’ve known each other for decades now, and sometimes I have to remind myself that we are the “adults in the room.” I was asking Tommy what he had coming up next week, and he was explaining the work on a lengthy, in-depth investigation he was in the middle of. The intricacies of sifting through the charred debris in order to discover the origin of the fire that decimated this structure. His findings had to be recorded and reported. As he was talking, I was fascinated by both his skill set and his diligence. His focus wasn’t merely on the destroyed scene in front of him, but on how what he saw could tell the story of how it arrived at that point. Additionally, it wasn’t just recognizing one individual detail. It was the collection of connected points, so he could communicate and paint a clear, truthful story.

The next day, my wife and I were at dinner with Todd and Donna, whom we’ve known for years and served alongside in ministry. Donna has served on staff at a local counseling office. We were discussing some of our own experiences in a therapist's office, and I brought up my current reading on the tools of Emotionally Focused Therapy and attachment therapy.1 It was intriguing how something that happened years ago could have such a strong impact on something happening today. But also, how the questions and observations that tether a past event to a current emotion might be reassigned, with the therapist serving as a gentle guide in a safe space for reassignment to begin. The gift of the therapist is to help bring what lies beneath the surface into a shared reality, so that what was operating outside our awareness can be seen and named. Once the connection is visible, something can begin to change.

And then, a few weeks ago, while driving, I was listening to the “For Context” podcast, hosted by friends Gino Curcuruto and Luke Stehr, as they interviewed Alan Roxburgh. He brought up the role of the 6th-century abbot. As I drove, I realized I didn’t know much about the role of an Abbot, so I began digging. Here’s what I discovered… In the 6th-century monastic life, there was an agreed-upon “Rule,” a desired way of life, but the real question is how that “Rule” is actually embodied. The Abbot was not charged with telling everyone what to do, but with holding the desire in tension with reality. He was given permission from the outset to speak truth from within the community—not from outside it—to notice its rhythms, relationships, and practices. The Abbot’s focus was on whether these were forming the inhabitants in the desired ways. To ask, “Where is the lived reality aligned with the desired reality, and where is it not?” His embeddedness meant he was not operating from the outside, producing an outside analysis or issuing a directive. He noticed, made connections, and brought it into the common life so the community could discern together. And then, through small adjustments, truth, patience, and love became part of the process of change. The abbot pushed the question from the individual toward the life of a community being formed together.

All these vocations play a different role in society. As for the actual tasks, they have very little in common. However, there is a common thread. Each begins with something that already exists. But paying attention alone is not enough. The fire investigator has to connect the evidence, the therapist has to connect past stories with present experiences, and the Abbot has to connect stated commitments with the actual life and formation of the community. So the common movement might look something like: notice, connect, name, discern, and respond.

In an earlier Substack post, I introduced my experience with ethnography, which teaches us to slow down, observe, listen, become curious, and resist premature conclusions. But I want to push my previous post one step further. Paying attention gives us the pieces. Making connections helps us understand the story. The connections I’m proposing are not simply intellectual analysis. They help us understand why the present looks the way it does. They can help reveal relationships between history and present practice, stated values and actual behaviors, organizational structures and lived experiences, past wounds and current reactions, or habits and formations. We must be able to see; then we can walk forward together to have an opportunity to alter the future imagination. And the most effective way for this change to take place is not when it is imposed from outside, but when it grows from a community seeing itself more clearly.

But the hope isn’t solely attention, or analysis, or even connections. These are all skills of listening and wisdom. The deep hope is that a clearer shared reality creates room for healthier, more faithful ways of living together. Health and flourishing grow as communities can see what is forming them and participate in changing it.

This has been a soul-ache of mine for some time. It was what I focused most of my attention on in my doctoral work. It is also a goal of the 412 Project. 412 is concerned with the health and flourishing of churches. It is why I am excited to step into a new role within 412 Project as Director of Groundwork in the near future.

Groundwork gives me the opportunity to practice this very posture with churches. To pay attention as an embedded contextual theologian, to listen carefully and make connections, in hopes that, through the excavation process, we can name a shared reality and create space for communal discernment. This approach assumes that the people already there possess knowledge, have a history, carry wisdom and agency, and that, as followers of Jesus, God is already at work in that space. We just need to have ears that hear. The change, then, emerges from within rather than being prescribed from outside.

Tommy reminded me about following connections through a story. Donna and my reading showed me how seeing and addressing connections can make a different present possible. My digging around the role of the abbot gave me a picture for doing that work within a community rather than merely for it. I am excited to spend this next season learning how to pay attention alongside pastors and churches, make connections together, and see what might grow from the ground already beneath our feet.

I have sat with men and women who are responding to this call. They long to see a movement of Jesus in their churches, and to be a blessing to their communities. My empathy and my longing to see the church flourish in beautiful ways grew even more out of the conversations I had through my research. And also…I would contend that the world does not only hear what the church proclaims. It watches what our common life makes possible. The church doesn’t need a bigger mission. It needs to reckon with what kind of people that mission is forming. It needs to be able to ask and discern, “What kind of body could become possible?”

The church is a body. I know that. And organizationally it’s classified as a 501(c) (3) with a website. But it cannot be reduced to an organization that happens to have relationships. I wonder if we’ve let the picture of a body become as disruptive as it should be? I wonder if we could approach mission visibility in a way that more resembles a body caring for itself. To be displayed in how we listen and submit to one another and disagree well. Or how we might confess and stay present. How power is stewarded among a group of people. And whether repair actually happens, or just gets talked about. These aren’t the only things, but I do think they are glimpses into a healthy body moving towards flourishing.

I remember a staff retreat a couple of decades ago. Gathered around a large oak table in an upstairs room with our pastoral team, I lamented, “Sometimes it might be easier to be in construction because at least the project is finished and you can see what you did.” It was an honest statement, but almost immediately I could feel the anxiety in the room. My comment was met with quick attempts to fix my perspective. I wanted to state the obvious hard reality that my soul felt. I didn’t want to leave, and I wasn’t asking for less ministry...I’m not even sure that I was even looking for someone to solve the burden. I simply needed to know I wasn’t expected to carry it alone. I wanted someone to stay in the room long enough to take that burden with me to Jesus.

If 45-year-old Danny were sitting with the twenty-five-year-old Danny today, I’d want him to know that the body represented around the table could be a part of carrying him. I’d try to create enough trust for him to tell the truth without feeling like he had to defend it and to know that what he was feeling was okay to say out loud, and let the soul sit for a minute. Then we would begin discerning the weight, why it existed, and what God might want us to do with it. A scenario like this would allow weariness to land in a different habitat. But somewhere along the way, many churches quietly learned how to fix people faster than they learned how to carry them.

You see, I didn’t need better advice in that moment. The kind of moment I think I needed wasn’t one that could be manufactured through another strategy or leadership framework. The irony in this story is that for the last 4+ years I’ve been able to serve with a team in the construction industry. The type of community I have experienced over the last several years was one I’m looking forward to helping pastors step into within their church leadership in the future. It grows as communities learn to tell the truth without fear because the organization and its people have a rooted identity. Churches will flourish when pastors learn to practice repair without embarrassment and tend to the deeper realities below the surface. Could there be enough space for an embedded trust that Jesus is already present among them, and because they are united in Christ, they are learning to belong to each other?

The older I get, the less interested I am in arriving with answers. I have watched too many pastors carry strategies and “answers” that never fully allowed the body to move towards flourishing. Almost like it was stunted and malformed. A version of what it could be. And I’ve been in rooms where there was space given for discernment and excavation to take place. Where the room slows down long enough to tell the truth and really listen.

Rather than primarily asking what our churches should accomplish next, could we begin paying attention to what kind of body we are becoming together? Because the church’s witness is inseparable from the way the Body learns to carry one another. In doing so, we make Jesus more visible to each other and the world.

If you have stayed with me this long in the series, I’m sincerely grateful! My hope is that I’ve put into short form some of my ideas from my dissertation work. But my longer prayer that I would invite you into is: How can these move from living on paper or Substack and into our systems and with our pastors to create different habitats? What would chasing this for the next several decades mean for pastors in the region and the churches they lead? It is an endeavor I’m excited to pursue in the near future, and I look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead.

Attention to a habitat tells us something about what it has the potential to produce. Healthy soil provides the opportunities to support healthy organisms. A well-formed habitat does not guarantee flourishing, but it creates the types of conditions where flourishing becomes possible. Where shalom and union are realities. When I say shalom, I’m not referring to a shallow peace, but life ordered toward the way things ought to be. This definition of shalom is one I first learned nearly two decades ago from Dustin Benac, then a student of mine and, more recently, my dissertation supervisor. It gave me a picture of life moving toward wholeness and fullness. It has stayed with me because it assumes something fundamental about God’s world: there is a way in which life is meant to exist together, and when it does, flourishing follows.

Of course, we do not have to look very far to realize that much of life does not function that way. Even good people and good institutions often work against the very goodness they hope to embody. Church systems are no exception. The question that I want to explore is what kinds of people their shared life is making possible.

Every church has a habitat. It may not call it that, but it's there. Over time, through the operational theology, you learn what allows for the survival of the system and the people within the system. Before long, those repeated patterns stop feeling like choices. They simply become the air everyone breathes.

This is why the answer to our last post on pastoral types cannot simply be to tell pastors to try harder. If we want different kinds of pastors, we have to cultivate different kinds of habitats. That’s when practices like better boundaries and rhythms, retreats, sabbaticals, coaching, counseling, and spiritual direction begin to make sense. In our modern age of “fixing”, though, we often ask those practices to carry far more weight than they can intrinsically bear. A retreat can't do it. Coaching can't do it by itself. Neither can counseling or another good book. Advice or coaching may help a pastor survive a series of decisions, but advice alone cannot change the environment to which the pastor returns. If the embodied habitat continues forming people in the same direction as before, pastors will keep running into this wall, even as they attempt healthier practices.

I've sat with pastors who returned from a retreat with renewed clarity only to walk back into the same rooms that rewarded overfunctioning. I've also listened to pastors who warned those around them long before they reached their limits. The tragedy wasn't that no one knew. It was that the system only honored those limits after a physical or mental breakdown.

In my dissertation, I unpacked four different characteristics of habitats that could undergird different pastoral types, and I’d like to name just two here in this post. The first is truth-telling and the second is repair.

I've learned that telling the truth is harder than simply saying the words. Truth-telling is creating the kind of community where reality can come into the presence of God and trusted people without immediately being defended, explained, or managed. It isn't weaponized honesty or frustration disguised as courage. It's the slow work of becoming a people who make truth safe enough to tell.

Over the last several years, I have had the blessing of sitting in these kinds of settings, and they have been remarkably refreshing. We were able to name our exhaustion and fear, as well as the gap between what we say we value and the life we actually live. What made those spaces different was the confidence that our identities were not at risk (except to be refined by and towards Jesus), and that the person across the table would not check out or defend when the hard thing was said.

Let’s be clear, silence is not the same thing as peace. I have sat in rooms where silence was practically demanded. It was the cost the people paid to remain inside the community. A different habitat would provide space for the setup and execution of the hard things to be communicated if it made the entire room better. A different habitat would also not merely send a pastor away to recover. It would make room for that pastor to return and tell the truth about what made recovery necessary. It would allow people to name an unsustainable pace, a gap between stated values and lived practices, or the weight one person has been carrying on behalf of the body. Truthful communities create room for people to stop editing themselves in order to belong.

But I have also been in settings where people learned to name the truth and the system still did not know what to do with it. The concern was acknowledged, the pain was discussed, and everyone eventually returned to the same patterns. That is why truth-telling must lead somewhere, and why I keep returning to the importance of repair.

Dr. Curt Thompson uses the language of “rupture and repair” as he leads others through the dynamics of “confessional communities.” Thompson observes that some systems become resistant to repair because repair appears too costly.1 Reputation management asks, How do we preserve confidence? Repair asks, What happened? Who was affected? What needs to be made right? What practices need to change so this pattern does not quietly continue? Those questions lead communities in very different directions. Communities committed to repair already have language and practices waiting on the other side of truth-telling.

Wholeness isn’t a conflict-free church. It’s a church where conflict doesn’t have to be hidden. When conflict is exposed, it isn't weaponized, and no one has to carry it alone. In that kind of community, pastors do not have to become secluded to remain connected or omni-competent to remain valuable. And institutional loyalty never becomes more important than faithfulness to Christ and neighbor. Wholeness is not the absence of rupture. It is a way of life in which rupture can be named, and repair can be practiced together.

That kind of community will probably move more slowly, and it may disappoint people looking for constant momentum. From the outside, it may appear less polished. Telling the truth about exhaustion, conflict, and failure rarely produces a polished image. Yet I suspect such a community will become more resilient because its health does not depend upon everyone pretending things are fine. Its resilience will grow as people learn to tell the truth and repair what has been broken, even when doing so costs momentum or threatens the image the institution has worked to maintain.

So if you are looking for a key takeaway as you examine and pay attention within your organization or system, “consider the birds?” Jeremy discovered the birds never existed apart from their habitat. I think the same thing is true of pastors. Might I encourage you to examine the habitat that is forming the common life around you and those closest to you? It is building the very thing it is meant to build. Is it the kind of common life that makes a different kind of pastor possible? Perhaps that is where wholeness begins. Not with finding stronger individuals, but with cultivating different habitats.

I was on an afternoon run last Fall and realized I needed better language for what I was seeing. I was not trying to label pastors. I was trying to find language for what I kept hearing. Stanley Hauerwas wrote, “you can only act in the world you can see, and you can only see what you have learned to say.”1 Many pastors know something is happening to them, but they cannot quite describe it. Without language, the experience remains private. Once we can name what has quietly become normal, we can finally begin asking whether it is actually faithful.

That is why I want to name three pastoral formations that emerged as I listened to pastors over the course of my research. These are not personality types or diagnostic categories, and I am certainly not suggesting that these are the only three. I am thinking of them as adaptive formations: ways pastors learn over time to survive, belong, and remain trusted within particular church systems. Most pastors, myself included, will recognize pieces of themselves in more than one of them. Naming these three pastoral formations is an act of giving language to the things I’ve seen.

Secluded Enmeshment

The phrase Secluded Enmeshment was the first to make itself known. It is a phrase that holds contradiction. It is meant to communicate the “pastoral type” that becomes so emotionally woven into the life of the system that they no longer know where the system ends, and they begin. Enmeshment may not be your psychology or therapy term of choice, but it does capture the person who is seemingly indispensable to the community, while “secluded” jolts the hearer to understand they are increasingly isolated within it. Because the system has specific purposes, it is wired to achieve the enmeshment component; the enmeshment component takes priority for survival, and seclusion is the fruit. Somewhere along the way through the system, they lost permission to be ordinary humans, because there is just no space to be this raw.

The danger is not their love for people and the sacrifice that love demands. Rather, it is the assumption of usefulness where their love slowly loses any meaningful reciprocity. Pastors continue giving themselves away without a place where they, too, can be received because it is too costly for efficiency and/or protection of the institution. And finally, there is an appearance of intimacy and being deeply known, but it tends to be their usefulness in the lives of others at the expense of their seclusion, and even the ability to be known quietly fades. Relatedly, they can confess yesterday’s struggles because those stories have already been redeemed, but they can rarely confess today’s. Criticism of the institution felt personal because their own identity had become intertwined with its success, stability, and reputation, and there was no space for the institution to falter.

Renaissance Pastor

I grew up in a time of ministry, as most did, where you learn to do all the things. As an intern, I was a sound tech, janitor, video editor, teacher, event planner, and skit guy. Our goal was to do everything well and make do with what we had. Most pastors have had similar experiences. I have sat in rooms watching the same person preach, counsel, lead staff, develop leaders, resolve conflict, oversee budgets, cast vision, comfort the grieving, manage crises, and somehow still arrive on Sunday with enough emotional and spiritual energy to preach again. It made sense then to refer to this formation as the “Renaissance Pastor.” For many, there is a willingness to do what is needed, but if it is rooted only in usefulness, it can harden into a professional expectation that pastors should be able to do nearly everything with singular excellence.

During my research, I came across a phrase that captured this well: omni-competence. The assumption isn’t that pastors possess many gifts. It is that whatever problem emerges, they should be the one capable of solving it. Competence becomes the required identity. Before long, both the church and the pastor begin assuming that because something can be done, it should be done by him, otherwise they aren’t needed. What began as giftedness slowly becomes captivity to usefulness.

Institutional Ambassador

Taken from the “brand ambassador” idea, it’s the exchange of unbalanced loyalty in a transactional relationship. What I began to hear in some stories was a pastor giving family, gifts, community, soul, and spiritual life to an organization that gradually came to demand strict loyalty to the system and its success. It came across in the guise of Kingdom language, but the operational theology and ego of the institution, when pressed, would reveal brand protection over Kingdom building. This happens at multiple levels, from not saying the hard things in meetings to not partnering with other organizations because of what it may detract from the mission of the organization or its brand.

This was also where truth-telling seemed most difficult. If someone asked the hard but honest question or pushed on partnerships “upward” in the org chart, it could feel like critiquing leadership or the institutional brand. Like they don’t really care about the mission. On the other side, if a leader has to field questions about the church, it could begin to feel like questions about the individual leader’s adequacy. Protecting the people and protecting the institution slowly become indistinguishable. And when the institution is responsible for your position and livelihood, the institutional loyalty often wins out.

I am naming these formations because we cannot cultivate different kinds of pastors until we become honest about the kinds our systems have been rewarding. I am curious whether you recognize yourself in any of them, or whether other recurring formations need language. The question moving forward is not simply what kinds of pastors our churches have produced, but what kinds they might yet cultivate. What kinds of habits might be needed to produce a different pastoral type?

As I sat with that voice over the next several hours, I began to bring it into the light by processing it with people around me. I discovered that I was still longing for the word of affirmation because on the other side of the critic, I also knew the simple phrase, “good job,” would replace the inner critic with the ego machine, ready to pump out performed content. It was such an odd and weird internal dialogue.

Ultimately, I was glad for the unexpected dialogue. As I’ve unpacked this series, I have been able to take that voice for what it is and put it in the appropriate bucket. To place it in a specific light and ask questions of why it’s there and not just try to stuff it down deeper and tell it to shut up. When I acknowledge where it came from and what’s feeding it, I can say, “well of course you would say that, that’s the protector coming out, and while it may have been helpful in certain settings, it is not necessary now. Thank you and have a nice day.”

Looking back, I don’t think I simply walked out those doors into criticism. I walked into a voice twenty years in the making. Years of a voice formed around usefulness, making sure I edited correctly for the room, making sure the time was “productive,” and hoping what was shared would still allow me to belong. I knew the voice, but it was more evident and noticeable because of the long absence. Our understanding of a pastor’s usefulness is where I want to turn today’s post toward.

We all learn to interpret the words around us. Sometimes we hear criticism that was never spoken. Sometimes we absorb praise that slowly becomes expectation. Either way, those words begin shaping how we understand ourselves and what we believe is required to belong. Someone could tell a pastor, “you are so steady,” “you know just what to say,” “you’re always available,” “you carry so much,” or “we don’t know what we would do without you!” Most of those words are offered sincerely, and they name something true and beautiful about the role pastors are invited into. The role and vocation of the pastor is costly, and pastors are called to be wise, present, and faithful. I don’t know a single pastor who stepped into vocational ministry because they were concerned about self-protection. However, if the hidden curriculum I wrote about in the previous posts teaches long enough, the things mentioned above turn towards efficiencies of usefulness instead of a life of worship. It can become the shape of the pastor’s self. Without excavation, this becomes absorbed into the identity of the self.

A line stuck out as I read Stanley Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens. He says people who are “attracted to the pastoral ministry are often people who have a need ‘to help people.’ They like to be liked and need to be needed. Their personal needs become the basis for their ministry—and also their greatest problem.”1 As a result, we become the person people need, but not always the person people know. We learn how to be present for others while quietly disappearing from ourselves. Useful, but not free.
Usefulness is not the problem by itself. A pastor who is never useful to the body is probably not pastoring. The problem comes when usefulness becomes the main measure of faithfulness. When a pastor is valued primarily for what they can carry, fix, absorb, produce, manage, or represent, then the system may praise them while quietly consuming them.

I wonder how much of our leadership crisis begins here. Pastors within systems learn how to be perceived as efficiently useful and have built (or negotiated) power within the system to maximize its usefulness to them (rather than the Body). Do I think this is true of every pastor? Absolutely not! Do I think it is increasingly baked into our ideas of organizational success and church leadership today, and we simply refer to it as a “strong visionary leader”? Yes, I do.

I don’t say this as a hot take at all. Much of what pastors do in softening a difficult conversation, navigating a contentious room, leading groups of people where they don’t know they need to go, absorbing disappointment, answering late-night texts, and making a Sunday morning happen is just a part of ministry. I know a ton of pastors who operate faithfully in their contexts with great maturity and love. And also…we all tend to come to an understanding of what a room needs us to be. It is an easy drift into self-erasure wrapped in spiritual language, all because we have not paused to take an honest assessment around the messages and meanings around a pastor’s usefulness the system has determined or is drifting towards. When availability, steadiness, loyalty, and productivity become the learned requirements for belonging, something begins to bend. The pastor learns that the parts most useful to the system are often the parts that get celebrated most, even when those same parts are making him less whole. The pastor may still be doing good work, but the work is forming them around survival, and living in survival mode makes us less present to the moments right in front of us. This is where usefulness becomes dangerous. It can make a pastor necessary to the system while making him less available to God, their family and friends, and even their own soul. He can become fluent in the needs of the church and nearly speechless about his own. She can read every room except the one inside herself.

The way of Jesus is cruciform. Love costs something. There are seasons when faithfulness requires a pastor to carry quite a bit of discomfort, and stay there longer than they’d prefer, and serve when no one sees the weight of it. The question is whether the system (the collection of people with their shared beliefs and practices) knows the difference between costly love and slow disappearance. Whether a system can handle the “risk” of a pastor’s “weakness” in an attempt to tend to the pastor’s soul because they are actually weary. Whether a place and people could walk in covenant community being fully known to each other without rushing by and blaming efficiency, because, in all honesty, deep relationships are the most inefficient in today’s sense of the word.

But this is not just on the people around the pastor. It also means pastors have to be honest about the parts of usefulness that feel rewarding. Being needed and trusted can feel like belonging and give us an identity. Or if we are the ones who can handle situations, we feel like we matter and have purpose. Sometimes the system is not the only thing asking us to become useful. Something in us may want the role because it gives us a place, a name, and a way to avoid the deeper work of being known. Nowhere is this more evident than when the pastor is no longer in a staff position, and their perceived identity has been stripped away. It can be a painful reality. This is honest. And it is not shameful to be honest about it. It’s actually freedom. It opens space for a church to ask whether it is forming shepherds or training dependable workers. It tells us whether faithfulness is being honored or a malformed version of leadership that slowly makes people less whole is quietly rewarded instead.

The church does not need pastors who are less faithful. It needs pastors whose faithfulness is not measured only by usefulness. May we begin to pay attention to the voices of usefulness and bring them into the light in community, and unpack them together before the Lord.

But every church also has a lived, or functional, or operational theology. It may never be written down, voted on, preached in a sermon series, or printed on the website. But, it shows up when pressure rises. It is revealed in what a church treats as necessary, protects first, fears most, and is willing to sacrifice to keep going. This is what I mean by a church’s operational theology.

Operational theology is not always the opposite of stated theology. Most of the time, it is more subtle than that. A church may sincerely preach grace and still manage by anxiety. Or teach dependence on God while expecting leaders to operate with endless capacity. It may speak of authenticity while only allowing the kind of vulnerability that does not threaten confidence in the institution. Or a church may celebrate community while forming pastors who are accessible to many but actually known by very few.

I do not think most churches are trying to live with this kind of contradiction. Most pastors I know are certainly not waking up hoping to build anxious, controlling, image-conscious systems. They love Jesus. They love people. They want to be faithful. I believe they are doing their best to make the right next decision. But systems often reveal what our words are not yet able or willing to admit. In an anxious, performance-driven system that is under-resourced and often carries unrealistic internal and external expectations, the pressure builds, and truer loyalties surface.

That is why operational theology matters. It not only reveals what a church believes in practice, but also becomes the curriculum people learn from. For instance, if a church says it believes in grace, but everyone is afraid to fail, then fear may be functioning as a deeper authority than grace. Or, if a church says it values truth but treats difficult questions as disloyalty, then perceived stability carries more weight than truth. If a church says it follows the Spirit, but only trusts outcomes that preserve the existing plan, then control may have become more believable than discernment.

No one has to hand a pastor a syllabus for this to become clear. Over time, you learn. You learn what kind of questions slow the room down in a good way and what kind of questions make people nervous. You learn when honesty is welcomed and when it needs to be softened. You learn who can speak plainly, who needs to translate, and which concerns are better saved for a private conversation after the meeting, with the simple phrase, “Let’s take that offline.”

That is the hidden curriculum of church leadership. It is absorbed through repetition. It comes through meetings, hallway comments, budget conversations, sermon feedback, elder dynamics, hiring processes, and the quiet aftermath of conflict. The hidden curriculum is the lessons a church teaches beneath its stated values. It tells pastors what is safe or costly and what kind of person succeeds in that space.

I have talked to pastors who were told, “We value honesty,” but then watched what happened to the relationships around them when honesty delayed a decision. Or when a staff member was told, “We are a team,” but then realized the team only participates after the real decision has already been made. A leader was told, “We care about your health,” but then noticed that the people who are praised most are the ones who never seem to need anything. The lesson is not only in what is said. The lesson is in what the system makes believable.

Eventually, the hidden curriculum becomes internal. No one has to remind the pastor to be careful. He already is. Nobody tells the staff member which topic is off-limits. She already knows, or learns very quickly. No one has to say that certain leaders should not be disappointed. The room teaches that lesson. What begins as an external pressure slowly becomes an internal reflex.

What I’m beginning to understand is that this is not just a leadership problem. It is a discipleship problem. In the local expression of the church, we are meant to be teaching people how to be human together under the lordship of Jesus. If the hidden curriculum teaches fear, performance, silence, and overfunctioning, then those patterns will shape the body even if the sermons say something different. These are certainly human responses, but they are responses with “power-over” as the undercurrent (see post 3). We may be preaching one imagination while practicing another.

The hopeful possibility is that hidden curricula can become visible. A church can begin asking what its practices are actually teaching. This isn’t to generate suspicion, but to become more honest about our life together. What a congregation does with conflict, budgets, or silence after a hard meeting teaches as surely as anything said from the front on a Sunday morning. When the practices are named, they can be examined. Once it is examined, it can be repented of where needed. And where the Spirit is already cultivating something good, it can be protected and strengthened.

A healthier church will still teach beneath the surface, because every community forms people through more than words. The goal is not to eliminate hidden formation. The goal is to bring enough of it into the light that the church’s practices begin to agree with its confession. When the stated theology, operational theology, and hidden curriculum move closer together, pastors no longer have to live divided lives to belong. Because the truth is, a church is always teaching. The question is whether it is forming pastors and people into the way of Jesus, or training them to survive inside the institution.

I’ve sat with many pastors who have wrestled with similar thoughts about not measuring up to the expectations of that up-front lead man. But what if this were less about personality and more about how the system trains individuals to use power in a space, regardless of how large or small it is?

Power is hard to talk about in the church. We usually know how to name power when a person holds a title, the microphone, the checks, or the final decision. This power matters, and pretending it does not exist usually means someone else has to carry the cost of it. But power often works in quieter ways. It lives in the habits, expectations, and relationships before anyone names it.

Have you been in a meeting where a question is asked, and there is a pregnant pause? Not because the room doesn’t have thoughts, or because people aren’t brave enough to speak first, but because there is an “understood” dynamic around answering too quickly or making sure it is the right response. And then the person who asked the question originally is the filter and conductor of the responses to fit the agendaed question. That is the subtle work of power in a community of people.

Subtle power shows up in who gets to speak first and who feels the need to wait. Or it separates whose concern is treated as wisdom and whose concern is treated as negativity. It tells us who can interrupt or disagree, and who has to make their question sound less threatening before it can be received. It shows up in the moment after someone tells the truth, and everyone silently tries to figure out whether the room can handle what was just said. In my research, I was able to sit in a variety of different rooms. And when you begin to see the dynamics of power at work in a room, the connections become easier to spot. I have been in rooms where no one was trying to be controlling, and still, the room had rules. This is part of why power is not solely about bad intentions. Power can shape a room even when people love Jesus and each other and are trying to be faithful.

That does not mean every difference in authority is wrong. Churches need leadership. Decisions have to be made. The goal is not to flatten leadership. Not every voice carries the same responsibility in every situation. The issue is not that power exists. Power inevitably exists, and we can either use “power-over,” a worldly power, or “power-with/under”, a Godly power.1 The issue is whether power can be named, examined, submitted to Jesus, and held for the sake of the body.

When power is hidden and unnamed, people often learn to call it something else. An emphasis and utilization of words such as wisdom, alignment, covering, unity, trust, and stewardship can all be good words. They can name real gifts. However, in anxious systems, they can also become softer language for control. “Trust the leadership” can mean faithful patience, but it can also mean stop asking questions. “Protect unity” can mean guarding the body from division, but it can also mean keeping the hard things quiet. “Alignment” can mean move together in shared mission, but it can also mean do not disrupt the plan. Sometimes these words stop functioning as descriptions and begin functioning as badges of belonging. They tell us who is “with us,” but no longer invite us into deeper truth or shared discernment.2

This is where we have to be careful. The more spiritual our language becomes, the easier it is to hide power inside it. Once power is baptized in religious words, questioning it can start to feel like questioning God. A staff member may no longer be disagreeing with a strategy, they may be framed as resisting vision. An elder may be asking for discernment, but be seen as lacking trust. A pastor may not have space to name a concern without being accused of being divisive. At that point, power has stopped being shared stewardship and has become a shield. It becomes dangerous when it cannot be questioned without punishment, even subtle punishment. It is deforming when the people closest to it must keep pretending it is not there. And shielded power, utilizing “power-over,” becomes detrimental when a church’s language of humility, unity, and mission trains people into silence rather than truth.

An often-overlooked reality is that this can harm the system that sustains this type of power, but it also malforms those who hold it. When leaders are not invited to tell the truth about their power, they may begin to believe their perspective is simply reality. They may confuse agreement with trust, compliance with maturity, and quiet rooms with healthy rooms. Over time, they can become insulated from the very feedback that would help them lead more faithfully.

This is why the question is not just about who has power. Every church has power somewhere. The better question is how power is moving through the collective body. Is it creating space for truth or protecting people from it? Is it helping the vulnerable become more visible or making the powerful harder to question?

A system moving towards wholeness does not pretend that power disappears because people love Jesus. It brings power into the light so it can be submitted to Jesus. Authority becomes something held for the sake of the body, not protected for the sake of the institution. Leaders can be honored without being untouchable. Unity is not built on silence, but on truth that has been carried together.

This is hard and slow work. It is pushed against because it is not the norm, and power rarely announces itself. It has to be noticed and named carefully, without turning every leader into a villain or every concern into prophecy. And if done well, and a church begins to tell the truth about power, something opens. The room becomes less performative. Questions become less threatening. Leaders become more human where the gospel can enter in. And the body begins to learn that truth is not the enemy of love. When power is brought into the light, it no longer has to form people through fear, performance, or silence. It can instead become a shared stewardship that forms leaders and communities in truth, humility, and love.

But there is a question underneath that work that pastors can sometimes miss: What happens when the people expected to know others are unaware of their own formation? I’m talking past and present formation. Not only family of origin, wounds, education, personality, or previous experiences, though all of that matters deeply. But also the ongoing formation that happens inside the systems where they serve.

I recently finished “A Failure of Nerve” by Edwin Friedman, in which he notes something that was a premise within my research. He says, “individuals function not out of their own personalities or past, but express that part of their nature that is regulated by the emotional processes in the present system.”1 He’s not saying the past doesn’t matter. He’s saying it exposes what’s there and plays off it in a formative way.

That is part of what makes pastoral leadership both beautiful and dangerous. Pastors are not blank slates who step into ministry untouched. Even as I asked my thesis question, “How do systems form leaders in a family of suburban churches?”, I know full well that both individuals and institutions have histories before we step into them. And we bring those histories with us. We bring our old ways of seeking approval, avoiding disappointment, carrying anxiety, reading authority, managing conflict, and trying to know whether we are safe. We bring the rooms that raised us, the families that shaped us, the jobs that trained us, the cultures that rewarded us, and the stories we learned to tell about who we have to be in order to belong. And we bring all of that into a present system.

The system a pastor serves within is not the only thing forming a pastor. It may not even be the most significant thing. But pastoral pressure has a way of exposing and expanding what is already there. It finds the places where we already have a need to be needed, a fear of disappointing people, a desire to avoid conflict, and then gives those patterns a spiritual job to do. What may have once been a family survival instinct can become “being pastoral.” What may have been conflict avoidance can become “protecting unity.” What may have been anxiety management can become “steady leadership.”

Friedman helps name a felt reality. In anxious systems, people can become fused to one another. The self gets tangled up in the emotional life of the group, the “herd instinct.”2 I have been in rooms that were calm on the surface, but underneath it, a pastor is carrying something that no one can name. Because of how the pastor has been formed to manage the undercurrent, they know how to anticipate disappointment or guard an identity. So they manage the temperature of the room and soften a concern to keep the “ship” from tipping too far in any one direction.

Over time, that can start to feel like love. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is fusion with spiritual language wrapped around it.3 A leader may begin to feel responsible not only for their own presence and choices, but for everyone else’s reactions, stability, and sense of safety. In that kind of system, differentiation becomes necessary. What I mean is that we need to remain present without becoming responsible for everyone else’s emotional life. But why do certain ways of being even become desirable, rewarded, or imaginable in the first place?

Michel Foucault presses the question from another angle. Friedman's main points help us see the fused self inside anxious relationships, but Foucault helps us see that the self is never formed outside power. We are not simply independent people who happen to encounter institutions. Institutions, practices, language, expectations, and disciplines shape what kind of selves become possible.4 Power does not only restrict us, but it also trains us to see, speak, desire, perform, and become. It is hidden beneath what feels normal, and over time, those lessons become part of how people understand themselves. The question is never whether we are being formed. The question is whether that formation is making us more available to the life of Christ or conforming us to some rival vision of what makes life worthwhile.

So the development of the self is not simply a psychological concern. It is deeply theological. Pastors are asking, “How do I lead well?” But they are also answering a hidden question, whether they know it or not, “What kind of self am I becoming before God?” A truthful or a managed self? A differentiated self or a fused one? A beloved creature with limits or a religious worker who has learned to survive by becoming useful?

I know this dynamic exists in most institutions. A new, ambitious recruit comes in wanting to change the world, but little do they realize how much they will be formed and molded through the journey. But there is something distinct about the spiritual nature of pastoral ministry that does a different kind of work on pastors. I have sat in rooms and edited my own honesty, or carried the room’s anxiety, because that is what I was supposed to do to manage a malformed version of peace. I guarded others from disappointment or leaned on survival instincts, merging them with my background of people-pleasing and a fear of being a disappointment. I’m not saying it’s right, and I don’t think I’m the only one; I'm simply saying this is the reality of what happens in our systems that exposes and then reinforces these places of formation.

Look, pastors are not helpless victims of systems. We are responsible for our maturity, choices, wounds, and patterns. But responsibility does not mean we are unformed. Agency does not mean autonomy. The Christian vision of the self is not an isolated individual who becomes healthy by needing no one. We are persons formed in relation to God, to others, to the powers around us, and to the practices that shape our loves.

So here’s why I bring up names like Friedman and Foucault and am showing you a picture from the church directory circa 1997… (well, maybe the picture is more humorous to me than it has to do with this post). If we only tell pastors to be healthier selves without paying attention to the systems that press on those selves, we may send them back into the same rooms with better language and the same hidden demands. But if we can begin to see how the self is formed, pressured, and rewarded, then perhaps we can ask a better question: Are our systems forming pastors who are more available to Jesus, and to the Body of Christ in truth and love?

Most of us have been trained, formally or informally, to ask at some point whether ministry is “working,” and in my mind, it was. That is not a bad question. People need to be cared for, money needs to be stewarded, and leaders need to be developed. The church is either paying attention to its life together or drifting along on assumption and momentum. So yes, whether something is working matters. But somewhere beneath that question sits another one: what kind of person does this system require me to become in order to belong, succeed, survive, or be trusted here? That is a question I had missed because I was only asking if it was working. I failed to see what it was working within me.

That latter question is altogether different. It requires a slower conversation, because it moves us out of dashboards, strategies, attendance patterns, giving trends, staff structures, and leadership competencies. Not because those things do not matter, but because they are not neutral. They are not just measuring ministry to see if it is “working.” They are also forming the people who live inside them.

My reason for sharing that early ministry memory is that every system requires something of the people within it. Usually, it is not written down anywhere. A church may have a handbook, like the one I was handed, or a set of posted values, or a theological confession. But alongside the formal documents, pastors are also learning something else, instinctively and often without anyone teaching it directly. They learn it in the pause after a difficult question, in the way concerns are received, in who gets access, in which stories get celebrated, and in what kind of honesty becomes costly. As I said, I was learning many things without ever knowing it.

In pastoral ministry, no one needs to explicitly state, “You must become this type of pastor.” Instead, the system implicitly shapes this through repetition. We tend to think formation occurs through sermons, discipleship pathways, or theological education. And it does. All of those matter deeply. But formation is also happening in planning meetings, staffing decisions, and even hallway conversations. In the seemingly insignificant places, we are learning, for instance, the unspoken rules about who can be safely disappointed.

That is where this gets painful, because many of the instincts pastors develop in these systems are praised before they are ever questioned. I observed the following through experience, hours of conversation, and research. There are pastors who are always available and are called servant-hearted, or others who carry tremendous anxiety, albeit some self-induced, without showing, and it is called steady. I’ve seen the pastor who is called “loyal” simply because they keep their concerns private. And the pastor who produces under constant pressure is called faithful. And perhaps one of the most heartbreaking observations is the pastor who is “useful” to everyone while known by almost no one, and the whole thing can still be called strength.

Some of those words may be partly true. Ministry absolutely does require sacrifice, and leadership requires steadiness. We are called to live out a faithfulness that carries costly love. But there is a difference between cruciform faithfulness and system-maintaining deformation, between laying down your life in love and being trained to ignore the fact that you are a creature with limits.

Pastors are responsible for their choices, wounds, immaturities, and patterns. Systems do not erase agency. But agency does not erase formation either. We are always being shaped by the environments we inhabit, especially those that give us a sense of belonging, identity, and spiritual meaning. That is why, when a pastor leaves a staff position, it is not just a job being transitioned. It is something much deeper than that.

For pastors, the question of formation can be painful because it may reveal how much of their current self has been shaped by survival. But it can also be strangely relieving. Like, why does your nervous system send a bolt of energy when you hear the ding of an email or text message? Or you feel forgotten when you wake up, and there are no messages? Why is the internal critique so relentless when you are just trying to do your best to make the next decision? Maybe you are not simply tired because you are weak. Maybe you are tired because you have been carrying more than one person was meant to carry. Maybe you are not guarded because you lack courage. Maybe honesty has been costly in rooms where trust was conditional.

That recognition does not solve everything, but it can begin to tell the truth. And truth, when held before God, is often the beginning of a different kind of formation. Before we ask whether the ministry is working, we may need to ask what the ministry is forming. Because the issue is not only sustainability. The issue is one of discipleship, and whether our systems are forming shepherds for the Kingdom or merely workers for the institution.

In 2019, I took on the challenge of writing 1 sentence a day. It would be something I read or heard, or a thought I had that I wanted to capture. I wrote down a quote from G.K. Chesterton and Eugene Peterson. I captured a verse I had read in Psalms or from Paul. I would make an observation from a sermon or capture a setting from a trip. Or sometimes it was just a random thought, like this one…

Sometimes a long or seemingly pointless journey is made worth it in the last mile.

As I go back and read through them, some of them are funny, and others feel prophetic at this stage of my life. Altogether, they have become a version of me paying attention to what I was paying attention to. Slowing down long enough to take note of what is happening in front of me, like little field notes of what was in the view of my soul.

In 2020, I placed another challenge on myself. Could I limit myself to 20 articles of clothing purchased in a year? This wasn’t because I had an addiction or was trying to stick it to Amazon, but I wanted to pay attention to the undercurrents of my buying habits. Did I buy things out of boredom, or for the thrill of the delivery? Could I gauge a long-term desire as I was looking at a shirt or hat and determine, “Do I really want this thing to be one of my 20 purchases?” This was all introspective observation. It was a way of documenting my own participation in a culture of consumption. A small attempt to notice the stories shaping me before I simply obeyed them.

The truth is, we are always watching the world around us. And the world, in turn, is informing and forming us. We are noticing what people say and do not say. What others repeat or what gets avoided. And what everyone has slowly learned to call normal. We are instinctively “meaning makers,” though most of the time we absorb the meaning someone else makes on our behalf. This is why the slow, intentional work of ethnography is so vital. It tells us about the world around us. If we are lucky enough, we get to enter into a space as a stranger, “entering someone else’s garden.”1 Meaning, we get to come with fresh inquisitive eyes, seeking to understand, not necessarily to fix and depart.

This is where ethnography becomes, at its roots, a practice of awareness. Mary Clark Moschella refers to ethnography as a form of “pastoral listening.”2 We are quick to give advice or become an expert, but pastoral listening requires a different presence. Not studying people as you might in a stale laboratory, but listening to people, hearing their stories, and discerning the spiritual heartbeat of a community. A type of listening that slows down long enough to ask what is really happening here.

I think of people like Vincent Donovan, and his work among the Masai (Christianity Rediscovered) or John Swinton’s thick description as he shares stories of those with mental health challenges (Finding Jesus in the Storm). They give us categories for how people carry meaning and belief, especially in areas we typically overlook and avoid. Both remind me that research can either flatten people into datasets or it can help us receive their lives with greater reverence.

This is where ethnography and theology intersect for me. In one sense, we are all theologians. I remember sitting in a staff meeting once when one of the pastors said, “I don’t ‘do’ theology.” The reality is that he did. We all do. Nobody does not have a theology. It may be an understanding that is unspoken, inherited, confused, wounded, or still under construction. We all have an understanding of God, even if it is that we believe He doesn’t exist or is not active or interested in our current experiences. That’s still a theology by definition. We may not call ourselves theologians, and we don’t write papers and make footnotes, but we all carry beliefs about God, the world and ourselves.

The difference is between theology that has been examined and theology that has simply been absorbed. I think something similar is true with ethnography. We all carry an ethnographic lens per se. We are all reading the world around us and making meaning from what we see. We are drawing conclusions about what is possible and where we belong. But if we never examine the lens, we may mistake our assumptions for reality. We may call something healthy simply because it is familiar. Or faithful because it is efficient in the business sense. We can call something normal because everyone around us has stopped questioning it. This is true in our personal lives, and it is true in our churches, organizations, and places of work. A culture can form us long before we have language for what it is doing.

This, then, is the work of ethnography. It is a big part of the work I undertook for my thesis and will begin to unpack over the next couple of months here. And I want to invite you to begin to notice as you listen and see what’s around you. Jot a little note down. Don’t worry, you don’t need a tiny journal and pencil worn down to the nub. But pay attention. Ask what is shaping this moment and these people in the place you are in. Ask what we have come to call “normal,” and why? Ask where beauty is still breaking through, and where something has been bent out of shape. See what kind of people our habits, systems, and cultures are producing. Because if we do, paying attention on purpose may be one of the first steps toward honesty, repair, and wholeness.

There was a phrase my dissertation supervisor (also a friend and former student), Dr. Dustin Benac, frequently repeated during the thesis process: “take it to the ground.” That phrase has stayed with me because it names what Northern kept pressing into us…theology has to land somewhere.

It is easy, especially in theological work, to live in the realm of ideas and possibilities. It is easy to stay theoretical, to build beautiful conceptual worlds, and to say things about God, church, culture, and formation that sound compelling but never actually make it into individual lives. But one of the defining markers of contextual theology is that it must actually be…contextual. It must take shape in real places, among real people, within real histories. Real places carry tensions, wounds, histories, and practices. It cannot remain detached from the lived world.

Again and again, the Contextual Theology program pressed us to pay attention to what was actually there in front of us. Listen. Excavate. Observe. Notice the stories and patterns in a place before trying to name what might need to happen next. This kind of work requires humility because it means you can’t simply impose an idea onto a context. You have to let reality interrupt your assumptions. Only then can theological reflection become constructive in a way that has enough breath in it to become real.

One of my favorite images for this posture comes from Bevans and Schroeder in Prophetic Dialogue: we are “entering someone else’s garden.” Anthony Gittins says something similar: we enter as strangers. It reminds us that we are not trying to be the smartest person in the room, and that changes how we enter the room. But humility does not mean passivity. So we listen. We discern. We reflect. And then, eventually, we practice. We enter on the ground, with dirt on our feet and sweat on our hands. We discern together, listening for the leading of the Holy Spirit. And then we act with embodied faith, trusting we have heard the Lord rightly.

There are times, if I am honest, I have been accused of being too heady. There is truth there. My mind naturally moves toward patterns, connections, concepts, and deeper layers of meaning. I am often asking what is beneath the thing. What larger theological or cultural forces are at work? What invisible dynamics are shaping the visible? This is valuable, but it does carry risk. The risk is that theology can remain suspended above the ground, elegant but unembodied. It can stay in the realm of what could be without ever submitting itself to what is. That has been a challenge for me because I can live so naturally in the world of thought. In the thesis process, that meant I could not simply write about power, leadership, or formation from a distance. I had to sit in actual rooms, listen to pastors, pay attention to what was said and unsaid, and let the lived reality of a place challenge the neatness of my categories.

At the same time, relationships have never felt foreign to me. Walking beside a small group of people over a long stretch of time is written in my DNA. I value making space for someone to know they are heard, cared for, and not alone. Offering presence rather than pressure. That just feels intuitive. The deeper wrestle has been learning how to take the complex thoughts I carry about God, meaning, culture, and formation, and bring them into real spaces. How do I not only think deeply about divine realities, but bring those reflections into the proximate, to borrow Steven Garber’s word, where people are trying to make sense of their lives before God? That is a challenge.

In particular, it is challenging as I pray and discern how to do this very thing as the dissertation journey ends. Dustin challenged me to not leave my work “on the edge,” as so often happens after a long dissertation journey. There isn’t pressure attached to the challenge. It is wind in the sails to see how this “pebble in my shoe” of systems and shepherds might be a divine invitation to play out from dreams to realities with whatever time the Lord gives me. To find ways to serve the local church and her leaders with trust and vulnerability, moving towards wholeness and flourishing. And in the meantime, to not rush out of hiddenness, to sit under leadership in a local congregation, write, and work in the marketplace. To meet friends in seasons of transition, lead a bible study for a group of rowdy freshman boys, and work out with my girls. For now, this is what it looks like to take my work “to the ground.” To try to practice and experiment the things I’m learning. Not to perform perceived perfection, but to take small steps of obedience with the ideas and reflections that I have been sitting with.

My journey through Northern would not let me settle for the dissonance between what might be and what is. It would not let theology name ideals while ignoring the ground beneath our feet. And at the same time, it would not let us become cynical realists who only describe the world as it is without imagining what could be made possible with faithful presence (to borrow a Fitch term). There was a constant push to hold reality and possibility together. Excavation and imagination. Observation and prophetic hope.

I would not say it is comfortable now. In fact, it still feels costly, and there is a good chance I will fail more than I succeed. But escape and resignation are not options. The work requires staying present long enough to create space where imagination can breathe, take root, and slowly become real. Distance running has helped me understand this. I cannot be in a hurry. But I can take the next step. Get to the next marker. Whether I am carrying a big idea or only a small inclination, the invitation is the same: ask the next question. Respond with a step of embodied fidelity in allegiance to King Jesus (to borrow from Matthew Bates). This is the work of cultivation. The Groundwork required. Hard work, but holy work.

I am coming to understand that this whole thing was not about becoming a “better theologian.” It was not about putting “Dr.” in front of my name. The point wasn’t to become the “expert” in the room who arrives with the answers. The point is to become the kind of person who can help theological reflection emerge from within a people in a specific place. The program was forming fellow travelers who could become trusted guides. Trusted guides who can listen carefully, name reality honestly, ask better questions, discern patterns, and help others make theological meaning in their own context. This is about nurturing communities of micro-contextual theologians. People who may never use that language, but who are learning to pay attention to God, place, people, and possibility with greater faithfulness.

Northern taught me how to ground thoughtfulness. It taught me to cultivate imagination and tether it to a people, a community, and a set of practices. It did not ask me to choose between presence and theology. It trained me to be an embedded contextual theologian, or a “theologian in residence” (thank you, Mike Moore), so presence and theology can dwell rightly together.

The pre-work mattered because it slowed us down before we ever entered the room. We were not showing up cold, waiting for the professor to tell us what mattered. We were already immersed in the material. We had already spent time with the books and the tensions inside them. That meant each of us arrived with something different, and that was part of the gift. Different lines in the books struck different people. Certain concepts landed with one person because of what they were living in their ministry, while something else stood out to another person because of what they were processing in their setting.

I remember a classmate reading a quote they had found that struck me to my core. I had completely missed it! And so I grabbed the highlighter and marked the page, prepping it for what I would later write. I loved that part of the process. I would pull something from a reading that no one else seemed struck by, and someone else would name something I had almost passed over. Then, when we came together in person, those different takeaways began to interact. Sometimes it made me rethink what I had read, or it sharpened something I was already sensing. Sometimes it helped me hear in a fresh way what I had seen but not yet fully understood. It was as if the material opened up in stereo. The readings were not static. They became dynamic once they were refracted through a room full of attentive, thoughtful people.

That created a really strong set of feedback loops. The room had a kind of discernment built into it. The most impactful dialogue was not always the most obvious or the most academically central point. Sometimes it was the insight that met someone right where they were, and because they named it, the rest of us got to see it too. It felt like we were creating a larger whiteboard together, one that could hold more than any one of us could have captured alone.

The in-person cohort became the place where all of that could be tested out loud. It was not just a space for content delivery, as a podcast or YouTube video might produce. It was a space for communal processing. The structure gave enough direction to keep us moving, but enough openness for the group itself to begin shaping the experience. And as relationships deepened, shared language emerged. The group began to have a feel. We learned how to listen to one another, push a little, ask better questions, and name what was happening beneath the surface. As trust grew, people engaged more deeply. And as people engaged more deeply, the cohort became more than a class.

Then there was the writing on the tail end, which I think was just as important as the reading on the front end. Writing forced us to do something with what had happened. It required us to gather the material and the conversations and work them into our own thinking. The writing was part of the formation. It was where the conversation had to become our own. It forced us to wrestle with what stayed with us, what challenged us, what was shifting in us, and what needed to take shape back home.

Looking back, the strength of the format was that each part depended on the others. The pre-work helped us arrive with substance. The cohort expanded that substance through conversation and relationship. The writing helped us carry it into reflection and practice. None of those pieces alone would have had the same effect. Together, they created a pattern that was demanding but also generative. It honored the work each person had to do alone, while also recognizing that understanding deepens in community. And finally, it trained us to do the contextual work back home. The goal was not only to learn what contextual theologians do, but to become people who could do that work and help others pay attention to where God is already at work among them.

What I appreciate now is that the format did more than hand us information. It made it hard to stay passive. It asked something of us. It invited us to take ownership. Because the group leaned in, it became more than a model. It became a shared practice of learning how to think and discern together. It was one of the hidden strengths of the entire experience. The rhythm gave us a way to enter, share, and carry the work home.

The cohort. Our cohort. A “group of people with a shared characteristic.” That is the technical definition, I suppose. But for me, the cohort became one of the most unexpected and meaningful gifts of my time at Northern. We were not a uniform group. We came from different denominations, ministry settings, regions across North America, and stories that had shaped us in distinct ways. And yet each person carried theological insights that had a way of sharpening the rest of us. We each carried hope for the future because we truly love the Church and our local expression of that Church. Beneath the diversity was a shared conviction that Jesus is not done with his Church. That conviction held us together. It gave our differences somewhere to go.

There were sixteen of us. We did not just show up twice a year to sit in class and gather information. In Alan Roxburgh’s words, we became fellow travelers. What made the cohort meaningful was a genuine desire for understanding. We wanted to know one another, with all of our contexts, questions, burdens, and motivations. We attempted to listen to the why beneath the ideas. Why does this person care so deeply about this issue? Why does that ministry challenge land with such weight in their context? Why does this theological conviction feel so urgent to them? In that sense, the cohort became a place where we learned how to interpret one another charitably, where each person’s life and ministry context gave texture to what they were saying. It was not uncommon for a classmate’s name to show up in a post-class paper because something they shared had stayed with someone long enough to shape what they wrote.

That kind of community was built over time through shared experiences that often mattered just as much as the formal academic work. Shared meals became part of the formation. Around those tables, stories continued, questions resurfaced, and conversations from class found new life. It created a kind of table fellowship that was as formative as a lecture. There is something about breaking bread (and plenty of other foods I was not accustomed to) together that lowers defenses and opens people up. Car rides became spaces for probing conversations about family, ministry, theology, and calling. Late-night conversations on Fitch’s back porch or in the hotel lobby carried similar weight to assigned readings. Going to a Blackhawks or Cubs game, snack breaks in the hallway, and lingering after class all created informal spaces where trust was built. Looking back, I do not think those were accidental extras.

This is part of the cohort's ecosystem. It is in those unscripted moments that people often speak most honestly and freely, where the guard comes down just a bit more. It becomes hard to reduce one another to positions or categories when you have sat around a table together, heard about each other’s families, shared disappointments, and listened to stories of ministry that were both beautiful and painful.

From where I sat, it was not shallow camaraderie. We were not averse to disagreement and did not all think the same way. We did not arrive at the same conclusions on every issue. But there was enough trust and enough shared humility under Jesus and his Church that disagreement did not have to fracture the room. In fact, some of the richest moments came precisely because people were willing to stay in the conversation rather than retreat from it.

That is part of what made the group feel safe to me. Safety did not mean the absence of tension or the avoidance of hard questions. It meant there was enough relational depth and mutual respect to tell the truth, ask difficult questions, and speak from conviction without fear of being dismissed. In a polarized age, and especially within church contexts where difference can easily become suspicion, that space feels rare. It was not perfect, but it was a beautiful space to practice truthful, charitable presence. And it was deeply life-giving.

Each time we gathered, there was a rhythm to it. We would enter the cohort carrying the weight of our local contexts, our churches, our work, our families, and our own internal questions. Then, over the course of 5 days together, something would happen. The conversations, meals, laughter, learning, and late-night processing all began to work their way into us. By the time we left, most of us were exhausted. But it was a peculiar kind of tiredness. We were exhausted, yes, but also energized. Drained by the intensity of the week, yet renewed by the sense that we were not alone. Sent back into our own specific places with full minds, full hearts, and often a fuller imagination for what faithful leadership might look like.

What stands out now is that the cohort did not end when the classes ended. The formal academic structure eventually came to a close, but the relationships remained. That may say as much as anything about what was really built there. Even after assignments were submitted and courses were completed, the desire to stay connected continued. People still try to connect when they travel through each other’s cities. They still hop on Zoom calls when they can. They still care when updates are shared. That kind of continued relationship cannot be manufactured by a syllabus. It is the fruit of genuine affection, shared struggle, and meaningful formation alongside one another.

As much as I valued the academic rigor of the program and was grateful for the formal structure that shaped us intellectually, this was by far the greatest gift Northern gave me in the season I was in. It gave me people…at a table. And it gave me conversation partners. It gave me a community of fellow pastors and leaders who were serious about Jesus, hopeful about the Church, unafraid of complexity. They were willing to stay near one another through disagreement, growth, and change. I wanted an academic challenge, but I also needed companionship. I wanted ideas, but I also needed fellowship. A gift I gladly received, which we experienced together.

But hiddenness is also awful. Not mildly uncomfortable. Not inconvenient in a way that makes for a good story later. Awful, disorienting, and sometimes humiliating. There were parts of the last four years where hiddenness did not feel like a gift at all. It felt like being shelved. Like the middle school football player standing on the sideline asking the coach to put him in and just getting a nice pat on the head. Like the life I had known, the roles that had given me language, the usefulness that had helped me know where I fit, had all been pulled beneath the surface. I could use words like wilderness, healing, transition, or formation, but a lot of the time, it just felt like I had been taken out of circulation. Those are the honest feels.

I was introduced to the language of the “dark night of the soul” somewhere along the way, maybe through Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night, maybe through Pete Scazzero, and eventually back toward St. John of the Cross. Warren’s book is framed around Compline and the question of how we trust God in the dark, in suffering, vulnerability, and God’s seeming absence. The book did two things. First, it alerted me to the reality that we (in suburban American Christianity) have a severe underdevelopment of a theology of suffering. But secondarily, her language gave me a way to name something I could not quite explain.

I want to be careful here because not every hard season is a “dark night,” and sometimes we can make our pain sound more mystical than it is. But there was something about that phrase that helped me. There are seasons when God is not absent, but He is also not present in the ways I had learned to recognize. The old lights go dim, not because God has left, but because God may be healing us from our dependence on light we can manage.

Only recently have I begun to see the past season as the gift of hiddenness rather than the curse of being shelved. That did not come quickly. For a long time, I could not tell if I was being protected, buried, disciplined, forgotten, or remade. Maybe it was some mixture of all of that. A phrase my wife and I used was “winter.” In the winter seasons, it doesn’t look like a lot is happening above the surface. In fact, it looks a lot like barrenness. But there is a sustaining work taking place below the surface. Holding space for the warm sun and spring showers to come.

Another image that has helped me is cocooning. Not the cute version where everyone knows the butterfly is coming. More like the version where the old form dissolves, and you do not yet have language for what is being made. These pictures were given by the Lord at the moments and weeks we needed them most. Not because they solved a problem, but they were soul manna, reminding us to trust the Lord in the hiddenness. Faith became embodied trust, even when everything around us might have screamed otherwise. These pictures became anchor points for conversations to hold onto in the hard days and “Ebenezers” to point back to as the days passed.

The fancy word I eventually found was liminality. It refers to that strange state of transition and in-betweenness, what anthropologist Victor Turner called being “betwixt and between,” no longer in the old place but not yet in the new. That language helped me understand that sometimes, from the inside, transformation can feel a lot like death. And sometimes things really do have to die before new life can spring up.

God used some surprising places for that work. He used a roofing company and a seminary. Two places that are not necessarily among the top institutions for soul restoration in today’s cultural or spiritual headlines.

He used a specific, small group of people who knew me without needing me to be impressive. That still feels strange to write, because part of me would have expected healing to come through something more obviously spiritual or more public. But much of the restoration happened in the relatively unknown and mundane rhythms of being in the marketplace. The everyday building, task managing, and people problems we all encounter during our week. Problems to solve that had nothing to do with sermons, church politics, or pastoral identity.

I was not being asked to carry everyone’s soul. I was not being asked to interpret every room theologically. I was not being asked to be the visible spiritual representative of a community. I was just working, learning, contributing, making mistakes, being part of a team, and rediscovering that my value was not tied to my ability to pastor publicly. The hiddenness gave parts of my soul room to breathe.

Seminary did a different kind of work, with an equally wonderful group of people. I’ll write more about Northern in future posts, but the gift of the people through the experience was unexpected. A cohort receptive to the struggle, asking questions, and leaning into the mystery together. People from different streams who dearly loved Jesus and his church. It gave me new and refreshed language and categories. It gave me a way to look back over years of ministry, disorientation, longing, and hope without reducing all of it to bitterness or nostalgia. It helped me see systems, name power, and understand that some wounds were personal, but not merely personal. And slowly, almost without realizing it, I began to see that God was not only healing me from something. He was forming a different kind of seeing in me.

The film “A Hidden Life” helped me feel the weight and beauty of this in a way I did not know I needed. It gave me a picture of faithfulness that was not loud, successful, platformed, or easily measured. It was hidden, costly, and largely unseen. I think that is what I had trouble really believing: that a life could matter even when it was not seemingly moving the action forward. Eugene Peterson, in his book, “Under the Unpredictable Plant,” writes, “the pastoral itch to be where ‘the action is’ should be resisted.” I have thought about that often, partly because everything in me had been trained to believe that being near the action meant being useful, and being useful meant being faithful.

But hiddenness has been teaching me something else. It has been teaching me that the action is not always where I think it is. Sometimes the most important work of God is happening in the quiet, in the ordinary, in the small circle of people who know the unfinished version of the story, in the marketplace rhythms that feel unspiritual until they become the place where your soul starts to heal.

There are realities of the last four years that I did not choose and certainly did not anticipate. I do not want to romanticize them now. Hiddenness is beautiful, but it is also awful. It strips, disorients, humbles, and sometimes leaves you wondering if the life you thought you were living has simply disappeared. But maybe hiddenness is also one of the places where God frees us from needing our lives to be legible too quickly. Maybe the hidden place is not only where God restores our soul. Maybe it is where God teaches us that our soul was never meant to be held together by visibility in the first place. Maybe the only visibility worth longing for is the kind that opens our eyes again to the goodness, truth, and beauty of God.

As I have tried to make sense of the last four years, I wanted to write four short reflections on what made this experience such a gift, especially in the season I was walking through. What I am attempting to describe is not necessarily the nuts and bolts of how things worked, or what all I learned, but rather, the posture of the program and the many gifts the experience provided.

Someone asked me a few days ago, “Why did you choose Northern?” My response was one that I have given multiple times over the years: “It’s because I wanted to learn from a collection of people.” When I was exploring doctoral programs, several voices at Northern intrigued me because they were putting language to things I had sensed but could not yet name. I knew I wanted to learn from them. What I did not know was how much that collection of voices would end up forming me.

Our primary guide was Dr. David Fitch, whom we were asked to simply call “Fitch.” He was a great guide as the overseeing professor, and times spent in the classroom were matched by his invitation into his home on Wednesday evenings for fellowship and continued conversations. But the experience at Northern never revolved around Fitch. It wasn’t intended to. It was not about reducing education to a single voice speaking from the front of a room. Fitch’s writings alone beat the drum of mutual submission and collective discernment, so it made sense that this was the practice in the classroom. There was a consistent pattern of bringing in other voices, people with deep expertise in their field. He brought in other professors, authors, and practitioners with lived experience in real ministry settings and practical wisdom forged through actual engagement.

What made this meaningful was that they were not talking about ministry from a distance. Their knowledge was not detached from their experience and practice. In many cases, they were not speaking as people who had mastered a subject in abstraction, but as people who were still actively wrestling with its implications in their own communities and institutions. They were bridging the voices that had gone before them, with their lived experiences, into fresh dialogue with us. At times, conversation would break out around the room, and it was not the professor going passive or losing control of the syllabus. It was space for all of us to lean in and learn from each other, the professors included. This gave the learning a different kind of weight and invited us, as students, into a similar pattern to model. It was a living conversation, not just a completed body of information.

That posture shaped the whole program. It quietly taught us that theological education was not supposed to be a closed system. We were not there to inherit the conclusions of one expert, though we deeply cherished and valued their voice. We were learning how to access souls across differences. In that sense, Northern modeled something for ministry itself. I have become less convinced that faithful leadership is formed by just one stream of influence. It is formed as we listen, test, discern, and allow voices to sharpen or challenge each other. After all, the Church is the collective body across people groups and throughout history. Why should its training grounds in seminaries be any different? In a time when we think we have all the answers and are pretty certain we have nailed “all the things,” it is refreshing to admit we really do need each other. The structure of the program quietly reinforced that mature theological imagination requires more than a single trusted voice.

I saw this same pattern in courses like Dr. Jonathan Tran’s, where the syllabus itself became a kind of conversation. Each class put several thinkers and perspectives in front of us, so the conversation had already started before we ever sat down in the room. By the time the cohort began, we were arriving with tensions, questions, resonances, and partially formed insights already alive within us. The reading gave me time to process before sharing. We had already begun to carry multiple voices internally, and that made the cohort experience richer when we finally gathered for conversation.

The program enabled the kind of processing that let you sit with something and trace connections to discover what was beneath the surface. The readings prior to the cohort created space for ideas to interact and sometimes even interrupt one another. Then, when we came together in person, the classroom became less of a place for downloading content and more of a place for shared discernment. It is one thing to receive information. It is another thing to enter the room already carrying a chorus of voices, and then to test and deepen those voices in community. The cohort became a place where theology was worked out in dialogue. The conversations began in class and then spilled over as we sat around tables eating a sandwich with Alan Roxburgh or Jeannine Brown, or coffee with Mark Mulder, or Hot Pot with Jonathan Tran. That dynamic helped me see that robust theological reflection is not a solo act. It requires encounter and friction. And it requires paying attention to the actual people and places in front of us. When those things come together, learning becomes more than accumulation. It becomes formation.

There was something that felt deeply pastoral about this way of learning. Ministry itself is never one-dimensional. Real people, churches, and communities are shaped by layered stories, pressures, systems, and longings. A single-voice environment can quietly train us to reduce things and people, as though every problem has one clean answer from one trusted authority who holds a “power over” the collective. But to be formed in a multi-voice environment is to be prepared for the complexity of actual life and ministry. It trains us to do more than master content. It teaches us to listen, discern, and lead without pretending everything is flat. It taught me that the classroom can become a place of communal discernment rather than mere intellectual performance. It showed me that wisdom often comes from many voices gathered around truth, practice, and shared presence, and not necessarily the loudest voice or the one with the most followers.

Thinking back to the original question of “why Northern,” I have treasured the many voices and the hearts behind those voices. I did not fully know at the time which people I needed to learn from, but Northern gave me the right guides for this season and this cohort. To Doctors Fitch, Roxburgh, Brown, Edwards, Marti, Mulder, Tran, and Bevans, and every author who’s spoken something significant….THANK YOU! In a time when leadership can become reactive, tribal, and overly dependent on personality, I needed a formation that was slower, wider, and less anxious. It has made me slower in the best sense. More thoughtful, more patient, and more open to discernment that requires trust, depth, and dialogue.

I am interested in the local church, but not in a romanticized version of it. I deeply love the church. I still believe God works through ordinary communities of people learning to follow Jesus together. But I am also interested in telling the truth about how church systems can shape people in ways we do not always recognize. Especially pastors and leaders.

My doctoral research explored how church leadership systems form pastors. Not just what churches say they believe or what their mission statements claim, but what their actual life together teaches people to become. What gets rewarded or avoided. What kind of person moves toward trust. What kind of honesty becomes costly. What happens when a pastor is needed by everyone but known by very few. What happens when gifted leaders become the hidden infrastructure holding the whole thing together.

I am interested in what it means to become more truthful, whole, free, and human before God and one another. I am interested in the kind of life that cannot be manufactured by strategy but can be cultivated through presence, patience, truth-telling, and love.

Some of this will come through theological reflection and essays connected to my dissertation work. Other pieces may come through stories from ministry, coaching, business, family, and life in a small Hill Country town. Some may just be me thinking out loud as I try to make sense of what the next season looks like.

This isn’t a space for hot takes. I am not very interested in outrage as a writing strategy. There is enough of that already. I am more interested in slow attention, an excavation work, if you will. Naming what is beneath the surface as we curiously ask better questions. Finding language for things many of us have felt but have not always known how to say.

The phrase I keep coming back to is becoming who we already are. That has become important to me. Maybe because I have spent enough time trying to become impressive, useful, needed, capable, or acceptable. Maybe because failure, transition, ministry wounds, and middle age have a way of stripping away some of the illusions. Maybe because I am learning that Jesus’ invitation is not to become a louder or more polished version of myself, but a truer one. Maybe that is not only true for me.

Maybe pastors, churches, families, and communities are all carrying some version of that invitation: to stop performing wholeness long enough to actually become whole. That is what I hope to explore here. Not as someone who has arrived. More as someone walking with a shovel, a notebook, and a stubborn belief that God still raises the dead.