I had a realization on a walk this week that might provoke a similar one in you.

The realization: I am not Wendell Berry. And that’s fine.

Berry is one of my favorite fiction writers. Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow are two of my favorite novels, period. I love his essays on community, economy, and relationships too. Back in 2017 I dug deep into a theology of place, and I don’t think another writer has shaped my sense of place more than Wendell. His descriptions of timeless rivers, rolling farmland, property that’s stayed in families for generations, and a people who remember their place all move me. Leaving the academy to become a farmer who writes novels about farmers was both romantic and full of integrity. He’s been consistent in his convictions about place, the environment, and creation for decades.

In the church planting networks I was a part of, Berry got handed out as a prescription. Church planters have a similar wiring to entrepreneurs: creative, driven, efficient, high capacity, usually high on the 3, 8, and 1 on the Enneagram. The tendency is to burn hot, overwork, and build relentlessly. In a well-intentioned effort to correct that tendency, a lot of us got prescribed the slow, patient prose of Berry and the equally slow, patient characters in his novels.

Like a lot of prescriptions, it’s well-intended and can even help. But prescriptions can also overcorrect, be ill-fitting, or they can just be for a season of your life. When it comes to Christians in leadership, prescriptions are everywhere.

Walking through our neighborhood last week, past the creek, thinking about the four seasons here in Michigan, it hit me: I am not Wendell Berry. I’m not slow, patient, or romantic about seasons or farmland. However, I do share his desire for an integrated life, for my convictions to actually show up in my place and my life. God wired me to build, to create, to connect dots at all hours of the day, to cheer my friends on and win as a team, to prefer the rigor of trail running and CrossFit over fishing, and to romanticize the timeless power of the ocean over the quiet of a river.

Can a well-intended prescription throw you off? Yes, when you mistake it for the principle underneath it. That’s the distinction in what I was thinking about — the difference between a principle and a prescription. A principle is what’s true for everyone, a prescription is what worked for someone else. Berry’s slowness was never the principle, attentiveness was — a life ordered enough that you can actually notice God, your family, and your own soul. Berry got there by rivers and hayfields. I get there by trail miles and the ocean. Same target, different road, and neither of us gets extra credit for the road.

What prescriptions have been given? The trick is, when you adopt the prescription rather than the principle, the temptation is to focus on being someone you’re not rather than living into who God made you to be. You are not John Mark Comer or Pete Scazzero. Neither are Elon Musk or Naval Ravikant. If we believe that God has knit you together in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139), has made you for a particular time and place (Esther or Acts 17), or has saved you with a purpose to fulfill particular good works he has for you (Ephesians 2), then you have to live into who God has made you to be, in the time and place he has you. Hold fast to truth and collect principles beneath the prescriptions.

We just had our last day of school. As of a few weeks ago, we officially have two high schoolers. In words of Will Ferrell, that escalated quickly.

Titus has been playing flag football, and he’s been one of the better players on a team that…hasn’t won much. That’s a hard combination at any age but especially in middle and high school. As a fan of Friday Night Lights, we’ve been talking about what to do when you give your best and it’s not enough and how to lead with your head up through a loss on the scoreboard. Hopefully he’s learning how to compete with your whole self in a situation you can’t control. As the coach, I am too. :)

Speaking on Growth & Culture

I few to Austin a few weeks ago to speak at the Advance Movement Network’s pastor’s retreat for large churches.

They asked me to speak for three sessions on navigating growth without losing your culture. I’m thankful for both the good and hard lessons I’ve learned from leading in growth and I loved the conversation.

If the topic would be helpful for your and your team, simply respond to this email.

A few things worth sharing from the work:

Woodside has been in a strong stretch. A few things I want to note because they’re worth celebrating: We’ve been working on a very large, two year campaign to mobilize every member for ministry (10,500 weekly) and raise the budgets we need for the next chapter of ministry ($80m over two years). Four of the thirteen campuses are now 1000 people or more and there are some exciting opportunities ahead including a possible new campus a stone’s throw from Michigan State University.

It’s been fun to lead the team responsible for such a campaign. They’re really clicking together and appreciating the Sprint-based operational rhythm we’ve adopted; which has provided focus and buffer. I created a strategic plan for the team and recently refreshed job descriptions to support it. Most of all, the team enjoys working together and they’re producing some of the best work they’ve done.

This testimony continues to floor me every time I see it.

MinistryEngine continues to roll. Kim and I had one of our favorite teaching days recently. We walked a large nonprofit’s leadership team through the Leadership Pathway I built for navigating the different levels of an organization. What made it land wasn’t just the clarity on roles, it was the moments where room started to see the invisible, unnamed weight the people above and below them are carrying. (Which, of course, Kim was so good at leading through). It was awesome to see newer people hear what the directors carry, for the frontline managers to hear what the executives carry, and vice versa.

We also have a few fractional comms clients right now, helping churches get clearer on their messaging and communications. It’s been genuinely fun work with friends, which always makes it better.

Relational Leadership has two new podcast episodes up on the feed -- one on the invisible cost of growth, and one that’s a Q&A covering some good questions about marriage and leadership.

We’re looking at a Lead Together cohort or two later in the year. Reply to this if you and your spouse are looking to strengthen your leadership together at work and home and I’ll give you the details.

Worth Your Time

• Nick Cave sat down with Freddie Sayers and Tom Holland on UnHerd for a conversation on faith, church, and creativity. His comments on Christianity being the new punk are fun.

• YungLean’s video for “Storm”. Some of the best creative direction I’ve seen in a long time. Watch here.

• Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull has been outstanding. Most people associate Pixar with Steve Jobs or John Lasseter -- the visionary owner and the creative genius. Catmull is the one who actually held the place together, and that's a perspective you don't often get. He's the operator in a room full of artists, the systems guy inside a creative organization, the leader who had to figure out how to protect the culture without killing what made it great. I identify with that more than I do with the other two. If you're leading any kind of creative organization and trying to keep it healthy as it grows, this one is worth your time.

That’s the update. Thanks for being in my corner.

-- Nick

You’ve likely experienced at least one of these. You got the promotion. You hired the people. You had the baby - maybe the third one. The business grew. The church grew. And somehow it feels harder than it did when you had less.

That’s not ingratitude or weakness, that’s the hidden cost of growth and it’s the thing almost nobody in the leadership space wants to name out loud.

We celebrate growth. We build teams and coach people toward it. I’ve spent my career in the music industry, ministry, and marketing & communications helping drive growth. But here’s the truth: growth doesn’t just add things to your life. It changes the nature of things. It restructures relationships, responsibilities, and rhythms you’ve relied on. And if you’re not paying attention, it can quietly dilute the very thing that made you or your organization worth growing in the first place.

This episode of Lead Together is for anyone who’s navigating a season of growth and feeling the friction. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just need language for what’s happening and a framework for what to do next.

What Growth Actually Does

Think of it this way. Playing tennis by yourself is simple — one person, one set of decisions, no coordination required. Add a doubles partner and the lines of communication multiply. Now you’re playing volleyball. Then basketball. Then football. At each level, the game isn’t just bigger, it’s fundamentally different. The skills, roles, and systems that worked at level one don’t scale automatically to level four. Complexity, coordination, and specialization increase as the number of players grows.

That’s what growth does to families and organizations. It doesn’t just add headcount or square footage. It restructures every relationship inside the system.

When a nonprofit client here in Michigan grew from a tight team of five to over a hundred employees, it wasn’t just that they needed more desks. The culture that everyone had assumed was self-sustaining — because it was embedded, lived, and relational — suddenly needed to be named, formalized, and actively maintained. The growth exposed what was never built to scale.

We see this pattern everywhere: churches, businesses, families. You add people, roles, responsibilities, kids, campuses — and suddenly the playbook that served you well in the last season stops working. You’re playing a new game by old rules.

In the episode, we break down four specific challenges that growth creates — and four ways to navigate them well. Whether you’re leading a team, building a business, or just trying to keep your family thriving through a busy season, I think you’ll find something useful here.

A few things we cover:

• Why smaller, healthier cultures are often the most vulnerable when growth hits

• The right person / right seat problem, and what it looks like at home

• Why surviving on heroics is a short-term strategy with long-term consequences

• The question to ask yourself before you restructure anything

[Listen on Apple Podcasts]

[Listen on Spotify]

Nick

There’s creative power everywhere, if you have eyes to see it.

I watched it in musicians that we managed, who’d walk into a dingy practice space with nothing but instruments and ideas and emerge weeks later with songs that could bond friendships or give language to what someone couldn’t express on their own.

I’ve seen it in my friend Jesse who can extract the hidden, underlying beliefs in leaders or companies — like Microsoft, Zillow, or the Seattle Seahawks — and hold them out to a wide-eyed room; giving them words to a purpose they couldn’t express five minutes earlier.

I see it in my friend, Truman, who is the creative vision behind, arguably, both the best coffee and best bar in Orange County. It’s not the marketing or fashion that makes them the best but Truman’s unique ability to dig deeply into subjects and combine them to create something profoundly good and delicious. In 10 years, his coffee shop, Hopper & Burr has created 75 unique recipes. In the first two years of his bar, Pioneer (named after the NASA space probes), they created 120 unique recipes alone.

I see it in my wife, who teaches our kids to crawl, walk, talk, reason, make wise choices, and navigate friendships. She also coaches clients to levels of self-awareness and performance they didn’t know they could reach previously.

You see it in teachers and taco cart vendors, veterinarians and videographers, plumbers and paralegals.

This is what Andy Crouch calls culture making: taking raw materials and turning them into something good, beautiful, and helpful.

Here’s the truth: You were made to build something.

Not consume. Build.

This is what theologians call the cultural mandate — God’s foundational command in Genesis 1 to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and cultivate it. Take what I’ve given you and make something of it. Work was never the punishment. Work was the design.

Back to Crouch’s description: The farmer turns wild land into gardens, the musician turns instruments and silence into songs that bond friendships, the baker turns wheat into bread, the engineer turns steel and stone into bridges.

Leadership is the human version of this, applied to organizations and teams. You take the raw materials — the talent, the friction, the culture, the problems, the people in front of you — and make something that wouldn’t exist without you.

That sounds significant, because it is. Leadership is one of the highest-stakes arenas in which that calling, that Cultural Mandate, plays out. The reality is, nearly everyone leads in some capacity either in work, at home, at church, or their neighborhoods. You have the opportunity to build and shape something good, beautiful, and that contributes to flourishing.

Consider today: What raw material are you working with right now? What are you trying to build?

The core of the content comes from synthesizing lessons from 20 years of my career into frameworks that I’ve used in multiple industries and in consulting work with Kim through Relational Leadership. I recorded the content as I taught it in classrooms, trainings, and coaching sessions over the past two years, transcribed the recordings, did initial edits with Claude (AI), and then additional multiple edits myself, including in this post.

One of the most surreal meetings we ever had when I managed music artists was at Rick Rubin’s house - a giant stuffed polar bear standing behind him and Johnny Cash’s Bible beside him. He wanted to sign one of the bands we managed and invited us over to get to know one another. Given his primary role as a producer, we inevitably talked about songwriting. He explained that the mistake a lot of artists make is to record a song too close to its birth. He said that because songs are like seeds, you have to let them grow up and mature a bit before making them concrete - play them live in clubs to see how they feel and how the crowd responds; play them in various forms to see how they feel acoustic, amplified, or on other instruments. This is my attempt to follow that advice with this content. Thank you for reading and any questions or feedback you have. What follows is an excerpt from chapter 3.

My fascination with organizational integrity didn’t begin in a classroom or through leadership theory. It began when I realized that the same patterns I had seen, and lived, at Mars Hill were not confined to churches. They showed up in creative agencies, school districts, nonprofits, and tech companies. They may have had different vocabulary but they carried similar dynamics. Organizations fracture for the same reasons leaders fracture — they lose touch with who they are. Their practices no longer match their values. Their external story drifts from their internal reality.

At the end of the day, organizations are made up of people, and if individuals and be dis-integrated, so can organizations.

This insight crystallized for me when I read Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. His premise is simple and profound: healthy organizations outperform smart organizations every time. You can have brilliant strategy, talented staff, and cutting-edge systems, but if the internal life of the organization isn’t marked by trust and clarity, none of it matters. Healthy beats smart. Alignment beats impressive. Congruence beats charisma. Every time.

At the heart of organizational health is trust — the willingness to operate in truth, to admit mistakes without fear, to disagree honestly. Lencioni helped me see that we experience organizations the same way we experience people. Every interaction reinforces one of two realities: we are either building trust or breaking it. And underneath that trust is a single question: Does what you say match what you do?

This idea made sense of so much of my own experience. At Mars Hill, the public messaging emphasized strong marriages, biblical conviction, and gospel-centered culture. But inside the system, the relational patterns, communication habits, and leadership dynamics told a different story. The gap between what was said and what was lived widened over time; the liabilities compounding faster when speed trumped integrity. The external persona no longer matched the internal reality. And once that gap grew too large, trust evaporated.

At Cross of Christ, however, we saw the opposite dynamic. We didn’t have the largest budget or the most sophisticated structure but we practiced what we claimed as consistently as possible. We told the truth about who we were and who we weren’t. We stayed within our identity. We confessed mistakes. We preached the gospel and sought to embody it in our every day lives. Our public story matched our internal experience. And as a result, we grew — not fast, but deeply, relationally, and sustainably. People trusted the culture because it was coherent.

That coherence, that alignment, that match between belief and practice, is integration at an organizational level. Integrated leaders create integrated cultures. Leaders who live with alignment build teams that live with alignment. Leaders who live divided lives create organizations that feel divided, thin, reactive, and anxious.

And this brings me to the framework that has shaped how I help leaders and organizations regain clarity: the armature.

Why You Need Conviction

My understanding of why leaders and organizations lose their way sharpened significantly through my work with my friend Jesse Bryan. Jesse formalized something some people intuit but rarely articulate: the armature. In sculpting, the armature is the internal frame that gives a piece structure and strength. Without it, the clay collapses under its own weight. With it, the form can expand, develop, and hold its shape.

Jesse applied this idea to storytelling. Every true story has an armature — the core belief the story exists to prove. It is the conviction underneath the narrative. Once you know the armature, every decision makes sense. Without it, the story becomes scattered, reactive, or overly reliant on tactics.

Here’s the truth most leaders don’t realize:
Every leader has an armature.
Every organization has an armature.

But in most cases, it has never been articulated. The closest that most leaders or organizations get is with a meaningful purpose statement; however, I’ve seen enough without a coherent purpose that to know it is rare.

When the armature is unclear, leaders and organizations default to something else — tricks, tactics, noise, branding that looks sharp but says nothing, or strategies that are impressive but not grounded. Leaders do the same thing. When conviction is unclear or compromised, the Projected Self takes over — the curated version we present publicly, shaped more by pressure than belief.

The Projected Self may be competent, but it is rarely whole, and without a clear armature underneath, it eventually becomes exhausting. This explains why so many leaders burn out, why teams lose clarity, or why organizations drift. They mistake projection for identity, charisma for conviction, storytelling for truthfulness.

Leadership without conviction inevitably becomes performance.
Culture without conviction becomes inconsistent.
Strategy without conviction becomes reactive.

And even when leaders do have core beliefs, if they consistently compromise those beliefs, or make decisions that contradict them, the gap between the projected self and the true self widens. Eventually the mask becomes the only thing people recognize.

Another problem is that, historically, many organizations have separated their marketing and communications - what they say externally - from their culture and operations. That separation forces dis-integration. When any email you send to your staff or recording of a call with stakeholders can be made public with a click, there is no separation - the supposed separation between internal and external is permeable.

This is why I add a second layer to Jesse’s armature concept in our work with leaders and teams: after we identify your conviction, we embed it into your organizational rhythms and practices.

Identity does not matter unless it becomes embodied. Conviction does not matter unless it becomes lived in the culture.

We’ll explore those practices in later chapters. For now, the foundational truth is this: Leaders without conviction, or who compromise that conviction, will always lead from projection.

Organizationally, the same dynamic applies. If a team, business, nonprofit or church doesn’t know what it believes, projection fills the vacuum — branding replaces identity and marketing replaces truth. Busyness replaces purpose. The system becomes double-minded, unstable in its ways, anxious at its edges, increasingly hollow at its core.

I’ve seen first-hand the truth of this for better and for worse. I have taken these principles, frameworks, and processes we applied at Cross of Christ and seen great effects in much larger and different organizations. As Sr. VP of Marketing at a tech company, my team had some of the highest eNPS scores in the company, helped drive multiple years of >20% growth, and led in the integration of OKR’s across the 15 year old company. At Woodside, the same tools helped turn around a 71 year old megachurch that was plateaued and declining, with an unhealthy culture, and saw 7% growth and an aligned team by year two. We’ve seen similar impact in creative agencies, nonprofits, small businesses, and in our individual coaching.

Conviction is not optional for leaders and teams. It is the armature that holds their story, and their culture, together. It creates the coherence (integrity) that builds trust both internally and externally.

When leaders clarify their convictions and live them, trust grows, teams align, cultures strengthen, and the widening gap between who they are and who they pretend to be begins to close.

When they don’t, projection takes over and projection always cracks under pressure.

CLOSING THE GAP

If projection is what happens when our convictions are unclear or compromised, integration is what happens when God meets us in the truth. One of the surprising realities of the Christian life is that God rarely begins His deepest work in the places where we feel strongest. He begins in the places we would rather keep tucked away—the wounds we’ve minimized, the guilt we numb, the insecurities we’ve masked, the disappointments we’ve never processed, the fears we’ve powered through. He goes straight to the places we’ve avoided, and instead of condemning us there, He restores us.

This is where my friend David Zahl’s work has been so clarifying for me. In his book Seculosity, Zahl describes what he calls “Performancism” — the version of ourselves we construct in order to secure belonging, approval, identity, or justification through performance. We live in a culture where everyday arenas like work, parenting, fitness, politics, marriage have become ways to prove ourselves. Instead of receiving identity as a gift, we try to earn it by outworking, outproducing, or outshining others. And that instinct inevitably leads us toward the projected self.

Zahl points out that the tragedy of living from the projected self is not simply the exhaustion, it’s the loneliness. When people respond primarily to the image you present — the optimized, curated version of you — you end up being admired, maybe even celebrated, but not truly known. Admiration without intimacy cannot nourish the soul. You feel the ache of being seen, but not known; loved, but only for the mask.

That insight helped me understand something I had personally lived without fully naming. When the projected self becomes the primary self you lead with, you lose access to the very relationships that could bring healing, correction, and joy. More importantly, you lose access to the truth of the Gospel, which reaches not the polished version of you but the unedited one.

Integration is not a self-improvement project; it is a Gospel project. It is what happens when the love and presence of Christ reach the places we’ve refused to expose. When the Gospel touches the truth of your life, the projected self, the mask, loses its power. You become less interested in performing and more interested in being truly known. Less concerned with managing perception and more willing to tell the truth. Less attached to maintaining an image and more committed to becoming whole.

This is why the first movement toward integration is simply naming reality — not in a dramatic or performative way, but in an honest one. Naming the truth of your story. Naming the places where fear or insecurity have shaped your leadership. Naming where conviction has been compromised or left unarticulated. Leaders rarely avoid truth because they are deceptive; more often, they avoid it because they are afraid of what it will cost. But avoiding reality carries a cost of its own. And the longer we avoid it, the higher the price becomes.

Here’s the truth, in each of the situations above, I compromised my own integrity and the integrity of the organization. I could’ve spoken up during my interview in the library. I could’ve raised questions or pushback in meetings earlier than I did. I could’ve said something during my boss’s ranting in the jeep – but I didn’t. Out of fear or people pleasing I stayed quiet and didn’t serve Mark or the team well. My compromise in those instances was part of the problem.

This is where the heart of the Gospel speaks most clearly. God does His deepest work in the very places we are most reluctant to expose. Jonathan Linebaugh captures Luther’s insight when he writes:

“And in each instance, God’s action is directed to and creates out of the opposite: God raised the crucified; justifies the ungodly; calls that which is not; gives life to the dead. Martin Luther captures the pattern. ‘It is of the nature of God,’ he says, ‘that he makes something out of nothing.’ As creator, God does the impossible. As giver, God’s grace is incongruous: ‘Thus God accepts no one except the abandoned, makes no one healthy except the sick, brings no one to life except the dead, and makes no one holy except sinners.”

This is the pattern of grace. God does not meet us at the mask. He meets us in the truth. He meets us where the fragmentation is most acute. He meets us where our projected self can no longer sustain the weight of our story. And only when we are finally willing to name reality can the Gospel do its work of restoring us.

Places and teams that refuse to face reality not only cannot have clear strategy (as you’ll see in a later chapter); more importantly, they cannot experience grace.

Leaders who cannot admit what is true cannot be made whole. Organizations that live from projection rather than conviction will always have the liability of a shadow side and, worse, never get to transformation.

The truth is that that confession and repentance are not punishments; they are gifts. They collapse the distance between the projected self and the actual self. Confession is how we re-enter the truth. Repentance is how God realigns us with what is good. Integrated leaders are not those who never drift; they are those who return to the truth quickly and regularly. They stay close to the places where God is at work. They refuse to pretend. They refuse to hide. They refuse to let the persona lead.

Integration also requires clarifying conviction. Leaders cannot lead from projection; they must lead from conviction. And conviction is not merely intellectual agreement—it is what you believe so deeply that you refuse to violate it, even when doing so would be easier or more expedient. That conviction becomes the armature of your leadership - the underlying structure that shapes your decisions, your relationships, and your culture.

And once conviction becomes clear, it must be translated into behavior. When what you believe and what you do begin to match is when integration become tangible. When your calendar reflects your values. When your decisions reflect your identity. When your relational patterns reflect the Gospel you proclaim. This is why the Seven Practices of Integrated Leadership exist. They are the structural supports that turn belief into behavior, conviction into culture, identity into action. They help leaders live the same story in every room.

Ultimately, integration is not something we accomplish through willpower. It is the work of the Spirit. The Spirit strengthens by confronting illusions, comforting wounds, illuminating blind spots, and forming us into people whose lives make sense from the inside out. The Spirit aligns our inner world with the life of Christ so that, over time, we become people marked by wholeness, humility, courage, and love.

This is why integrated leadership is not just good leadership, it is Christian leadership. It is leadership grounded in grace, anchored in conviction, shaped by truth, and lived without the need for pretense. It is the pathway to having impact that lasts.

On Servant Leadership

[This comes from an Instagram reel I did recently.]

When it comes to Christian leadership - either in the marketplace, ministry, or nonprofit space - the most well-known style of leadership is Servant Leadership.

Now, when most people define Servant Leadership, they default almost entirely to the servant side. In fact, I did this with my staff last month. I asked them to give me descriptors of Servant Leadership as I wrote them on the board - attributes like kind, sacrificial, and others-oriented. And yes, all of that is true. We should be looking like Christ, giving of ourselves for the good of others.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the phrase is servant leader. Both words matter.

Why? Because there’s a whole category of things you do as a leader that are deeply others-oriented — that are genuinely for the people you lead — and they cost something. Think about hard conversations, accountability, difficult decisions, or strategic clarity that forces prioritization. These aren’t failures of servant leadership. They’re expressions of it.

Think about how Jesus led. Yes, He washed feet and welcomed children. He healed and comforted and had dinner with people nobody else would eat with. But He also confronted the Pharisees directly (Matthew 23 is not exactly a warm fuzzy), told His disciples hard truths they didn’t want to hear, or challenged the rich young ruler and even watched him walk away. He made strategic decisions about where to go and what to do and when.

That’s the full picture. The servant and the leader.

There is a tendency to moralize one side over the other. Either we lead with a kind of top-down authority that loses the servant part entirely, or we’re so conflict-avoidant and people-pleasing that we’ve hollowed out the leadership. Neither one works. The first produces compliance without trust. The second produces warmth without direction.

The best leaders I know hold both—and they hold them together under real pressure, not just in theory.

Something to sit with this week as you lead: where are you defaulting to one side? Where do you need to reclaim the other?

A Personal Update

Last month I stepped into a new role at Woodside. After two years leading as the Executive Director (Pastor) of their largest campus (3,700 attenders), I was asked to consider stepping into a church-wide role as Communications Executive Director, overseeing communications and stewardship across all 14 campuses.

The Troy season was hard and good. I walked in to a campus that was plateaued, declining, and internally unhealthy. By God’s grace, it’s genuinely in a healthy place now — growing (+7% this year), unified, with a culture and team I’m really proud of. It was fulfilling to see many of the principles, processes, and structures I’ve built and tested in other settings be fruitful here. That kind of turnaround work is some of the most meaningful I’ve done.

The new role is similar work at a different scale — there’s a need to turn the team around and lead it to a place of growth. It solidifies what I’d call the other side of my skillset (from organizational leadership to communications leadership) and I’m thankful for the opportunity. The truly enjoyable thing is that I’ll get to work closely with my friends Brad House and Jesse Bryan again.

On the Relational Leadership and MinistryEngine side of things, there’s been a lot of encouraging opportunities to serve Christian leaders:

• Kim is providing 1:1 Executive Coaching to the CEO of a large nonprofit and group coaching to their leadership team. Together, we’re training their young managers and directors in leadership and management skills while our friend Brad helps them implement EOS as a leadership team. That kind of layered, integrated support is what we love to do - and it’s working.

• I’m providing fractional Communications Director support to two churches, shaping and directing their communications and training up their teams.

• We’re also both coaching Christian leaders in the marketplace at significant pivots in their careers. Kim’s group coaching has been so effective that one of her clients extended their contract with her.

I’ve drafted 12 chapters for the book I’ve been working on and am working my way through edits. Anyone have an agent they’d recommend? :)

It’s been a season of genuine blessing, and I’m grateful.

What I’m Reading and Recommending

Three things I want to point you toward this week:

On the Spiritual Ambition of Samwise Gamgee — A post I’ve been thinking about since I read it. The writer reflects on coming to realization he didn’t wan to beAragorn or Gandalf, not really. What he actually wants is to be Samwise Gamgee: to have a garden to tend, a table to come back to, joy that isn’t heroic but is faithful. Sam saves the world almost by accident, not because he’s chasing significance, but because he loves something small enough to carry. There’s something deeply Christian about that —where a faithful life looks less like a sword raised high and more like hands dirty with ordinary work. Worth your time. [Read it here.]

On the Death of Spotify — A sharp piece on what’s happening, not only to the music industry, but more broadly. The conclusion lands hard: we’re watching the death of the mass audience and the birth of the micro-community. The old game was getting a million people to listen to your song once. The new game is getting a thousand people to care forever. I’ve watched Thrice and bands I grew up with — others in the punk/hardcore/indie rock world — build exactly that. Twenty-five years ago, if you weren’t a platinum-selling artist, you couldn’t carve out a long-term career. Now those same bands are still creating, still touring, still deeply connected to the people who love them. It’s a music industry observation, but the leadership and marketing implications are everywhere. [Read it here.]

Nathan Florence on YouTube — Nathan is a professional surfer and I regularly torture myself watching his videos on YouTube. He is known for charging heavy, almost unrideable waves around the world. In the last couple of years he has started sailing the South Pacific with his brothers, John John and Ivan, and they catalog their searches through perfect blue waters for people like me to watch with envy and gratitude. But really, watch the guy surf. It’s incredible.

That’s what’s on my mind. If anything here resonates, hit reply or share it with someone leading alongside you.

Lead well,

Nick

Introduction

Walking into the creative agency’s office that morning, I could sense the energy immediately. Designers were hovered over web and graphic designs with a level of detail you only see in truly excellent teams. There wasn’t a whiteboard that wasn’t covered in arrows, insights, and sketches of potential frameworks drafted by strategists. Writers sat with headphones on, leaning forward into sentences that needed to be not only compelling but true. It was the kind of environment I’ve always appreciated, where people bring their best to work that matters.

On the surface, everything looked strong. The agency was known for high-quality work. Clients trusted them with meaningful stories. Team members carried the kind of talent and experience you don’t find everywhere. If you stood back far enough, you could easily believe everything was exactly as it should be.

But as anyone who has led long enough knows, you can feel relational tension before anyone names it. And if you paid attention in that office, you could tell something was unsettled. People were polite, but not fully connected. Meetings had an emotional tightness that wasn’t always tied to the work itself. Comments landed a bit more sharply than intended. The energy wasn’t chaotic or dysfunctional. It was more subtle than that. It was relational drift.

When we gathered for the workshop, it only took a little space for the unspoken truths to emerge. As we explored values, communication tendencies, and stress patterns, people began offering thoughts they had been carrying quietly. A strategist shared that she often felt her ideas didn’t make it into the final output. A designer admitted he didn’t always feel his perspective was taken seriously by one of the creative directors. An account manager noted that she wasn’t sure honesty was always welcome, especially when deadlines were tight. None of this was explosive. No one was trying to undermine anyone else. It was simply the truth finally finding language.

And something shifted once the truth was spoken. People exhaled. They listened. They began responding to each other with renewed clarity and empathy. Over the next several months, that shift grew. Retention stabilized at ninety percent. Revenue rose between fifteen and twenty-five percent. Difficult conversations became more productive. The culture strengthened because trust strengthened. The work became better because the relationships became better.

That experience reinforced something I have seen again and again: the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your leadership. Competency matters. Skill matters. But competency alone cannot sustain the weight of leadership. It may open the door, but only relational integrity keeps you in the room for the long haul.

THE COMPETENCY TRAP

One of the most subtle dangers leaders face is the belief that competency is enough. This is especially true for high performers. When someone is excellent at what they do, they can begin to rely on their skill rather than on the relational health of the people around them. A leader assumes that if the work is strong enough, the people will fall in line. They assume relationships will take care of themselves. They assume the results will justify the culture.

Competency becomes a shield. It becomes a way to avoid vulnerability, honest feedback, or relational investment. A leader may not intend to operate this way, but the gravitational pull of performance can be strong. Output becomes the measure of success. And when output drives everything, relational gaps grow quietly until they begin to cost more than anyone expected.

This trap shows up in the most public leadership collapses of our generation. Travis Kalanick built Uber through extraordinary strategic acumen, but his relational patterns created a culture of fear and instability that eventually led to his removal. Adam Neumann led WeWork with charisma and bold vision, but relational unpredictability and mistrust ultimately brought the entire enterprise down. James MacDonald preached with passion and led a growing church, yet a relational culture marked by fear and volatility caused the ministry to fracture.

These leaders were not undone by incompetence. They were undone by relational patterns born from character issues that went unaddressed. Competency carried them a long way, but competency could not repair what had been neglected.

There are common signs of the competency trap. Leaders become impatient with people who do not operate at their pace. They avoid conflict or handle it with too much force. They misunderstand how their emotional presence affects others. They rely on their intelligence or output to solve problems that require humility, emotional intelligence, or relationship. They develop blind spots around their own impact. And perhaps most perilous, they begin tying their identity so closely to their performance that any feedback feels like a threat.

These are not issues of intelligence. They are issues of formation. And until leaders recognize the dangers of relying too heavily on competency, relational breakdown followed by team breakdown becomes almost inevitable.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SHOWS

If we gather the most trusted organizational research of the last twenty years, the message is remarkably consistent: leadership effectiveness is primarily relational, not technical.

Gallup reports that seventy percent of employee engagement is determined by the relationship employees have with their manager. Google’s Project Aristotle found that the most important factor of high-performing teams is psychological safety - the sense that the environment is safe for honesty, risk, and even failure. To put it another way, they found that how a team worked together was more important than the particular competencies of the people on the team. Google’s Project Oxygen determined that their best managers were not the most technically skilled, but the most relationally capable: good communicators, good listeners, healthy coaches, and consistent supporters of their people. At a company known for their technical innovation and algorithms, technical skills mattered but, when it came to what made a great manager, they came in last.

Harvard Business Review reports that nearly ninety percent of what distinguishes high performers from others is emotional intelligence, not IQ. McKinsey’s research shows that relationally intelligent leaders produce teams that are nearly fifty percent more productive and significantly more collaborative. Pew Research and Lifeway have found that relational connectedness is one of the most reliable predictors of whether pastors and ministry leaders avoid burnout.

The conclusion is hard to miss. The difference between good leaders and great leaders has always been emotional intelligence, not IQ. Skill matters. But relational maturity determines whether skill becomes sustainable influence.

And this truth is becoming even more significant in the world we are entering.

WHY EQ MATTERS MORE THAN EVER

For years, emotional intelligence was considered a “soft skill,” something nice to have but not essential. That mindset has shifted dramatically. Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is now widely recognized as one of the most decisive traits in effective leadership. Studies have consistently shown that EQ plays a far greater role in long-term leadership success than a degree, technical skill or raw intelligence.

But EQ is not just one thing. It is a cluster of relational capacities that shape how a leader shows up in every environment. There are four components that are critical in leadership settings:

Self-awareness.
This is a leader’s ability to recognize their emotions, patterns, motivations, and blind spots. Self-aware leaders know how they come across. They understand their own strengths, limits, and tendencies. They can identify what is happening inside them before it spills out in unhealthy ways. Simply invert each of those descriptions to understand the negative impact of leaders who lack self-awareness. Without this skill, leaders often damage relationships without realizing why.

Self-management.
This is the capacity to regulate one’s emotions, reactions, and impulses. Leaders with strong self-management respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively. They remain steady in conflict. They stay grounded when pressure rises. They know how to slow themselves down enough to create space for wisdom to lead instead of reactivity.

Social awareness.
This is the ability to read the room, to notice what others are feeling, to recognize group dynamics, and to interpret unspoken cues. Leaders with strong social awareness notice when someone withdraws, when tension rises, or when a team is carrying disappointment. They are attentive to more than words, they are attentive to people.

Relationship management.
This is the ability to build trust, navigate conflict, offer encouragement, communicate clearly, and invest in others. Leaders with strong relationship management make people feel safe. They create clarity without aggression. They offer challenge without shame. They are consistent, dependable, and emotionally present.

When these four components work together, something powerful happens. Leaders develop a relational steadiness that invites trust. Their clarity creates alignment. Their genuine concern for others creates belonging. Their honesty creates growth. Their steadiness creates emotional permission for others to bring their full selves into the work. When we say that the quality of your life and leadership depend on the quality of your relationships, this is a picture of the reality and impact when that is lived out.

In contrast, when leaders lack emotional intelligence, the impact is immediate. They misread situations. They react impulsively. They overpower or withdraw. They create confusion instead of clarity. They generate anxiety instead of safety. They lose people long before they lose results.

As you read these descriptions, I hope you’re thinking of leaders you’ve had the pleasure of working with whose emotional intelligence created that rare combination of cultural health and measurable impact. Similarly,

Leaders with high EQ are not merely nice, they are effective in the most deeply human aspects of leadership. And in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence, EQ is becoming even more essential.

THE AI MOMENT AND THE HUMAN DIFFERENTIATOR

We are standing in a cultural moment where artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every domain of work. Tasks that once required hours of strategic thought can now be performed by AI tools in seconds. Content can be generated instantly. Vast amounts of data can be synthesized and analyzed immediately. Patterns can be identified faster than the human brain could ever process.

And while there is understandable anxiety about what this means for the future of leadership and work, I believe this moment clarifies something essential. It reveals what leaders uniquely bring to their organizations. It brings into sharper focus the deeply human aspects of leadership that cannot be automated.

AI can write draft emails, but it cannot build trust.
AI can outline a strategic plan, but it cannot sense when a team is tired or strained.
AI can produce perfect grammar, but it cannot comfort someone in suffering.
AI can identify trends, but it cannot discern what is wise.
AI can simulate empathy, but it cannot offer presence.
AI can respond, but it cannot relate.

Competency is being commoditized.
Relational wisdom is not.
Integrity is not.
Presence is not.

In an age where AI tools can create a decent strategy faster than we can write an outline, a leader’s unique value is not their intelligence. It is their relational maturity, their emotional steadiness, their integrity — it is the quality of their relationships.

The best leaders of the future will not be the ones who know the most, but the ones who can bring their full, integrated selves into the room with others. Leaders who can attune. Leaders who can discern. Leaders who can care. Leaders who can maintain presence in the midst of pressure. Leaders who can invite trust and cultivate belonging.

These are the skills AI cannot touch. And these are the skills Scripture has been calling leaders toward since the beginning.

THE THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION FOR RELATIONAL LEADERSHIP

At this point, the research, the stories, and the experience all point in the same direction. But long before Google or Gallup or McKinsey discovered the relational dynamics of leadership, Scripture declared it. The Bible does not treat relational leadership as a technique. It treats it as a reflection of God himself.

In Genesis 1, God introduces himself in relational terms: “Let us make man in our image.” The language is intentional. The first chapter of the Bible presents God as a community of persons—Father, Son, and Spirit—creating in unity and shared purpose. Relationship is not an add-on to God’s nature. It is his nature.

Genesis 2 underscores this truth with the first “not good” statement in Scripture: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” That moment comes before sin enters the world. Humanity was created for relationship because humanity was created in the image of a relational God. It is impossible to understand human flourishing, or human leadership, outside the context of relationship.

Jesus formed his disciples not simply through instruction but through shared life. He walked with them, ate with them, corrected them, encouraged them, and prepared them to lead not through technique but through imitation. His leadership was deeply relational because his mission was deeply relational. He did not save from a distance. He entered our world, shared our life, and invited us into his own.

Paul builds on this foundation by describing the church as a body of many members - one organism, interdependent, interconnected, and inseparable. His vision of leadership in passages like Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12 is grounded in unity, mutuality, and love. Leadership is not something done to people. It is something done with people.

All of this makes sense when you consider the relational nature of the Gospel. We are not saved into mere belief but into union with Christ and fellowship with one another. The Christian life is inherently relational. The Christian leader, then, must reflect the relational character of God. Skill matters. But spiritual maturity is always revealed in relationship. As Jesus said, “They will know you are my disciples by your love for one another.” Leadership, in its most Christlike form, is not measured by output but by love.

This is why relational leadership is never optional for the Christian leader. It is a theological calling, not simply a practical strategy. It is a reflection of the God we serve.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

The more I lead and the more I walk alongside leaders - in churches, businesses, creative agencies, nonprofits - the more convinced I become that relational maturity is the single greatest predictor of sustainable leadership. Competency matters. Vision matters. Strategic clarity matters. But none of those can compensate for relational fragmentation.

As we saw above, when leaders fail emotionally, spiritually, or relationally, their organizations inevitably absorb the cost. Cultures become anxious, communication becomes unclear, mistrust spreads, cynicism grows, good people leave. Even when the work continues, the soul of the team suffers.

Conversely, when leaders are relationally grounded, teams become resilient. They communicate openly and navigate conflict productively. They extend trust, stay, grow, and even flourish in other domains of their lives. The work that emerges from that kind of culture is always better.

This is why the future of leadership will not be defined by who knows the most but by who relates the best. It will not be shaped by who generates the best ideas but by who creates the conditions where people can thrive. It will not be determined by who works the hardest but by who cultivates trust, presence, and integrity.

The world is hungry for leaders who are emotionally steady, relationally grounded, spiritually rooted, and deeply human. That is the kind of leader people will follow in the years to come. And that is the kind of leader the Gospel invites us to become.

WHERE WE GO NEXT

The research is clears, stories are ubiquitous, and scripture is consistent: competency is not enough. The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your leadership. And in an age where skill is increasingly automated, relational maturity has never mattered more.

But this brings us to an unavoidable question:
How do you build the kind of relational integrity that sustains leadership over time?

You cannot cultivate relational trust if your own life is fragmented.
You cannot lead others with clarity if your own soul is divided.
You cannot build healthy relationships if your internal world is chaotic or masked.

Relational leadership requires something deeper than skill.
It requires integrity.
Wholeness.
Alignment between who you are, what you say, and how you live.

That is the focus of the next chapter.

Finding Your Place in God’s Story

Have you ever asked yourself questions like these?

How do I prioritize the many demands on my life?

How far can I go in fulfilling my purpose?

Why do the limitations in my life seem to be multiplying faster than the opportunities?

What would it take to pursue that calling I’ve always felt drawn to, but feel too trapped to pursue?

These questions aren’t just about time management or career decisions, they’re much deeper than that.

The truth is, you have two ways you can try to answer those questions and resolve their underlying tension. The first is that you can construct your own narrative, your own story. Even if you can’t answer those questions in and of yourself, you can look to the media, thought leaders, coworkers, or friends to give you the answers for them. Without recognizing it, you are looking to those sources as guides, sages, to set the boundaries of your world, to shape your identity, and to construct a story about you.

In our attempts to answer life’s fundamental questions, we try to author our own stories. We piece together fragments from a dizzying array of sources - pulling a productivity principle from this podcast, borrowing an identity marker from that influencer, adopting a life philosophy from a bestselling guru. We curate our social media to reflect not who we are but who we wish to be seen as. We join communities that reinforce our carefully constructed self-narratives. In our professional lives, we chase achievements and titles that we believe will solidify our chosen identity. Even our consumption becomes part of this identity-formation - the brands we align with, the conferences we attend, the books prominently displayed on our shelves all serving as props in our personal narrative. Like curators of a personal brand, we gather these disparate elements and assemble them into a patchwork story that feels uniquely ours but is, in reality, a collage of borrowed pieces. This self-constructed narrative feels authentic because we chose each element, but it remains fragile, requiring constant maintenance, validation, and vulnerable to both failure and the winds of fashion.

This is a natural thing to do because humans are ‘storied’ animals. Creating or deriving meaning through stories is something that separates us from animals. It’s something so innate and powerful that we often miss that we are doing it. In his book, The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall describes humans as species who are ‘addicted to stories’ to the point that even our dreams are stories.

Philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre made a nearly identical statement but then connects it to a profound application. He said that “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” To say it another way, you can’t answer the functional question without answering the deeper question of which story you exist within.

My favorite statement to this point is from GK Chesterton who said that he had always felt life first as a story: and if there’s a story, there must be a Storyteller.

This leads us to the second way you can answer those questions and resolve their underlying tension. Rather than constructing your own story, or piecing it together through other people’s voices; you instead place yourself, and your place, in God’s story. The questions are about understanding what you were made for: When you know who you are, you know what to do.

The answer begins in the first pages of Scripture with what theologians call the “cultural mandate”, God’s foundational command to humanity. This mandate addresses perhaps the most fundamental human question: What are we here for? Without this understanding, we risk falling into despair, idolatry, or self-centeredness.

Perhaps at this point, you’re wondering if religion, particularly Christianity, has any place in a discussion about leadership and culture. Maybe you’ve been taught to separate your “spiritual life” from your “work life.” Or perhaps you’re skeptical about whether ancient texts have anything meaningful to say about modern leadership challenges.

I understand these hesitations. Our culture often compartmentalizes faith as something private and personal, unrelated to the practical realities of leading organizations or creating culture. Others may have experienced religious teachings that seemed to devalue human creativity or diminish the importance of cultural engagement.

But what if this separation is actually part of our problem? What if the fragmentation between faith and work, between spiritual truth and practical leadership, contributes to the sense of purposelessness that plagues so many leaders today?

The biblical narrative doesn’t recognize these artificial divisions. Instead, it offers an integrated understanding of human purpose that encompasses all dimensions of life - including leadership, creativity, and cultural engagement. This isn’t about imposing religious rules on secular spaces but about recovering a holistic vision for human flourishing that can benefit believers and non-believers alike.

Even if you don’t share my Christian faith, I invite you to consider the wisdom found in this understanding of human purpose. After all, great leadership insights can come from diverse sources, and dismissing timeless wisdom simply because of its origin would be shortsighted; especially as it is wisdom that contributed to the founding of hospitals and universities, nations and global nonprofits, and has shaped Western Civilization. The question isn’t whether these ideas come from a religious text, but whether they illuminate truth about the human condition and a deeper wisdom that has proven itself true, beautiful, and good for centuries.

What we do with this deeper question of purpose determines whether our lives reflect God’s glory or become enslaved to the false stories of consumerism, materialism, or individualism. And nowhere is this more evident than in our leadership, where we have the opportunity to create something beautiful from the raw materials God has given us.

Around 15 years into my leadership journey, I noticed something interesting. Most leadership books and resources dive straight into communication techniques, conflict resolution, or management styles. While these are important topics, they miss something fundamental. They often treat leadership as an isolated skill rather than placing it within the broader story of what God is doing in the world.

This is why we begin with the cultural mandate. Before we can understand what leadership is for, we need to understand what humanity is for. Your leadership exists within a larger narrative, and seeing that clearly will transform how you view even the smallest moments in your work.

What Is the Cultural Mandate?

Let’s start at the beginning:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.’” (Genesis 1:27-30)

The cultural mandate is God’s foundational command to humanity to reflect His image by cultivating His creation. It’s expanded in Genesis 2:15 when “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”

Let that sink in for a moment. The first commission God gave wasn’t focused on avoiding sin or pursuing personal holiness; those concerns would come later after the Fall. Instead, humanity’s original purpose centered on active cultivation and creative ordering of the world. Work wasn’t a punishment or curse but a primary way we reflect God’s image. This doesn’t diminish our spiritual lives; it reminds us that from the beginning, God intended our engagement with the physical world to be meaningful, purposeful, and central to our identity as image-bearers.

This command wasn’t just for Adam and Eve at the beginning. It reappears throughout Scripture:

● After the flood, God tells Noah, “Be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it” (Genesis 9:7).

● The Psalmist marvels at humanity’s unique role: “You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands” (Psalm 8:5-6).

● Even in exile, God tells His people through Jeremiah: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters...” (Jeremiah 29:5-6).

Central to God’s design is a malleable world inhabited by men and women with unique capacities to think, feel, choose, create, and build. He created you with those same capacities and with particular gifts. One of the reasons He created you is to work like Him and make something of the world He has given you.

C.S. Lewis captures this beautifully in his essay “The Weight of Glory” when he writes that God “seems to delight in taking risks with His creation and to delight in the independent life that He has given to others.” God could have created a finished world that needed no development, but instead, He invited us to participate in shaping it - a profound act of divine delegation.

From Raw Materials to Something Beautiful

Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making and Partner at Praxis, offers a helpful perspective. He explains that humans make culture by taking raw materials and turning them into something good and beautiful. Think about it:

● Farmers transform wild land into crop-producing fields and gardens

● Artists craft beauty from raw materials - clay into pottery, pigments into paintings, notes into songs

● Vinters labor over vineyards to ultimately turn grapes into wine

● Engineers take steel and stone to construct bridges

● Millers turn wheat or rye into flours that ultimately become bread in the hands of a baker

This is what we do when we make something of the world. That is what God has made you and me to do. It’s about harnessing this creative power to bring flourishing in every sphere of life.

I saw this firsthand during my years in the music industry. A group of musicians would enter a dingy practice space with nothing but instruments and ideas, and weeks later emerge with songs that could bond friendships, inspire hope, or give language to what the listener can’t express on their own. The interesting thing is that the creative power transcended circumstances. The music they created would have an impact on people whether it was at a sweaty punk show in a condemned house, a legendary club like the Troubadour in LA or CBGB’s in New York, or the mainstage at Coachella or the Reading & Leeds festivals. In those moments of creativity, even before I fully understood the cultural mandate, I was witnessing creative power at work.

I saw this in other creative work where my friend Jesse could extract the hidden, underlying beliefs in a leader or company and hold them out to the wide-eyed room - giving them words to a purpose they couldn’t express five minutes earlier. I see it in friends like Alex who take passages of scripture, abstract passages from church fathers, and lyrics from current artists to write sermons that help you see God’s truth, beauty, and goodness in ways you’d never considered. I see it in my wife when she teaches our children to crawl, walk, talk, and reason; or when she coaches a client to new levels of self-awareness and leadership they didn’t know they could achieve. You see it in teachers and taco cart vendors, veterinarians and videographers, plumbers and paralegals. Creative power is everywhere if you have eyes to see.

This view stands in stark contrast to the messages we hear in our culture. Materialism reduces humanity’s purpose to just acquiring and consuming. If you wonder what’s behind the zero-sum power games in our world, it’s this view that there’s nothing outside this life. So get as much as you can while you can. The cultural mandate tells us that instead of accumulating for our own ends, we’re called to steward creation and cultivate what He’s given us for the good of others.

Similarly, postmodernism rejects any external purpose, claiming everything is just our own individual preferences or truths. What do you think is the end result of atomized individuals all expressing their own individual preferences or truths through their work? Self-centered projects where the end is not other people or the work itself but our own sense of identity. However, the cultural mandate gives us a universal purpose - to reflect God’s image through creativity and care.

Echoing Crouch, Tim Keller points out that “work is taking the raw material of creation and developing it for the sake of others.” This gives profound dignity to our daily tasks. Whether you’re developing software, managing projects, leading teams, or building communities, you’re participating in God’s creative purposes.

What’s at stake here? When we forget this calling, we shrink into passive consumers rather than active creators. Instead of bringing order from chaos, we merely sample what others have made. Instead of cultivating beauty, we settle for lust or gluttony. Instead of developing resources for others’ flourishing, we merely deplete them for our pleasure. It strips us of our God-given agency and relegates us to an existence like what we see in the movie Wall*E. This consumption mindset fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. We were designed to produce, not just partake; to generate, not just gather; to offer, not just acquire.

The consequences extend beyond our individual fulfillment. Our marriages become entertainment centers rather than creative partnerships. Our work becomes merely a means to fund our consumption or status rather than a context for cultivation. Our communities suffer from our withdrawal into private enjoyment rather than benefiting from our creative engagement. We lose ourselves in self-centered pursuits, missing the profound joy and dignity that comes from participating in God’s redemptive plan as active co-creators. The cultural mandate isn’t a burden, it’s an invitation into the most meaningful way of living possible.

The Cultural Mandate and Leadership

If you’re trying to figure out what your leadership is about, you’ll hear various answers. Two of my favorites, John Maxwell and Jocko Willink, would say “influence” or “mission achievement.” In other circles, you might hear about inspiration or servanthood. While these elements have their place, we don’t talk enough about how leadership is meant to make something of the world - to build something meaningful together.

Leadership is one of the primary ways God designed humanity to fulfill the cultural mandate. You, as a leader, were made to create, build, tend, serve, and multiply as an individual and together with others. As David Bahnsen writes in Full Time, “The work of our hands is not separate from the work of our hearts...We don’t have a spiritual life and a work life; we have a life, and God cares about all of it.”

The implications of this are profound. Leadership isn’t only about achieving goals or hitting metrics (though those matter). It’s about partnering with others to create something that wouldn’t exist if you were apart – a unique combination of gifts, perspectives, and passions that can uniquely contribute to God’s purposes in the world.

Think about where you see the “raw material to something beautiful” principle we mentioned above in your leadership:

● You take the raw talents of individuals and create effective teams that are greater than the sum of their parts

● You transform concepts and problems into solutions that serve others, unlocking benefits and value that didn’t exist before

● You shape organizational culture through countless small decisions

● You develop people, helping them grow into their full potential and seeing benefits in spheres of their lives beyond work

As I’ve served as an executive pastor, this was my love language – creating systems that served people well, stewardship processes that honored the church’s resources, and calling people to meaningful outcomes with challenge and care. You likely do similar things in your work. Whether it’s crafting stories in marketing that accurately convey value to customers or designing products that genuinely improve lives, you’re making something of the world.

During my time at Subsplash, I saw how marketing could be more than just driving sales. By clearly articulating how our products helped churches and nonprofits connect with their communities and share the gospel more effectively, we were participating in kingdom work even through spreadsheets, slide decks, and campaign strategies. In the midst of multiple years of over 20% growth, I was most proud that our marketing team had some of the highest satisfaction scores in the company because they felt empowered, supported, invested in, and connected to a purpose beyond MQLs.

Consider a Christian business leader who prioritizes integrity over profit to create a culture of trust that honors God. Or my friend who works as a director at Microsoft. In her one-on-ones, she regularly asks team members, “How are you doing? How are you actually doing?” She’s often met with surprise at the genuine inquiry. It’s a simple question, an easy movement toward her team. By taking the raw materials of her time, energy, and emotions to care for her employees, she’s cultivating a culture of intentionality and consideration. It’s not an empty gesture either; the culture she has built has led to her team excelling and her own promotions - it is good for Microsoft, her team, and her family.

Consider my good friend, Truman, who is the creative vision behind, arguably, both the best coffee and best bar in Orange County. It’s not the marketing or fashion that makes them the best but Truman’s unique ability to dig deeply into subjects and combine them to create something profoundly good and delicious — for example, the particular history of a drink and its ingredients, the creative progression of vanguards like Noma, the herbs, fruits, and vegetation unique to a season in an area, or a Korean fermentation process. In 10 years, his coffee shop, Hopper & Burr has created 75 unique recipes. In the first two years of his bar, Pioneer (named after the NASA space probes), they created 120 unique recipes alone. Most people who order a drink at either, don’t know what went into each drink, they only experience the goodness that they receive. What I love about Truman isn’t just his love and commitment to the craft but his love for sharing it with people, especially his friends.

The cultural mandate dignifies the small, overlooked acts in our work. Martin Luther’s theology of vocation speaks to the dignity of all work in God’s economy. If you were to trace the journey of grain becoming bread on your table, you’d encounter dozens of people caring for you along the way: the farmer planting the seed, the harvester gathering it, the miller grinding it, the baker shaping it, the grocer selling it. Each person does small, dignified work to cultivate God’s creation and bless others.

This stands in contrast to common views that work and leadership are all about personal gain, status, title, or paycheck. The cultural mandate shows us that work has a deeper purpose: reflecting God’s creativity and order. It also challenges the view that work is meaningless, just something we do to pay bills. Instead, the cultural mandate ties our work to eternal significance. God has made you with capacity to work, to do something with the world He has made.

Work has been given by God as a means by which we can live out our reason for being here. It is the context God has given us for worship, for relationship, and for witness. When we see our work through this lens, even the most mundane tasks take on eternal significance.

Why Do We Resist the Cultural Mandate?

If this is true—that God made the world with this directive for us to steward it, cultivate it, multiply, and bring about flourishing in ways that reflect Him—why do we resist it? We hear God’s intent and direction, but instead, we often:

1. Consume rather than create. Our culture celebrates consumption as the path to happiness, driving us to envy the latest devices, experiences, or entertainment. We’re constantly bombarded with messages suggesting that fulfillment comes from what we acquire, not what we contribute. This self-centered existence can define how we approach our work and relationships. Consider your own spending patterns over the past month. How much went toward consuming experiences or products versus investing in creating something of lasting value? What might shift if you allocated just 10% more of your resources toward cultivation rather than consumption?

2. Dominate rather than serve. Back in my music industry days, I’d walk into parties looking for who I needed to meet to advance my artists’ careers. I wasn’t thinking, “Who can I help?” but rather, “Who can serve my purposes?” This utilitarian approach to relationships stands in direct opposition to Jesus’s model of servant leadership. Think about your most recent networking event or social gathering. Did you approach it with a mindset of “What can I get?” or “How can I contribute?” The next time you’re in a room full of people, try experimenting with a different approach - look for one person you can genuinely serve without expectation of return.

3. Rely on self-determination and control. If you’re wired like me - type A and results-oriented - this might be your tendency. When I transitioned out of ministry during COVID and into marketing, that year was miserable because I was terrified of failure. I white-knuckled through it thinking, “I can handle this, I’ll make it work.” I was exhausted and burned out because I made it all about what I could do rather than what God was calling me to. Coming to Michigan and back into ministry has stirred up similar patterns. During my year-end reflection with Kim, I realized how much of the first year was driven by fear - fear of failure, fear that my decision to move across the country would hurt my family. That fear drove hard work that wasn’t rooted in what God wanted or what people needed, but in proving I could succeed, or at the very least not fail. Where in your life are you gripping the steering wheel too tightly? What project or relationship might benefit from you loosening your control and inviting God’s direction?

4. Get caught in busyness and distraction. We can ignore the cultural mandate by filling our calendars with activities that distract us from what God has given us to build in our organizations and communities. This takes many forms in modern life. For busy professionals, it might be the endless cycle of meetings that prevent deep, creative work. For parents, it could be overscheduling children with activities at the expense of family rhythms that build real character. For church leaders, it might be running programs rather than developing people. For couples, it’s often the separate schedules that leave no margin for collaborative building. Even our leisure can become another form of busyness when constantly seeking novel experiences rather than developing depth in a few meaningful areas. The typical American now spends over four hours daily on their smartphone and another four watching television or streaming content. Imagine what might happen if we redirected even a fraction of that time toward creative cultivation of our relationships, neighborhoods, or workplaces.

All these responses reflect a deeper issue: we’re attempting to make the world in our own image rather than God’s. The Bible has a word for this: idolatry.

Paul Tripp diagnoses this condition well: “The problem is not that we desire. The problem is what we’ve come to desire. We’ve forsaken the Creator to worship and serve the created thing.” (echoing Romans 1) When we try to fulfill the cultural mandate on our own terms and for our own glory, we distort it from its intended purpose.

As Andy Crouch points out, idolatry always results in injustice. When we worship something other than God - whether it’s status, comfort, control, approval or anything else - we inevitably devalue and harm others in the process. This happens because idols make demands that can only be satisfied at someone else’s expense.

Consider how this works in practice: When a leader makes career advancement their ultimate goal, team members become stepping stones rather than image-bearers. When a marriage prioritizes comfort above all, the hard work of serving the other person feels like an unwelcome intrusion. When a church pursues growth at any cost, people get treated as numbers rather than souls.

The connection between idolatry and injustice isn’t just theoretical, it’s historically demonstrable. Ancient cultures that worshipped fertility gods practiced ritual prostitution. Societies that idolized military might justified brutal conquest. Economic systems that elevate profit above all else exploit vulnerable workers. In each case, false worship leads to treating people as means rather than ends.

This pattern appears even in our most personal spheres. Parents who idolize their children’s achievements often sacrifice their children’s emotional well-being. Spouses who worship their own autonomy undermine the very trust their marriage needs to flourish. Leaders who idolize their vision often steamroll the very people they’re meant to develop.

The cultural mandate calls us to participate in God’s cultivation and ordering of the world. But when we replace God’s purposes with our own idols, justice becomes impossible. We cannot simultaneously worship false gods and treat people with the dignity they deserve as image-bearers. We cannot simultaneously put ourselves first and have meaningful relationships with God and others. It turns out that to participate in truly meaningful work requires integrity and relationships.

Where is Jesus in All This?

Think about the cross. Christ died at the hands of people exerting their power over creation. The Romans used crucifixion to terrorize those they dominated, religious leaders protected their control over the Jewish people, the crowd turned their praise to calls to crucify for convenience’s sake.

Yet there’s a terrible irony here. John 1 tells us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

The Word who made all things - who created the universe and all its goodness and beauty, the source of life and light - came to die for our idolatry at the hands of those with our own worst tendencies. The creator dying at the hands of His creation. This awful and beautiful inversion is at the heart of the gospel.

Fleming Rutledge notes that “the crucifixion reveals that God’s power is manifested in powerlessness.” On the cross, Jesus fulfilled the cultural mandate in a way we never could - creating life from death, order from chaos, beauty from ugliness.

But the story doesn’t end there. Christ resurrects from the grave and sends His Spirit to empower his followers. There’s an important question for every Christian: Where does your faith come from? Is it yours, or has God given it to you?

Scripture shows that it’s God who gives us faith to believe in Him. Ezekiel 36:26-27 promises: “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.”

Why do you believe in Christ’s death in your place and His resurrection? You believe because God got His hands into your heart and cultivated faith where there was nothing to work with, just a hard, dead heart. He brought life from death, cultivating what seemed impossible.

It’s like a child born deaf receiving a cochlear implant and hearing his mother’s voice for the first time. His face lights up and his pacifier drops as the sound creates an entirely new reality. Your ability to know God, to cry out to Him, to want to be near Him, to believe in Him at all is only possible because He did His creative work in you first. One of the implications of God’s work in you is that through your leadership and your work, you would live out the cultural mandate, making something of the world He’s given.

In Christ, we find both forgiveness for the ways we’ve distorted the cultural mandate and power to fulfill it as God intended. Through His Spirit, we can create, build, and cultivate in ways that reflect God’s character rather than our fallen tendencies.

Living Out the Cultural Mandate

The cultural mandate isn’t just a command from creation, it’s an invitation to participate in God’s ongoing work of bringing order, beauty, and flourishing to a world that desperately needs it. And your leadership is one of the primary ways God has designed for you to fulfill this calling.

I’ve found that understanding the cultural mandate transforms how I view even the most ordinary aspects of leadership. When I’m planning budgets, I’m not just allocating resources, I’m deciding how to steward what God has given us to create the most flourishing for our organization and community. When I’m establishing team rhythms, I’m not just managing a calendar, I’m cultivating a culture that reflects God’s character and priorities that can help the team do creative, meaningful work together.

In the coming articles, we’ll explore what it means to be self-aware as a leader, how to cast compelling vision, and how to implement effective strategy. But it all begins here: understanding that you were made to create, not just consume; to serve, not just be served; and to do it all as participants in God’s project of redemption.

Summary: We Make, We Relate, We Integrate

The theological foundation for leadership comes down to three essential principles:

We make. The cultural mandate calls us to be creators, not just consumers—to take the raw materials God has given us and cultivate them into something beautiful and good.

We relate. Leadership isn’t just about competence; it’s fundamentally relational. Our effectiveness as leaders depends on the quality of our relationships.

We integrate. Fragmented leadership ultimately fails. Just as when our personal values, words, and actions align; when our organizational values, communications, and operations align, we lead with an integrity that stands the test of time.

These three principles form the bedrock of integrated leadership. In the future posts, we’ll explore how self-awareness enables you to lead authentically from who you truly are.

The core of the content comes from synthesizing lessons from 20 years of my career into frameworks that I’ve used in multiple industries and in consulting work with Kim through Relational Leadership. I recorded the content as I taught it in classrooms, trainings, and coaching sessions over the past two years, transcribed the recordings, did initial edits with Claude (AI), and then additional multiple edits myself, including in this post.

One of the most surreal meetings we ever had when I managed music artists was at Rick Rubin’s house - a giant stuff polar bear behind him and Johnny Cash’s Bible beside him. He wanted to sign one of the bands we managed and invited us over to get to know one another. Given his primary role as a producer, we inevitably talked about songwriting. He said that the mistake a lot of artists make is to record a song too close to its birth. He said that because songs are like seeds, you have to let them grow up and mature a bit before making them concrete - play them live in clubs to see how they feel and how the crowd responds; play them in various forms to see how they feel acoustic, amplified, or on other instruments. This is my attempt to follow that advice with this content. Thank you for reading and any questions or feedback you have.

What happens when your greatest strength becomes your greatest weakness?

In an era of generational technological advancement, leadership is facing an opportunity hidden in plain sight. Artificial intelligence is disrupting technical skills, making uniquely human leadership qualities – relationships, wisdom, integrity – more valuable than ever.

Yet, 70% of team-level engagement is determined solely by the manager, and only 22% of employees believe their leaders are effective in creating an engaging environment. There is a disconnect between the opportunity managers have in getting the best from their team and how the team actually feels engaged. This is a problem that humans, not AI, can uniquely solve.

The numbers are stark. Organizations with high-trust cultures see 40% less burnout, 76% more engagement, and 50% higher productivity. Conversely, disengaged employees cost organizations 34% of their annual salary - imagine taking over one third of your personnel budget and setting it on fire. The numbers tell the truth that healthy can beat smart. Again, building a trusting and healthy team is a problem humans, not AI, are made to solve.

But the opportunity is deeper than productivity. Just as above, it’s an opportunity of integration.

In our broader culture, faith is often treated as something best kept private. It is acceptable on weekends and in personal life, but awkward or even unwelcome in public conversation and civic life. That climate forms people who learn to split what they say they believe from how they actually live, turning convictions into background noise rather than a guiding center.

For Christian professionals, that cultural pressure shows up with particular force at work. In one major workplace study in the UK, nearly three out of four Christian employees who own religious symbols choose not to wear them on the job, and almost half say their organization could do more to make people feel comfortable expressing their faith. The result is a quiet pressure to bring your talent and output but leave your deepest loyalties at the door. The disconnect isn’t only seen in fragmented work cultures but in compartmentalized lives that prioritize function and competency over everything else truly meaningful.

Take Chris, a lawyer at a prestigious national firm who reached out to us for coaching. On the surface, he was the picture of success – a respected attorney, an elder at his church, a leader everyone admired. But privately? He was drowning. Passed over for partner, feeling limited at work, increasingly distant from his family. The very competency that had defined his career and provided for his family had hit a ceiling he didn’t anticipate and left him distant from those he loved the most.

Or consider the creative agency we consulted with where a leadership team of Christian professionals led a business growing so quickly that the staff could barely keep up. More clients. Bigger projects. But internally? They were being eaten alive by conflict. Gossip was spreading like wildfire. Trust was eroding with every staff transition.

Then there was the tech startup led by a Christian CEO who’d just secured major venture capital funding. They had rapid growth and exciting potential but they were shaken by internal factions driven by external political issues during the COVID era. Internal communications were a disaster. The staff felt divided. All their technical brilliance was undermined by relational breakdown.

I know these stories. Not just as an observer, but as someone who has lived them. Each of these leaders - Chris, the creative agency team, the tech startup CEO - they’re not just case studies. They’re mirrors of moments in my own journey where competence felt like a cage, where success looked nothing like fulfillment. Where the external achievements masked an internal fracturing that was slowly, systematically eroding the internal foundation of a team or myself.

I was 27 years old, and from the outside, I had it all figured out.

New Noise Management was managing some incredible artists who’d signed to major labels, played mainstage at Coachella, were featured on MTV, and played all of the late night TV shows. Combined, our bands would go on to sell over one million albums. I’d built a company from dorm room phone calls to a team of five managers and six bands. I owned a home in Orange County and lived with good friends. I was traveling the world.

But internally? I was absolutely destroyed. Vacant. Hollow. Unrecognizably and inexpressibly angry.

It wasn’t until my friend Andrew stopped me on a walk and looked me in the eye. “Something’s off,” he said. “Are you depressed?” And right there, I broke down. His simple question pulled off the mask and made me start to face the reality of what was happening internally.

Fast forward some years. I was 32, planting a campus of one of the largest, fastest-growing churches in the US. Externally, it was an incredible opportunity. I was planting one of their first campuses across state lines. The plant we started with 6 people in a living room was going to launch with 1000 people on its first official Sunday, and I was making an impact in my hometown, living what looked like a dream. However, at the same time my wife was home with our one-year-old, pregnant with our second, while I was flying three weeks a month between Seattle staff meetings and Arkansas for a leadership residency. I found myself alone at a gate at John Wayne Airport on Halloween night, crying because I was missing my daughter’s first Halloween - feeling disconnected and like a failure for missing a milestone.

A few years beyond that, I watched a national controversy and tragedy unfold as Mars Hill Church very publicly and tragically collapsed. I had been a leader in their communications team, booking the senior pastor regular columns in the Washington Post and CNN. We were navigating media appearances on ABC’s Nightline and the Seattle Times, with platforms that reached hundreds of thousands with every piece published. The church had 15,000 people worshipping regularly across 13 campuses, including the one I had planted in Orange County. Multiple pastors published leading books through Crossway. The music publishing arm became a force in partnership with Tooth & Nail.

But in 2014, it all came tumbling down. Practically overnight, the church ceased to exist - undone not by a lack of competency, but by a complete absence of personal and organizational integrity. The public facade collapsed because the internal reality was rotten.

Maybe you’ve experienced similar situations or, perhaps as you read this, you are on the precipice of catastrophe. You feel hollowed out, unfulfilled, or frustrated like Chris, passed over for partner and disconnected from his family. Or like the creative agency team, growing rapidly but eaten alive by internal conflict. Or like the tech startup CEO, watching trust erode despite technical brilliance.

Perhaps you’re reading this and haven’t yet experienced these painful moments. Maybe you’re a young leader committed to building something different – a team, an organization, a career where integrity isn’t an afterthought, but the foundation. You’re looking ahead, wanting to create something sustainable, meaningful, and truly transformative before the cracks can even begin to form.

I’ve lived the failure of a lack of integration – watching organizations collapse, witnessing the devastating cost of compartmentalization, and experiencing personal burnout. But I’ve also experience and seen the remarkable transformation that happens when leaders close the gap between who they are and what they do.

This book is an invitation and a roadmap. An invitation to lead from wholeness, and a roadmap for building organizations where character, systems, and relationships align. My hope is to help you not only avoid potential leadership disaster, but to do great work, build amazing teams, and thrive at the intersection of great creating and great relating.

The Framework

This book is structured around three sections: the foundation of your leadership, the relational core of leadership, and the seven practices of integrated leadership.

[Chapter summaries removed for space.]

When we worked with these organizations, something remarkable happened. The law firm? Chris reconnected with his core purpose, rebuilt trust with his family, and was promoted to partner. The creative agency transformed their culture, reducing staff turnover by 90% and increasing revenue by 25%. The tech startup rebuilt their communication systems, realigned their team, and went on to become an industry leader. The multisite megachurch I currently work at navigated a turnaround from siloed, chaotic, reactive and to aligned, stabilized, and fruitful.

The secret wasn’t more technical competence. It was the trust built through relationship and integration.

The Future is Integrated

As artificial intelligence continues to transform technical work, the most important leadership skills become increasingly human - trust, wisdom, presence, culture, encouragement, generosity.

These can’t be automated or outsourced.

The leaders and teams who will thrive aren’t those with the best AI tools because those will be ubiquitous. They’re those who’ve done the deeply human work of aligning who they are with what they do, of closing the gap between their projected self and their true self, of leading from who they actually are and building organizations where character, systems, and relationships line up — where what you say, what you believe, and how you operate are fundamentally congruent.

Competency will increasingly not be enough. Relationships and integration will be the difference between good and great, smart and healthy.

The Captain Who Defeats Our Enemy

A few weeks ago we continued in Hebrews 2, looking at verses 10, 14-15: “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering... Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”

The word “founder” can also be translated as captain, pioneer, author, champion, or hero. Jesus is the captain who goes first and goes for us - like David facing Goliath. The Bible is not primarily about you conquering your Goliaths; it’s about Christ defeating them in your place.

And what did this captain defeat? Death itself. The passage says that you and I were “subject to lifelong slavery” to the fear of death. This isn’t just a literal fear of dying, but the psychological weight of our powerlessness, our limitations, our inevitable loss of everything.

The Bible does not diminish the sting of death. Death exposes our utter helplessness. It shakes us awake from our vain distractions and pursuits of mere happiness. Pop psychology tells us death is just natural, part of the circle of life. But the sting of death tells us it is utterly unnatural - it’s not part of a circle but the termination of a line. Biblically, the absence of death in the original creation, its appearance after sin, and its conquering at the end tell us that death is foreign, an invader, not how this world is supposed to be.

Consider the uniqueness of what we see in Jesus. The gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon viewed human affairs as infinitely beneath them. Other religious leaders gave people systems to work their way up to God or claimed to be prophets pointing toward a distant deity. Unlike our consumeristic culture, Jesus doesn’t distract himself from death, he enters into it. Unlike Buddhism, he doesn’t tell us suffering is to be escaped, he enters into it. Unlike stoicism or materialism, Jesus doesn’t treat death as a fear to be transcended, he enters into it.

Jesus is God coming down, becoming man, to serve, to let his friends shed tears on his shoulder, to cry with them at the graveside of a brother and friend, and to step in front of them into the unknown. Jesus did not minimize the sting of death; he entered into it.

But the good news is that Jesus didn’t just enter death, he defeated it. As Peter Kreeft put it, “Death KOs all the philosophies; only Christ KOs death.” One way to look at the cross is Jesus standing in the gap, in the place of his friends, to fight their enemy for them. He stood before a previously unassailable power and undid it by succumbing to it.

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At Lazarus’ graveside in John 11, Jesus doesn’t comfort Mary and Martha with platitudes about the full life Lazarus lived or what a good guy he was. He comforts them with the hope of resurrection. And he doesn’t anchor their hope in an event but in a Person - himself. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”

The only way Jesus could say that and deliver on it is if he himself conquered death. His resurrection validates his claim and ensures his promises. Death may sting, but it is no longer ultimate for the Christian. Its power is limited. Its terror is exposed. It doesn’t have the final say, the One who is the Resurrection and Life does.

If God can use evil as horrific as the cross for good, what can he do with the injustice you’ve faced or will face? If God can bring life out of death, as he did in the resurrection, what can he do with the losses, limitations, and death you are and will face?

Christianity is first historical, then theological, then practical. We believe a man rose from the dead. Out of that comes all the theology we believe and the way we live. Your changed desires - even in small ways - are evidence that the power of sin has been broken. And the power of sin is broken only because the power of death has been broken.

One day you will rise to hear your Captain say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”, or as this passage might put it, “Well done, good and faithful brother or sister.” One day you will rise to join with the saints in heaven, to see Jesus face to face, and all that you saw through a mirror dimly you will know fully even as you are fully known. Or as C.S. Lewis put it: “Further up, further in.”

On Writing Goals That Move the Needle

This one is for those of you looking to do meaningful work yourself and with your team. At the start of every quarter, I coach our team through setting goals that matter. Here are some notes to consider.

You can create goals based on Opportunities or Threats from a SWOT analysis or similar exercise, your Issues list (in the EOS framework), or another source, but I’m asking the team for two things:

1. Make them impactful.

Do your goals really move the needle for your organization or team? Do they excite you? Is there a cost to not doing them?

Here’s the test: if you accomplished this goal, would it fundamentally change something about how your business operates or the impact it creates? Or would it just make things slightly better? Strategic goals aren’t regular operations or maintenance tasks — those are just part of your job — the goals we’re looking for are moves that advance the mission and create meaningful progress.

The truth is, not all goals are created equal. Some goals are small, incremental improvements. Those can be important but they’re not transformative. Strategic goals are different. They’re the big, heavy lifts that require real effort and focus. They solve critical problems or seize significant opportunities. Don’t waste your limited focus on something that would happen anyway or something that’s just “nice to have.” Don’t take a lay-up when you could shoot a three-pointer.

Ask yourself: If we don’t do this, what’s the cost? If the answer is “not much,” it’s probably not worth your attention. But if the answer is “we’ll stay stuck in this problem,” or “we’ll miss a significant opportunity,” or “we’ll keep operating at 70% capacity when we could be at 100%”, then that’s a goal worth pursuing.

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2. Put them in SMART format.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. Vague goals lead to vague results.

Why does this matter? Because without SMART formatting, you’ll never know if you actually accomplished the goal. “Improve customer engagement” sounds good, but what does success look like? How will you know you’ve done it? When will you know?

Compare that to: “Increase customer retention rate from 72% to 80% by March 31st.” Now you have clarity. You know what you’re measuring. You know the target. You know the deadline. You know the key action. You can track progress month by month. And at the end of the quarter, there’s no debate about whether you accomplished it or not.

SMART format forces you to think through the details before you start, which dramatically increases the likelihood you’ll actually execute. It also creates accountability - both for you and for anyone working with you on the goal. Be clear about what success looks like and when you’ll achieve it, and you’ll be amazed at how much more you accomplish.

There is (much) more to be said about aligning them with the vision and goals of the organization and your team but starting with these will get you some great traction.

Recommendations

• Five Proven Hooks for Communication. Nancy Duarte is a best-selling author and Communications expert. After studying hundreds of presentation openings, Duarte identifies five hooks that consistently work. Why is this helpful? One mistake ministry leaders can make is to assume your audience will listen just because you’re speaking. Instead, earn their attention.

• Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle. When I first came to Woodside I studied the religious history of Michigan, this year I want to dig into Detroit. This first book on the list is a sobering, deeply researched look at how a confluence of public policies, private industry decisions, and deeply ingrained racism created one of the nation’s hardest urban stories (It was written before the current renewal but points toward the potential of it). It’s not just the challenges but the triumphs. The world can thank Detroit for the second industrial revolution and the automobile. The US can thank Detroit for being the "Arsenal of Democracy," the industrial engine that enabled us to win World War II. Music fans can thank Detroit for Motown - Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Aretha Franklin - and later Madonna, Sufjan Stevens, and the White Stripes. Movie fans can thank Detroit for directors like Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Black Hawk Down, Pirates of the Caribbean) and John Hughes (Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, Christmas Vacation). Detroit has shaped American culture in profound ways. It is a bit of a dry read but it makes the themes and patterns of the history visible. It is important to see this not as abstract history but an understanding the mission field we’re called to serve. Detroit’s story explains why our place looks the way it does, why our neighborhoods are shaped the way they are, why racial and economic divides persist, and what forces shaped the people sitting in our pews and living in our communities. If we’re serious about faithful presence and contextual ministry, we have to understand the history that formed this place.

A few Sundays ago, I preached on Hebrews 2:10: “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

There’s a profound reality here that cuts against our innate selfishness and many things our culture teaches us: Jesus was made perfect through suffering, not in spite of it. Our natural instinct, reinforced by movies, TV shows, and social media feeds, is to believe in what Martin Luther call a “Theology of Glory”: dig deep, believe in yourself, overcome adversity, be the hero of your own story. We want Easter without Good Friday. We want triumph without the cross.

But the Gospel operates on a completely different logic - a “Theology of the Cross”. Value and meaning are found at the point of weakness, not strength. God is not surprised by suffering. He planned, before the foundation of the world, that the path to glory would run straight through the cross. God is in the seemingly impossible business of resurrection - making dead things alive.

Here’s why this matters for us: we often don’t suffer well. (We can say this without minimizing the reality of pain and suffering!) When minor inconveniences hit like kids not listening, a rough commute, an unreasonable boss or foolish coworkers, we throw tantrums. When real suffering comes - job loss, wayward children, health crises, relational fractures - we flail. We interpret our pain as punishment or proof we’re failing. We rage, complain, demand “My will be done.”

But this is exactly where we need the wonder of the Gospel. It would have been enough for Jesus to die for your sin. But he did so much more. He also lived the perfect life you couldn’t live. When he was homeless, hungry, misunderstood, constantly needed and demanded from, betrayed, falsely accused, beaten, mocked, and crucified, he didn’t flail like you and me. He didn’t respond with anger or malice. He said, “Thy will be done.” He said, “Father, forgive them.”

When you blow it in your suffering - when you lose your temper, spiral into despair, or demand your own way - it’s not only that his death paid for your sin, but his perfect life fulfilled what you don’t, in your place. His perfection through suffering covers your imperfection in suffering. This a truth, and hope, I need as much as anyone else.

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Letter to Investors from a Christian CEO

I highly recommend you give this year end letter from a CEO a read. Leaders need to be able to communicate well and this is a stellar example.

Brent is the CEO of a private equity firm that invests in and grows small businesses. What is interesting about his story is that he was an ardent atheist who met Jesus in the past decade.

The whole letter to investors is worth your time but be sure to check out “Fear of Man”, “What CEOs Are and Aren’t”, and “The Strange Math of Generosity”.

What in the world just happened in Venezuela?

Now, here’s where I venture a little to left field if you’ll go with me. I did a breakdown of this during date night with Kim the other night, lucky lady. (To be fair, I did mention in a previous email that I spent a year or more digging into asymmetrical warfare, counterinsurgency, and information warfare.)

David Kilcullen is a leading academic on the topics I mentioned above and, in 2020, he published a book called The Dragons and The Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. His central claim is that the West won the Cold War but accidentally taught its enemies how to defeat it. To illustrate this, he reminds the readers of the overwhelming firepower and speed that the US showcased in Iraq in the 1990’s and in both Iraq and Afghanistan immediately post 9/11. All of our adversaries saw our technological might and thought, “We can’t go toe to toe with that.”

So, what did they do? They adapted. Rather than trying to match the West tank for tank or jet for jet, they shifted to strategies designed to avoid America’s strengths and exploit its weaknesses. State rivals like China and Russia learned to operate in the gray zone between peace and war, using cyber attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and proxy forces (eg. Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela) instead of conventional invasion. Meanwhile, non-state actors - terrorist networks, insurgent groups, militias, and criminal organizations - adopted new technologies, social media, guerrilla warfare, and propaganda to become more resilient and harder to defeat. In Kilcullen’s telling, these “dragons” and “snakes” are now increasingly intertwined, with major powers supporting irregular forces and irregular forces giving major powers deniability. The result is a form of conflict in which the West may continue to dominate on the battlefield, but finds itself steadily weakened politically, socially, and strategically at home.

You and I are familiar with those realities and dynamics. However, what no one was familiar with was US special forces invading a country, extracting their president, and bringing him back to the US to face charges. (Noriega in Panama is probably closest but that was 27,000 US troops vs roughly 20) That is a brand new move and, in light of the above, one that I think sends a message to our adversaries that is a blend of technological supremacy and asymmetrical disruption - if we can do that in Venezuela, what else can we do? It will be interesting to see what comes next.

Recommendations

• My top books, music, and movies of 2025. Hope they help you find something you may want to read or explore in 2026.

• Simon Sinek on what leadership is. It’s hard to not feel inspired and helped whenever Sinek speaks on leadership. Again, if you’ve never watched his Ted Talk on “Start With the Why” you’re missing out.

• Ben Sasse’s public announcement of his cancer diagnosis. It’s rare to see such a sober-minded, Gospel-centered statement from a public official.

Family Highlights

This year’s highlights had a lot to do with trips. Kim’s 40th birthday trip to Charlevoix and Mackinac Island was rainy but beautiful. Our family trip to Traverse City was incredibly fun, mostly because of the surprise of being there for the practice run of the Cherry Festival Air Show. I don’t think I’ll forget the kids faces as the F-35 and F-22’s flew right over our heads in the front row.

The kids surprised us with their growing independence, including a solo trip to California to spend time with grandparents - a fun milestone that we didn’t have on our bingo card at the beginning of the year.

Five Bears Kitchen, Kim’s baking cart, has been our family’s unexpected bridge to our neighborhood. Watching the kids perform in their recitals - Titus on drums, Edith on guitar, Eva on piano - reminded me how much joy comes from watching them develop their gifts.

Football and soccer seasons with Titus and Edith have been highlights. While it can be frustrating sometimes - as you can imagine coaching 9-10 year old boys can be - I want to hang on to this season of coaching Titus as long as he’ll let me. He’s grown so much in his feel for the game on both sides of the ball.

We also loved having family and friends visit us and getting to show them our life here. Before we moved, I called a friend who had moved to NC and asked him how it changed his relationships. He said the distance changed the frequency but upped the intensity - you might get fewer days with people but you squeeze the most out of the time that you do have. We’ve seen that to be true.

That doesn’t mean it was all rainbows and hugs. We had to say goodbye to our beloved dog Riggins in August due to cancer. We learned some hard lessons in marriage and parenting and continue to walk out the grief of homesickness.

Looking ahead, we’re hoping to continue those themes of trips and time with family and friends. One exciting thing already on the calendar is a mission trip to Japan for Kim that she is helping to lead with some of her high schoolers.

Woodside: Shifting Ministry Paradigms

When I first came to Woodside, my friend Brad, who hired me, drew an organizational lifecycle bell curve on his whiteboard. He sketched out the launch, growth, and plateau phases before pointing to the part of the curve where it begins to slope downward into decline and said, “We are here and that’s why we hired you.”

Last year at Woodside was about walking out a lot of the changes and processes I built in my first year on staff. We’ve been working to shift from a staff-centric to a lay leader-centric ministry model; which is a deep change in staff and ministry culture for a 70 year old megachurch.

Last year I wrote a 70 page strategy doc for our campus and implemented some new organizational rhythms to align the team. This year, we re-organized the staff and resources to support the strategy and are growing in consistency with the rhythms across the teams.

By God’s grace, the results have been encouraging. We’re seeing 7% growth in attendance YoY, over 170 baptisms so far, just had our biggest Christmas Eve (9,533!) and - most importantly - more of our members stepping into meaningful ministry leadership. I’ve been beating the drum that people flourish when they own something meaningful not when they consume something polished. The team has embraced the new structures and tools we’ve developed, and we’re just beginning to see the potential.

One of the lessons I’ve learned here is that change - especially at an organization of this size and history - takes longer than you might want. (For context, I have friends that use “Bogardus” as a verb for doing something effectively so that lesson is a challenging one) It takes patience, consistency, and trust. I’ve had to check myself on many occasions and think I’ve grown because of it.

MinistryEngine: Serving Ministry Leaders

MinistryEngine is the consulting and coaching work Kim and I do with my partners Brad House and Doug Schmidt as well as a few other friends. 2025 was a big year on this front as well. This year we:

• Provided crisis communication consulting for a large church navigating a public leadership challenge

• Conducted a search for a Sr. Pastor in a multisite church and placed an interim pastor as a bridge

• Provided executive coaching to help leaders navigate complex organizational transitions like mergers

• Supported church revitalization efforts across a national denomination

Relational Leadership: Serving Christian Marketplace Leaders

Relational Leadership is the consulting and coaching work Kim and I do with Christian marketplace leaders. In 2025, we were able to make an impact in these ways.

• Coached two senior leaders through significant organizational shifts - one taking on a new role and the other preparing for growth ahead

• Worked with a leader in South Africa, helping him prepare for a critical leadership transition

• Published the third season of our Lead Together podcast

• Provided fractional Content Marketing leadership for a Christian accounting firm

I think the lessons with MinistryEngine and Relational Leadership this year involve what consumes a lot of entrepreneurs - fine tuning your ideal client and product market fit. We did a lot of good work we’re proud of but also learned a lot about who we work best with and how we can provide the most value moving forward.

Looking Ahead to 2026

Here’s what we already have on deck for 2026:

• Fractional Communications Director roles in two locations

• Fractional COO and Leadership Development for a major nonprofit in MI

• Multisite church consulting

• Supporting two churches through capital campaigns

As we step into 2026, we do so with gratitude. We’ve been blessed to have had some remarkable experiences in our careers and it’s a joy to bring those to bear to help Christian leaders in the marketplace and ministry. Our favorite aspect is the ripple effects the work has beyond the leader - their marriage, family, and teams are often better for it.

Thank you for reading and for your support. On to 2026!

Nick

Every year, I try to be intentional about my reading - some years it’s a deep dive into a theological concept like a theology place, others it’s exploring a specific domain like counterinsurgency. In 2025 my hope was to have my thinking shaped by CS Lewis through reading five books by or about Lewis. I supplemented that with a goal to listen to one Tim Keller sermon per week (typically on a run).

In full transparency I accomplished the Lewis goal but probably hit ~60% on the Keller sermons. You may notice that there are four Lewis books on the list. That is just because The Weight of Glory and Letters to Malcom didn’t make the cut for my favorites.

That said, here are my favorite books and movies of 2025. Hope they point you to something that’s interesting to you as well.

BOOKS

1. The Abolition of Man – C.S. Lewis. A prophetic diagnosis of our cultural moment. Lewis saw decades ago not only how we were dismantling objective meaning but how it leads to dehumanization. I highly recommend this, particularly with its companion book below.

2. After Humanity – Michael Ward. The perfect companion to The Abolition of Man. This book reads like a Biblical commentary - giving historical context and insight passage by passage. It’s scholarly but accessible, thorough but well-paced. If you’re looking for two books for a theologically-oriented book club this year, these first two books should generate some great conversation.

3. The Dragons and the Snakes – David Kilcullen. I came across David’s name when I was studying counterinsurgency and asymmetrical warfare as he’s one of the most cited names in the space. Remember how the Cold War was only cold in terms of actual battlefield conflict? This book will give you much-needed insights on what is happening right now with China, Iran, terrorist networks, and how they learn from one another.

4. God in the Dock – C.S. Lewis Lewis’s wit and clarity shine in this collection of essays. When our family went to England last year, one of our favorite parts was eating and drinking in pubs that Lewis and Tolkien frequented or visited. I picture these essays like topics of conversation they would’ve had over a pint. Give “Dangers of National Repentance”, “Meditation in a Tool Shed”, and “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ a read.

5. Life on the Silent Planet – edited by Rhys Laverty. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is probably his most overlooked and unique gift he left us. (I say that as someone who doesn't like Sci-Fi). If you’ve never read them, they’re like a mix of Naria meet Screwtape letters. This collection of essays by Lewis scholars take turns addressing themes in each of the three books. It’s a blend of literary reflection and spiritual formation and it deepened my appreciation of Lewis’s fiction. I highly recommend “A Taste of Paradise”.

6. The Lord of Psalm 23 – David Gibson. This book was gifted to me at just the right time this year. Gibson helps us sit in Psalm 23 with Jesus at the center, not just as a shepherd, but a companion and host. Beautiful, pastoral theology rooted in daily grace. For those of you interested this vein, its published by Crossway and Sinclair Ferguson wrote the forward so you know what you’re getting.

7. The Word of the Cross – Jonathan Linebaugh. A theologically rich reflection on Paul that keeps the cross at the center. It is a bit academic in a couple chapters - that I honestly skimmed - however, the others more than make up for it. This is for fans of Mockingbird, David Zahl (where I heard of it), and Gerdard Forde.

8. Invent & Wander – Jeff Bezos. A collection of Jeff Bezos’ annual letters to shareholders. It was interesting from a historical lens to trace the growth of the company from the simple online bookseller that it started as to the behemoth that is today in retail, cloud services, and entertainment. From a leadership perspective, it gives a great picture of Bezos’ dogged determination - he repeats their vision and values so many times it feels redundant in reading it. Bottom line is I appreciated learning how he communicated to his shareholders and the public.

ALBUMS

1. Blankets EP – Stephen Wilson Jr. His album “Son of Dad” was my favorite of 2024. If you’re unfamiliar, his tagline of Death Cab for Country is a good descriptor. Something I love about Stephen is he knows his audience - dad rock for 35-50 year olds. This EP contains nostalgic 90s and early 2000’s covers that feel both familiar and fresh, with some of my favorite drumming in a long time. Stephen’s guitar playing at the end of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” is…completely next level.

2. Museum – Citizens. Pure gospel truth you pump straight into my ears on repeat. “I love you and you’re alright” is basically a sermon in five words - the line I didn’t know I needed but can’t stop hearing.

3. Pale, Through the Window – Ruston Kelly. Midwestern emo-country that captures that perfect sense of melancholy and hope. “Pickleball” and “Me & You” are the perfect windows-down-driving love songs you didn’t know you needed. (Tell me if you hear Fountains of Wayne in “Pickleball” like I do.)

4. Jesus LoFi Vols 1&2 – Forrest Frank & the Lofi Christian. Forrest is having a year that could’ve been career-ending (with the back injury) that turned out to be career-defining. Out of nowhere he releases this awesome set of LoFi covers of his songs that is perfect for working, studying, or late-night driving.

MOVIES

1. Sketch. Angel Studios absolutely crushed this one. Picture a kids film (10+) that is a mix of Signs, Goonies, and Pixar. It stars Tony Hale from Arrested Development and D’arcy Carden from A Good Place, though the kids really shine. It’s a movie about loss, grief, and holding the good along with the bad.

2. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Based on the classic holiday book and directed by the creator of The Chosen, this movie surprised us on a family movie night last month. While the acting isn’t the strongest, if you aren’t moved by the deep current of grace that flows through the movie, I’m not sure what to tell you. It left me quietly wiping away tears.

As we look ahead to 2026, Kim and I are considering reading a volume of Charles Spurgeon’s sermons and I’m starting with a deep dive on the history of Detroit; which is already fascinating.

Thanks for reading and hope these are helpful!
Nick

PS. I preached this past weekend on “What Christ’s Suffering Means for Us” from Hebrews 2:10-18. If you’re interested, you can watch it here.

I wanted to give you a heads up about something I’m starting and why.

For most of my career, I’ve written a weekly email. When I was managing bands, it was updates and encouragement to artists and their teams. In Mongolia, Kim and I would post weekly on our Tumblr blogs for family and friends. At Mars Hill and Cross of Christ, it was reflections, teaching, vision for the church. At Subsplash, it was email and Slack messages with encouragement, direction, priorities or leadership resources for my team. Now at Woodside, I still send a weekly note to my staff—usually a blend of encouragement, strategic priorities, theological reflection, or resources I’m finding helpful.

It’s become one of my favorite disciplines. There’s something clarifying about putting your thoughts on the page consistently. And over the years, people have told me they’ve found it helpful.

So I’m expanding it.

Starting next week, I’m launching a Substack newsletter. It’ll be the same kind of writing I’ve been doing for teams and churches, just broader. Leadership and organizational health. Faith in a secular age. Marriage and family. The work of integration: aligning who you are with what you do.

Here’s why I’m doing this:

For you. I hope it’s encouraging and helpful. If you’re leading a team, building something, navigating faith and work, or just trying to figure out how to keep it all together—maybe these weekly reflections will serve you the way they’ve served others.

For me. Accountability and consistency. Writing forces me to think more clearly and live more intentionally. Knowing people are reading keeps me honest.

For us. It’s also a way to stay connected. You’ll get updates on life with Kim and the kids, what I’m learning at Woodside, and what we’re building with ministryengine and Relational Leadership. I miss the regular rhythms of friendship with many of you, and this felt like one small way to stay in touch.

What to expect:

I’m still working on the publishing rhythm but two times per month seems realistic. The content won't be a surprise to any of you who know me - Things I’m reading, cultural reflections, leadership frameworks, personal stories, theological thinking. Always (I hope) worth your 5-7 minutes.

Here’s the ask:

Would you subscribe? It’s totally free, always will be. You can unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings.

Subscribe now

And if you know someone - a leader, entrepreneur, friend who’s trying to lead well without losing their soul - would you forward this to them? I’m trying to reach people who want to hold together competency and character, success and significance, faith and mission. No small feat.

Thanks for being in my corner all these years. Whether we’ve worked together, served together, or just stayed in touch from afar. I’m grateful for you.

Let’s fight the long defeat.

Nick

Subscribe now