Twenty-five years of marriage has taught us that lasting love isn’t about staying the same. It’s about learning how to change without losing each other.

In Part 2 of our 25th anniversary conversation, we reflect on the word that may best describe our journey: together.

We’ve grown up together. Built careers together. Raised two daughters together. Walked through financial challenges, ministry, relocations, personal growth, disagreements, fear, uncertainty, and incredible moments of faith—together. And no, that togetherness hasn’t always been easy.

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that the person you marry will change. So will you. The challenge is continuing to remain curious about one another, communicate beyond the logistics of everyday life, and make room for the people you are both becoming.

Now we’re entering what we call “Phase 3”—the season when the primary years of raising children begin to give way to something new. We’re thinking about slowing down, simplifying our lives, rediscovering each other, prioritizing our health and relationship, and being intentional about how we want to spend the next 25 years.

But perhaps our most important message in this episode is for couples who may be struggling:

Close the back door.

We entered marriage without a Plan B. Not because we had everything figured out—we certainly didn’t—but because we were committed to figuring it out together. After 25 years, we understand even more deeply the importance of being all in, inviting God into the difficult seasons, and recognizing that our marriage is about more than just the two of us.

Our marriage has shaped our daughters, our family, our ministry, our community and, we pray, generations we may never live to meet.

Twenty-five years later, we’re still saying yes.

And we’re excited about what’s next.

🎧 Listen and join the conversation.

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Mark 3:13 says it plainly: “And he goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he would: and they came unto him.” Before the twelve apostles, before a movement that would outlast empires, there was a mountain and men who came.

I thought about that verse all weekend, sitting in a comfortable banquet chair at Mt. Hermon with roughly a hundred men from New Destiny Church, under the leadership of Bishop Carl Smith for our their third annual Men’s Advance. Third year up the mountain, and it doesn’t get old. It gets deeper.

We don’t call it a retreat. Nobody backs away from anything at Mt. Hermon. Men move forward into places they’ve been avoiding for years. But you have to get away first, from the phone, the job that needs you strong, the house that needs you steady, even the church seat where you’re expected to have it together. Jesus didn’t call the twelve in the middle of the crowd. He went up first. If the Son of God needed separation to commission His closest men, what makes us think we can build anything lasting in the noise?

A Room Where Men Actually Talk

Here’s the first thing I keep relearning every year: men need to talk. Not perform, not posture. Talk. Say the true thing out loud in front of other men and watch nothing bad happen.

I watched ministers, fathers, and businessmen say sentences they’d never said in daylight. Twenty-somethings listened to seventy-somethings, who asked real questions like they wanted the answer. That’s multigenerational when it’s working: older men remembering they still have something to receive, younger men discovering the fathers aren’t finished products either.

James 5:16 stayed with me on the drive down: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” Healing isn’t private. It happens in confession that has a witness, and most men have never had that room. Church taught us to confess in categories broad enough to hide in. Real repentance means named sin, spoken into the light in front of men who love you enough to hold it. That trust took two prior years to earn, a covering doing its job, building safety where confession stays confession.

The Weight Nobody Claps For

I want to say this plainly: the men in that room are carrying weight nobody applauds. Not the testimony that ends in triumph and gets a standing ovation. The quiet weight. The mortgage, the marriage, the aging parent, the struggling kid. The expectation to lead and never fall apart, carried by men rarely asked how they’re doing.

No Scripture tells a man he was built to carry that alone. Galatians 6:2 says to “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” Not admire them. Bear them. For a weekend, men did.

The Presence Nobody Wants to Leave

By Saturday, something shifted that’s hard to describe. The speakers kept speaking directly into the hearts of men, and real impartation was taking place in God’s presence, not performed for us but happening, low and steady, men with eyes closed and hands on each other’s shoulders. Psalm 16:11 kept surfacing: “In thy presence is fulness of joy.” Not information, not inspiration. Joy that doesn’t evaporate on the drive home, because it wasn’t manufactured by a good speaker. It was the byproduct of proximity to God, in a room of men who’d stopped performing long enough to be near Him.

That’s what I want to hand you. Fulness of joy isn’t a feeling chased once a year. It’s the fruit of a pattern: prayer, biblical meditation, personal devotion, personal worship, practiced alone on ordinary Tuesdays, long before and after the mountain. A lot of us watched our fathers keep that pattern and never learned to name it as one worth inheriting. Somewhere along the way, we set it down.

It Won’t Be Easy, and It’s Not Meant to Be Solo

The old patterns will still be waiting Monday. The job will still demand. The marriage will still need patience. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 has always felt like a men’s ministry verse: “Two are better than one... for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth.” The invitation isn’t “go be a better man on your own now.” It’s to keep the brotherhood after the mountain closes, to let this Advance become a covenant, not a memory. None of us was built to sustain this alone.

Coming Home to Where I Started

Some of the men I sat with this weekend watched me become who I am. Men from the church that first shaped what it looks like to walk with God, lead a household, take correction, show up when it costs you something. Sitting among them, not as the man up front but as one more man in the circle, felt like coming home to soil I grew in.

Three years in, I’m still being made in the presence of the men who first showed me what being made looks like. That’s the mountain’s real gift. Not an event. A pattern, and the men to keep it with.

If it’s been a while since you sat in a room like this, find one. The mountain isn’t the only place He calls men to Himself, but it’s a good place to remember He still does.

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect and holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

Twenty-five years ago, we stood in front of our family and friends and said “I do.”

We loved each other. We had already been together for five years. We had built a life together. And yet, looking back, there was so much about marriage and about ourselves that we simply couldn’t have known.

So for our 25th wedding anniversary (September 8th), we decided to ask each other a question:

If we could sit down with the two young people who got married 25 years ago, what would we tell them?

In Part 1 of this special With Love, The Chambers anniversary conversation, we go back to who we were then, the expectations we carried, the people who shaped us, and even some of the naïveté we brought into marriage. We also reflect on the incredible village of parents, grandparents, family, friends, and spiritual mentors who surrounded us and helped sustain our journey.

And perhaps the biggest realization is just how much we’ve changed.

After 25 years, we’re not the same people who stood at that altar. As we say in the episode, we’re probably on version 7.0 or 8.0 of ourselves. A lasting marriage has required learning how to love and keep choosing, not just the person we married, but the people we’ve each continued to become.

This episode is a celebration of marriage, but it’s also a celebration of faith, family, community, growth, memories, and the people who helped us get here.

Because 25 years later, one thing remains true:

We’d still choose each other. ❤️

If you prefer to watch the episode on YouTube, use this link.

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I was listening to The Leadership Roundtable Podcast with Dr. Conway Edwards recently, the episode on avoiding burnout in ministry, when Jada Edwards said something that made me put the episode on pause.

She wasn’t talking about time management. She wasn’t talking about self-care routines or sabbaticals, though those matter too. She was naming something underneath all of that: burnout, she argued, isn’t really about how much you’re carrying. It’s about whether you’ve quietly shifted from stewarding something God entrusted to you, to owning it as if you built it yourself.

That distinction stopped me.

It took me back to a season years ago when I was redlining in ministry, running at a pace that wasn’t sustainable and calling it faithfulness. That’s the season I picked up Anne Jackson’s Mad Church Disease. It was one of the first times I had language for what I was living, and it planted a question I’m still answering: was I actually being faithful, or was I just unwilling to let go of what I’d convinced myself only I could carry?

There’s a moment in the book where a colleague asks Jackson, after she’d been hospitalized from stress, “Does working at this church interfere with your communion with Christ?” I remember sitting with that question myself. It’s not a question that indicts ministry. It’s a question that indicts the way we’re carrying it.

Anyone who has led a ministry, a team, or an organization knows the pace is relentless. The calendar is full before the week even starts. Decisions stack up. People need answers now. And in the middle of all that legitimate busyness, it’s easy to start believing that if you don’t touch it, it won’t happen right — that every email, every approval, every small decision has to move through you.

Jada’s point, drawing on the Israelites’ grumbling in Numbers 11, was that when we lose sight of who’s actually carrying the mission, we start minimizing what we’ve been freed from and inflating what we think we’re owed. We forget, as she put it, “the mission started before you, it will continue after you.” That’s not a demotion. It’s a relief, if we let it be.

Here’s where it gets practical, and personal, for those of us who lead organizations:

The load was never meant to be carried alone. If your team, your staff, your volunteers aren’t sharing real weight, the structure itself is the problem, not their capacity.

Delegation isn’t a leadership shortcut. It’s the design. Handing off tasks without handing off real authority just creates a longer line to your office. People need the actual power to decide, not just the responsibility to execute and wait for your sign-off.

None of that works without competence and shared vision. You can’t delegate authority to people who don’t understand where the organization is headed or don’t yet have the skill to carry it. Building that, through training, clarity, and trust, is slower than doing it yourself. It’s also the only way out.

A different way of operating is possible, and it produces less burnout, not more risk. The bottleneck isn’t a sign of high standards. It’s often a sign that ownership has quietly replaced stewardship somewhere in how we lead.

I don’t think Jada was suggesting leaders stop caring. I think she was asking us to check whether our caring has curdled into control. That’s worth sitting with — not as a guilt trip, but as an honest inventory of where the load actually sits in our organizations, and whether we’ve built something sturdy enough to carry it without us underneath every piece of it.

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect and holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

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Does everybody need therapy? Or do some of us just need to accept that sometimes life is hard?

We believe in therapy. We’ve both benefited from it, although our journeys began at very different stages of life. But as conversations about mental health have become more normalized, so has an entirely new vocabulary.

Toxic. Narcissist. Triggered. Overstimulated. Boundaries. Protecting my peace.

These words can help us understand what we’re experiencing—but are we always using them correctly? And have we sometimes started labeling normal disappointment, conflict, accountability, and discomfort as something unhealthy?

In this episode of With Love, The Chambers, we talk candidly about our own experiences with therapy, the striking differences between generations, and the tension between seeking help and developing resilience.

We also explore an important distinction: hard doesn’t necessarily mean harmful. A difficult relationship isn’t automatically toxic. Constructive criticism isn’t necessarily an attack. And having emotional tools shouldn’t remove the responsibility to develop the strength necessary to navigate difficult seasons of life.

This isn’t a conversation against therapy.

It’s a conversation about using therapy—and the language surrounding it—wisely.

So we’re asking you:

Has therapy culture made us healthier, or are we sometimes confusing discomfort with dysfunction?

🎧 Listen and join the conversation.

I was sitting in a room at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, at a conference called And the Bible Says (ATBS) hosted by Pastor Philip White. It was the kind of room where you walk in expecting to be informed and walk out having been confronted, in the best possible way.

Dr. Kenneth C. Ulmer was speaking. And somewhere in the beginning of his teaching, he said something that I have not been able to put down since.

He said: “Some churches are so authentic that nobody is coming. Some churches are so attractive that Jesus is not coming.”

The room laughed. Then the room got quiet. Because everyone in it knew he was telling the truth.

It is worth pausing on the second part of that statement. Jesus himself said in John 12:32, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” The promise is not that clever programming will draw them. The promise is not that cultural relevance will draw them. The promise is that He will. Which means the church’s primary assignment has always been to lift Him up faithfully and trust the drawing to Him.

And then, almost as a companion thought, Dr. Ulmer referenced 1 Corinthians 4:9 from The Message, Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Paul writing to the church at Corinth: “It seems to me that God has put us who bear his Message on stage in a theater in which no one wants to buy a ticket.”

I sat with that image for a long time. I am still sitting with it.

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The theater nobody asked for.

Paul is not writing from a place of despair. That is the first thing worth noticing. He is not complaining about his audience or lamenting the cultural moment he has been placed in. He is locating himself theologically. He knows exactly what kind of assignment he has been given and he has made peace with the fact that it does not come with a full house.

That is a word for pastors today.

The pressure to perform for a culture that does not want to buy a ticket is real and it is relentless. Social media has made it visible in ways previous generations of ministers never had to navigate. The metrics are everywhere. And when the metrics are everywhere, it becomes very easy to mistake a full theater for a faithful ministry.

But Paul’s posture is not anxiety. It is clarity. He knows the assignment. And the assignment was never to fill the seats. It was to be faithful on the stage.

You were not called to fill the theater.

This is the word I want to offer to every pastor, church leader, and ministry worker who woke up this week carrying a weight that was never theirs to carry.

You were not called to make the gospel palatable to everyone. You were called to translate it faithfully for someone. Those are not the same assignment. And confusing them is one of the most spiritually dangerous things a minister can do, because the pursuit of a full theater will eventually reshape the message to fit the audience, and once that happens, the theater may fill up but the Word has stopped landing.

At the same conference, Dr. Dwight Radcliff delivered a session on incarnational preaching that helped me understand why both traps Ulmer named lead to the same place ~ a Word that never lands. Dr. Radcliff’s central argument was straightforward and disarming: the Word of God has to land. Not float. Not perform. Land. In a specific place. In a specific person. In a specific community.

He grounded that argument in the incarnation itself. God did not send a generic, broadly palatable, culturally neutral version of the Word into the world. God sent a specific person into a specific neighborhood with a specific history, a specific language, and a specific political reality. And that person preached in parables, not because he was softening the message, but because he was committed to it landing. As Dr. Radcliff put it, every sermon has an address. The preacher is not delivering a generic message to the world. The preacher is delivering a particular word to a particular people in a particular moment.

The measure of faithful preaching was never the size of the crowd. It was whether the Word moved into the neighborhood.

What the tension is actually telling you.

The church that is so authentic it has lost its translation skill has stopped caring whether the Word lands. It has confused faithfulness with insularity. And the church that is so attractive it has lost its theological nerve has stopped caring what the Word actually says. It has confused relevance with faithfulness.

Both miss the neighborhood. Both fail the assignment.

The preacher who has stopped feeling the tension between depth and accessibility, between the ancient text and the living congregation, has probably stopped doing the hard work of translation. And translation is the work. It has always been the work. God did it first. The incarnation did not resolve the tension between the divine and the human. It held it. The preacher is not called to resolve that tension either. The preacher is called to hold it faithfully.

The theater being empty is not the final word.

Paul goes on. He keeps preaching. He keeps writing. He keeps showing up for congregations that are fractured and confused and sometimes hostile, not because the results justify the effort, but because the calling does.

When the hard seasons come, return to the assignment. Were you faithful to the Word? Did you show up for the people God gave you? Did the message have an address? If the answer is yes, then you did the work. And the One who said if I be lifted up I will draw all men unto me is still in the business of doing what He promised.

You were not called to fill the theater.

You were called to be faithful on the stage.

That is enough. It has always been enough.

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect who holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

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We’ve been married for over two decades, and here’s what we’ve learned: the marriages that last aren’t the ones without problems. They’re the ones where two people keep showing up, keep talking, and keep inviting God into the room.

Seven Days of Us is a short devotional we wrote for couples who want to build that kind of marriage — seven days, seven scriptures, real questions to talk through together, phones down. Fifteen minutes a day. That’s it.

It follows the same path our upcoming book walks through: Seek. Establish. Maintain.

• Days 1–2: Seek God first, seek to understand each other

• Days 3–5: Establish vision, fight fair, establish grace

• Days 6–7: Maintain the friendship, maintain the legacy

This is a first taste of the full story — the book is coming in the future, told in both of our voices.

Subscribe below and it’s yours, free. Simply use the link below to download your copy.

With Love, Rufus & Jamila

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With Love, The Chambers is the home of Rufus & Jamila Chambers — married 24+ years, parents to two daughters, and hosts of the With Love, The Chambers podcast, where they speak openly about faith, marriage, and the real work of building a life together.

Rufus is a ministry leadership consultant, systems architect, and author of Does Your Vision Need an Engineer? and I Stand: The Road to Manhood, holding a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. Jamila is a Dream Releaser Life Coach, speaker, and founder of The Dream Studio, with 25+ years of experience building high-performing teams across Fortune 500 companies and higher ed.

Together, they write and teach on faith, marriage, and culture; sharing the seeking, establishing, and maintaining of a love that lasts.

Listen to With Love, The Chambers on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Link to Free Devotional

I studied structural engineering principles in undergrad. My career since then has been primarily in construction project management, notably as an owner’s rep, on capital projects for school districts, universities, biotech companies, and studios. The job has always come down to the same thing underneath whatever the project was: make sure what gets built is designed on purpose, inspected before anyone moves in, and built to last longer than the people who built it.

Somewhere along the way, I also spent over two decades in ministry, and years consulting with organizations of every kind. Churches, nonprofits, schools, companies. And I kept running into the same failure, over and over, in rooms that had nothing else in common.

A founder or a long tenured leader steps away. Retirement, health, a new opportunity, sometimes just burnout. Within a couple of years, the thing they built starts to come apart. Not because the mission stopped mattering. Because nobody was actually ready to hold it.

Every time, someone in the room says some version of the same thing afterward: “We always figured someone would step up when the time came.”

Nobody ever does, on their own. Not reliably. Not in time.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what I keep testing against every organization I work with:

Organizations don’t have a leadership shortage. They have a leadership design failure.

Leadership development, in most places, happens by accident. Whoever’s been there longest gets the nod. Whoever’s charismatic gets the platform. Whoever raises their hand first gets the title. Nobody sat down and actually designed a pathway: here’s how someone moves from new, to trusted, to load bearing, to ready to lead. It’s not written down anywhere. It’s not inspected. It’s hoped for.

And hope is not a succession plan.

I think about this now the way I think about a building. A beautiful facade over a weak foundation still collapses, eventually, predictably, and usually at the worst possible moment. Leadership works the same way. Charisma gets you a groundbreaking photo op. It doesn’t get you an occupancy permit.

The line I keep coming back to:

Leaders aren’t discovered. They’re built. On purpose, in stages, by someone willing to do the unglamorous work of construction.

Not found in a talent search. Not born with it, fully formed. Built, the way you build anything worth trusting. You survey the actual conditions honestly. You design the pathway on purpose. You give people real responsibility under real supervision. You test readiness before the stakes are high. And eventually, deliberately, you hand over the keys.

Most organizations skip straight from “we hope someone’s ready” to “we’re in crisis and nobody is.” There’s a whole system missing in between, and it’s not complicated. It’s just rarely done on purpose.

I’m working on something built around this idea. Pulling together what I’ve learned running real capital projects, what my doctoral research turned up about why succession specifically fails inside the Black Church, and what I’ve seen repeat itself almost identically in corporate, nonprofit, and higher ed settings. More on that soon.

But before I go further, I want to hear from the people actually living this:

Does your organization have a real, documented leadership pipeline, or is it mostly whoever’s stuck around the longest? If you lost your top three leaders tomorrow, is anyone actually ready?

I’d genuinely like to know. Reply, or just sit with the question for a minute. Either way, I think it’s worth asking before the answer gets forced on you.

Rufus Chambers III
Co-Founder, The Vision Engineering Collective
📖 Author, Does Your Vision Need an Engineer? and I Stand: The Road to Manhood
🎙️ Co-Host, With Love, The Chambers
🌐 thevecollective.info

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The recent Howard University enrollment controversy brought that reality into sharp focus. While the headlines centered on one university, we found ourselves asking much bigger questions.

How do we help our children pursue their dreams without compromising their financial future?

In this episode of With Love, The Chambers, we move beyond the news cycle to discuss the rising cost of higher education, the emotional pull of dream schools, student debt, financial literacy, scholarships, 529 college savings plans, and the difficult conversations every family should be having long before senior year of high school.

As parents who have guided two daughters through the college admissions process—and as professionals who have spent years working in higher education—we share both personal experiences and practical lessons we’ve learned along the way.

This isn’t an episode about telling students to dream smaller.

It’s about helping families dream wisely.

Because the goal isn’t simply to get into college—it’s to graduate with opportunities, financial stability, and the freedom to build the life you’ve worked so hard to create.

Whether you’re raising a future college student, preparing for college yourself, or reflecting on your own educational journey, we hope this conversation equips you to make decisions rooted in both hope and wisdom.

“Dreams are worth pursuing—but they should never come at the expense of your future.”

We’d love to hear from you:

If you or your child were accepted to a dream school that would require significant debt, would you still say yes? Why or why not?

❤️ Build with Love.

At With Love, The Chambers, we believe the best conversations don’t just inform us—they transform us.

Each week, Rufus and Jamila bring thoughtful discussions about marriage, parenting, leadership, faith, culture, and the moments shaping our communities. Our hope is that every episode leaves you encouraged, challenged, and better equipped to build a meaningful life and lasting legacy.

There is a leadership position in the local church that is simultaneously indispensable and undervalued. It does not carry the title of Lead Pastor. It does not preach most Sundays. It does not receive the invitations to speak at conferences or the recognition at the annual banquet. But without it, most of what happens in a healthy, functioning, forward-moving ministry would simply not happen.

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It is the second chair. And the church has never needed it more than it does right now.

I have served in second chair leadership for most of my ministry life, supporting church planters, serving as Chief Officer of Ministry, and coming alongside pastors doing the hard and sacred work of building. What I learned in those seasons is something I carry into every advisory conversation I have today: the second chair is not a waiting room. It is not a consolation prize for leaders who have not yet arrived. It is a distinct and specific calling that the health of the church depends on.

It is also worth clarifying what the second chair actually is, because it is broader than a single title or role. The second chair is a position, a posture, and a mentality. It may be occupied by one person — an executive pastor, a chief of staff, a ministry director or it may be held by a small collective of leaders who together carry the weight of vision alongside the lead pastor. An elder team functioning with genuine investment and strategic alignment is a second chair. A deacon board serving with both operational faithfulness and spiritual discernment is a second chair. What defines it is not the number of people in the seat, but the posture of those who occupy it: committed to the vision, accountable to the leader, and fully invested in building something they did not originate but have chosen to steward.

Genesis 41:43 offers a picture the church has largely overlooked. When Pharaoh elevated Joseph, he had him ride in the second chariot, and before him the people proclaimed, bow the knee. The second chariot was not Pharaoh’s chariot. The order was clear and the authority was rightly placed. But Joseph’s position carried its own dignity, its own weight, and its own purpose. He was not diminished by the second seat. He was deployed in it, precisely where he could be most effective in service to a vision greater than himself.

The Apostle Paul understood this as well. His relationship with Timothy is one of the most instructive leadership models in all of Scripture. Paul did not simply assign Timothy tasks and move on. He formed him. He wrote to him not primarily about strategy or structure, but about character, about guarding what had been entrusted, and about setting an example in life and godliness. What Paul gave Timothy was not just an assignment. It was a formation process, a season of depth and intentional investment that had lasting value regardless of what position Timothy held when it was over. That is the biblical picture of second chair leadership done well.

The need is real. Many ministry leaders carry the full weight of vision, administration, pastoral care, and organizational management largely alone. Not because they are unwilling to share the load, but because the second chair has not always been developed into the kind of trusted partnership it was designed to be. A well-formed second chair, whether an individual or a collective, provides the lead pastor with trusted voices, honest perspective, and operational continuity that protects both the vision and the people it serves. When that relationship is built on genuine trust and intentional formation, the whole organization moves with greater confidence and clarity.

For the second chair leader reading this: your assignment is not a lesser calling. It is a specific one. Some of the most enduring work in the kingdom has been done by people whose names appear in the second line of the text, not the first. Not every second chair leader is meant to become a first chair. Some are called completely and permanently to the second seat, not because they lack capacity, but because that is precisely where their greatest effectiveness lives.

The church moves forward when the second chair is filled with formed, faithful, and committed leaders who understand that what they are building together is greater than what any of them could build alone.

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect and holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

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In this From the Vault moment from With Love, The Chambers, she gets honest about being a “gatherer,” about the limits of even our most loving relationships, and about why every parent needs to hear that bringing in professional help is not a failure — it’s wisdom.

🎧 Full episode linked here.

💛 Sponsored by the Watts of Power Foundation — www.wattsofpowerfoundation.org

You dread Monday mornings and you’ve stopped asking why.

Your best people go quiet in meetings — not because they agree, but because they’ve stopped believing it matters.

If you’re a pastor, you’ve felt this in a leadership meeting that used to buzz with vision and now just moves through an agenda. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve felt it in a Monday stand-up where nobody pushes back anymore, not because everything’s fine, but because nobody thinks it’s worth the energy. If you’re a marketplace leader, you’ve felt it in a team that hits its numbers and still feels hollow.

We tend to call this burnout. I don’t think that’s right.

Burnout is what happens when you’ve given everything to something you still believe in. Drift is different. Drift is what happens when repetition quietly replaces reorientation — when you keep doing the work long after you’ve lost track of why the work matters, or where your people actually are on the journey.

Burnout looks like exhaustion. Drift looks like competence without conviction. And it’s far more common, and far more dangerous, because it doesn’t announce itself. You don’t collapse from drift. You just slowly stop noticing that the thing you’re leading has quietly become disconnected from the thing you were called to build.

Dr. Dharius Daniels puts his finger on the exact distinction: “It’s one thing to lead a driven life. It’s another thing to live a LED life.” Drift is what happens when driven quietly replaces led — when momentum keeps you moving long after direction has stopped being something you’re actively tracking.

Here’s what drift tends to look like in practice:

Leading the calendar instead of the vision. Your week is full. Every box is checked. But if you asked yourself when you last cast vision instead of just managing logistics, you might not remember.

Managing tasks instead of mission. The ministry runs. The business runs. But “running” and “advancing” are not the same thing, and most leaders stop noticing the difference long before their teams do.

Present in the room, absent from the journey. You show up. You lead the meeting. But your people can tell the difference between a leader who’s tracking their formation and a leader who’s just tracking the project plan.

I’ve spent over 25 years building commercial construction projects and over 15 years forming leaders in the church, and I’ve watched drift take down pastors who never lost their faith and executives who never lost their skill. What they lost was orientation — the ability to look up from the immediate task and ask, honestly, “Where are we, really? And is this still the direction we meant to go?”

The uncomfortable truth is that drift isn’t usually a crisis of character. It’s a failure of attention. And the leaders who catch it early aren’t the ones with more discipline than everyone else — they’re the ones who’ve built a rhythm of stepping back often enough to notice when the map and the terrain have quietly stopped matching.

So if you’re dreading Monday and you can’t say why. If your team has gone quiet in a way that used to be engagement and now feels like resignation — don’t reach for a vacation, and don’t assume you need a new strategy. Ask a harder question first: When did I last check whether we’re still headed where we said we were going?

That question, asked honestly and often, is the beginning of finding your way back.

And then there are conversations that choose you.

This week, we had every intention of recording another episode about leadership, marriage, and family. But as the news surrounding the tragic death of Nolan Xavier Wells continued to unfold, neither of us could simply move on.

So we didn’t.

Instead, we pressed pause.

Not because we have answers.

Not because we wanted to speculate.

And certainly not because we wanted to contribute to the noise surrounding an ongoing investigation.

We paused because behind every headline is a family.

A mother.

A father.

Loved ones who are living through the unimaginable reality of losing an 18-year-old son while doing so under the eyes of the public.

As parents ourselves, we couldn’t stop thinking about Nolan’s family.

What must it feel like to wake up each morning hoping for answers while also navigating cameras, social media, opinions, and the weight of an entire community watching your grief?

This episode is our attempt to do something increasingly rare.

To slow down.

To lament.

To mourn with those who mourn.

We also wrestle with larger questions that this tragedy has stirred within our own hearts—questions about community, race, history, empathy, media, and what it means to truly stand alongside people in moments of suffering. But throughout the conversation, we intentionally resist drawing conclusions where facts have not yet been established. Our desire is not to add speculation, but to make room for compassion.

Sometimes the most faithful response isn’t having the perfect answer.

Sometimes it’s simply refusing to rush past another family’s pain.

We pray this conversation honors Nolan’s memory, encourages thoughtful reflection, and reminds us all that every life bears the image of God and every family deserves our compassion.

“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” — Romans 12:15

🎧 Listen to the conversation above.

Question for our Substack community:

Have you ever experienced a moment when the most meaningful response wasn’t to have answers—but simply to be present with someone in their grief? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

With Love,

Rufus & Jamila Chambers

When Samuel arrived at the house of Jesse to anoint the next king of Israel, he made the same mistake most of us make. He looked at Eliab — tall, impressive, the picture of what a king should look like — and assumed he was looking at the one. God corrected him with one of the most important sentences in all of Scripture: “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” — 1 Samuel 16:7

The church has been making Eliab’s mistake ever since.

We have developed a remarkable capacity to celebrate what is visible, impressive, and immediately compelling. The preacher who moves crowds. The prophet whose words are demonstrably accurate. The worship leader whose gift creates an atmosphere that is genuinely transcendent. And we celebrate all of it without asking the harder and more essential question about the interior life of the person standing before us. We have confused the evidence of gifting with the evidence of character. And they are not the same thing.

I want to be honest about something before I go further. I am not writing this from a position of moral superiority. I have my own areas of character that require ongoing formation. This is not a piece written from above the tension. It is written from inside it, by someone who believes the church deserves an honest conversation about a pattern that keeps repeating and keeps costing us.

The recent case of Brian Carn is not one I raise to pile on. I raise it because it illustrates the pattern with painful clarity. Carn is a genuinely gifted minister whose prophetic gift drew thousands and produced spiritual fruit in people’s lives. He was also, as federal prosecutors established, concealing more than $1.3 million in income from the IRS while continuing to minister from a platform built on trust. He eventually pled guilty, acknowledging in a public live stream: “I’m responsible to handle everything that He’s blessed me with integrity, and I didn’t.” He was subsequently sentenced to 9 months in federal prison. The gift was real. The character had not caught up with it. And the people who trusted him paid a cost they did not agree to.

This is not an isolated story. It is a recurring one. And the church’s response to it, the cycle of exposure, grief, restoration, and return to platform, suggests that we have not yet reckoned honestly with the structural problem underneath the personal failure.

In my doctoral research, I argued that cultivating effective leadership necessitates a holistic approach that seamlessly interweaves spiritual formation, practical skills development, and deep contextual understanding. The sequence of that sentence is intentional. Spiritual formation is not the third consideration. It is the first. Everything else is built on top of it, or it is built on sand.

William H. Willimon, in his landmark work Calling and Character: Virtues of the Ordained Life, makes a distinction the church has largely failed to institutionalize. He argues that the qualifications for ordained ministry are fundamentally about character, not competency. The calling and the character must develop together, or the calling will eventually be undone by the absence of the character. The gift can carry a leader far beyond the place where their character can hold them.

The Apostle Paul understood this. The qualifications he outlined for leadership in 1 Timothy 3 are almost entirely character-based. Above reproach. Temperate. Self-controlled. Respectable. Not a lover of money. Not once does Paul mention the power of the gift or the size of the crowd. He is describing a person’s interior architecture. And he is insisting that this, not gifting, is the qualification for leadership.

This is not an argument against gifting. Gifts are given by God and they are genuine. What flows through a gifted leader can be real even when the leader’s character is compromised, because God in His sovereignty is faithful to His Word regardless of the vessel. But the long-term sustainability of leadership, the formation of healthy community, and the protection of the people entrusted to a leader’s care all depend not on the gift but on the character of the person carrying it.

The formation question I want the church to take seriously is this: are we building pathways that cultivate character with the same intentionality we celebrate gifting? Are we creating environments where emerging leaders are asked hard questions about their interior life before they are given access to large platforms? Are we willing to slow down the promotion of impressive people long enough to ask whether their character has caught up with their gift?

Samuel almost got it wrong. God corrected him before the anointing oil touched the wrong head. The church does not always have that corrective moment before the platform is given, the book is published, or the conference invitation goes out. Which means the work of character formation has to happen before the gift is celebrated, not after the character fails.

The gift will take a leader far. But it is character that determines where they land.

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect and holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

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You can become so committed to building something meaningful that you unintentionally neglect the people and relationships that matter most.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Matthew and Dr. Latasha Nesbitt, we explore what it actually takes to build a marriage, raise a family, pursue individual goals, and answer the call of God—all at the same time.

And one of the most important lessons from the conversation challenged the way we often think about balance.

Balance doesn’t always mean giving everything equal time.

There are seasons when your career may require more attention. Seasons when your children need more of you. Seasons when you’re building something new and the demands are greater than usual. And there are seasons when you need to recognize that your marriage, family, or personal well-being needs to become the priority again.

The key is learning to recognize the season you’re in.

The Nesbitts share how they navigated planting Deeper Church LA while protecting nearly 20 years of marriage and raising their family. They talk candidly about involving their children in major decisions, sharing the weight of each other’s assignments, conducting intentional family check-ins, and setting goals for every role they carry.

One statement from the conversation especially stayed with us:

You can build a strong ministry and lose your family.

The same could be said about a business.

A career.

An education.

Even a dream.

Sometimes the question isn’t whether what we’re pursuing is good.

The question is whether we’re building it in a way that allows the people we love to still be standing beside us when we arrive.

This conversation reminded us that purpose should never become an individual pursuit.

Marriage is a partnership.

Family is a team.

And sometimes the most important thing we can do is sit down with the people we love and ask:

Where are we right now?

What needs more of our attention?

What needs to slow down?

What needs to stop?

And what does this season require from us?

Whether you’re building a ministry, career, business, family, or dream, we hope this conversation encourages you to pursue purpose with intention—and to remember the people who are building alongside you.

🎧 Listen to Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Matthew and Dr. Latasha Nesbitt above.

Question for our Substack community:

What area of your life needs more of your attention in this season—and what might you need to say “no” to in order to give it that attention?

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

❤️ Build with Love.

Rufus & Jamila Chambers

There is a leadership development renaissance happening in the church right now. Conferences, cohorts, training programs, curricula, and certifications are more accessible than at any point in the history of modern ministry. Churches are investing in their leaders. Organizations are building pipelines. And yet something critical is missing from many of those pipelines, and its absence is showing up in ways the church is only beginning to reckon with.

Worth noting before we go further: the pipeline producing ministry leaders is under pressure. According to the Association of Theological Schools, Master of Divinity enrollment — the degree specifically designed to produce pastors — now represents just 35% of all seminary enrollment, down from 43% a decade ago. More people are pursuing theological degrees than ever, but fewer of them are preparing for pastoral ministry. The formation pipeline is narrowing, not widening. Which makes the question of how we develop the leaders we have even more urgent.

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In my doctoral research examining millennial engagement and spiritual formation in the Black church, one of the most consistent findings was this: the failure of leadership development programs to retain and produce effective ministry leaders was not primarily a programmatic failure. It was a formation failure. The most urgent need was not for more skilled leaders. It was for more formed ones.

There is a difference between a leader who has been trained and a leader who has been formed. Training gives a person tools. Formation shapes the person who will use them. Training can be completed in a semester. Formation is the work of a lifetime. And the church, more than any other institution on earth, has both the mandate and the resources to do the deeper work. And yet it has increasingly borrowed leadership development models from the corporate world that begin and end with competency, never touching the interior life of the leader being developed.

Dallas Willard described spiritual formation as the process of growing in faith and spiritual maturity through practices such as prayer, worship, and discipleship, aimed at deepening one’s relationship with God. That definition is not decorative. It is diagnostic. It tells us what we are actually building when we invest in a leader, and what we are not building when we skip this step.

What happens when we skip it is not always immediately visible. A leader who has been trained without being formed can carry a platform for years before the interior poverty becomes public. The skills hold. The systems work. The sermons land. But something underneath is hollow. And eventually, under enough pressure, that hollowness gives way. We have watched this pattern repeat in ministry after ministry, in leader after leader, and still we return to the same development models that prioritize competency over character, strategy over sanctity, and execution over formation.

The solution is not to abandon leadership development. It is to insist that it begin in the right place. The biblical model is not ambiguous. Jesus did not hand His disciples a curriculum. He formed them through proximity, prayer, practice, and the slow work of life lived together. Paul did not simply instruct Timothy in leadership techniques. He guided his spiritual growth, challenged his character, and called him toward depth before he called him toward duty. The early church’s model of leadership development was, at its core, a model of spiritual formation that produced leadership as its fruit, not its starting point.

The church that wants to produce leaders who last, leaders who lead from depth rather than depletion, leaders who build something that outlasts them, must recover this sequence. Spiritual formation is not the supplement to leadership development. It is the foundation. Everything built without it is built on sand. And what is built on sand may stand for a season, but it will not stand for long.

Before we add another program, launch another cohort, or promote another capable person into a position of influence, the better question is this:

Have they been formed?

Rufus Chambers III is a ministry leadership consultant and systems architect and holds a Doctor of Ministry from George Fox University. He works with pastors and ministry leaders at the intersection of spiritual formation, leadership development, and organizational strategy.

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Dr. Matthew Nesbitt looked across the table at Dr. Latasha Nesbitt and told her, “I believe you will be my wife.”

That kind of statement might sound bold—or even unbelievable—to some people.

But what struck us wasn’t the confidence. It was the preparation behind it.

Long before they found each other, both of them had committed themselves to living with purpose. Dr. Matt spent a season intentionally preparing himself before pursuing a relationship. Dr. Latasha knew her non-negotiables and wasn’t interested in dating without direction. When they met, they weren’t looking for someone to complete them—they were looking for someone who could walk alongside the purpose God had already placed in their lives.

Twenty years later, they continue to build a marriage while leading, serving, raising a family, and planting Deeper Church LA.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Why preparation often comes before purpose.

• How to balance marriage, ministry, and family.

• The importance of intentional rhythms.

• Protecting your relationship while pursuing your calling.

• Practical ways to discover your God-given purpose.

• Why authenticity matters more than appearance.

Whether you’re single, dating, engaged, married, or simply trying to discern your next step, this episode is a reminder that healthy relationships don’t happen by accident. They are built intentionally—one decision, one conversation, and one season at a time.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation above.

Question for our Substack community:

Do you believe purpose prepares you for relationships, or do relationships help you discover your purpose? We’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

With Love,

Rufus & Jamila Chambers

Connect with our guests at the following:

Dr. Matthew Nesbitt http://drmatthewnesbitt.com/

Dr. Latasha Nesbitt https://www.drlatashalnesbitt.com/

Deeper Church LA https://www.deeperchurchla.com/

On Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened its doors on the South Side of Chicago. Not downtown. Not in some sanitized corridor built for tourists. It sits in Jackson Park, minutes from where Barack Obama once organized churches and block clubs as a young community organizer, on a 19-acre campus that now holds a museum, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, gardens, an athletic facility, and a plaza named for John Lewis.

I watched the dedication ceremony the way I watch most things tied to that man’s legacy, with a mixture of admiration and scrutiny I’ve never quite been able to separate. Four presidents on one stage. Stevie Wonder. Bruce Springsteen. Thousands gathered at a free watch party blocks away, dancing in the same neighborhoods his presidency was supposed to transform. It was, by any measure, a beautiful day.

And right on schedule, the old argument resurfaced: What did Obama actually do for Black people?

It’s a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly before I tell you why it’s not the question that matters most to me.

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The Numbers, Honestly

The data cuts both ways, and a serious person has to hold both halves at once.

On one hand, the record shows real, measurable gains. Black unemployment spiked to a 28-year high of 16.8% in early 2010, in the wake of the Great Recession he inherited, then was cut nearly in half by the end of his second term, down to roughly 7.8% by January 2017. The Obama White House’s own data showed the African American poverty rate falling from 14.8% to 13.5%, lifting millions out of poverty, with the fastest income growth concentrated among lower- and middle-income households. Permanent expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit put real money, about $1,000 a year on average, back into the pockets of roughly two million Black working families. Health coverage made similar strides: the uninsured rate among Black Americans fell from 18.9% to 11.7% between 2013 and 2016, a drop of more than a third. On criminal justice, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 cut the infamous 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine down to 18:1, and he commuted the sentences of more nonviolent drug offenders than any modern president before him.

On the other hand, the critics aren’t inventing their case out of thin air. Economists across the political spectrum have pointed out that Black unemployment remained roughly double the white unemployment rate for nearly his entire presidency, the same disparity that existed before he took office and the same one that exists now. The wealth gap didn’t close. Mass incarceration, despite real reforms at the margins, didn’t reverse. If your standard for a presidency is “did the structural racial gap disappear,” the answer is no. It didn’t. No single presidency was ever going to make it disappear.

So: he inherited a catastrophe and helped engineer a real recovery that disproportionately benefited Black families. And: the deep structural gaps that predated him outlived him too. Both of those things are true. A both/and posture, I’ve found, is usually closer to the truth than either side’s tidy headline.

But That’s Not Why He Inspired Me

Here’s what I keep coming back to, and it’s something I don’t think the spreadsheets were ever built to capture.

I hold conservative principles. I believe in the dignity of work, the centrality of family, and personal responsibility, alongside systems and structures that are equitable to all. I didn’t agree with Barack Obama on every policy question, and I’m not writing this to relitigate them.

But I was inspired by him. Not by a line item in a budget. By the man.

By a Black man who built a career on substance instead of spectacle. By a husband who, thirty-four years into a marriage, still looks at his wife like she’s the whole point. By a father whose daughters grew up in the most scrutinized house in the world and came out grounded, accomplished, unscandalized. By a leader who carried himself with a dignity and an emotional intelligence that disarmed even the people determined to hate him. By a mind sharp enough to argue policy with anyone in the room, and a temperament steady enough to never need to prove it.

None of that shows up in an unemployment chart. None of it survives a fact-check. You cannot run a regression on grace. I watched a man hold the hardest job in the world for eight years without losing his composure, his marriage, or his children, and something in me recalibrated what was possible.

That is what inspiration does that policy can’t. Policy moves numbers. Inspiration moves people. And people, eventually, move numbers, just on a longer clock than a four-year term, through channels no White House fact sheet will ever track. The Black father who stayed because he saw one stay. The young man who finished the degree because he saw one finish two. The kid in Jackson Park who will walk through that library and, for the first time, picture himself in a room like that. That return on investment will compound for fifty years, off the books, in places statisticians don’t look.

The Question That Actually Matters

So I’ll grant the critics their data, because it deserves to be reckoned with honestly. But I’d ask them, and I’d ask myself, a different question than “what did the metrics show.”

Who are you inspiring?

Not who are you arguing with on the internet. Not what’s your hot take on the last election. Who, in your actual orbit (your son, your daughter, your mentee, your congregation, your team), is watching how you carry your marriage, your work, your setbacks, your faith, and quietly deciding what’s possible for their own life because of what they saw in you?

Who do you have the capacity to inspire, that you haven’t yet stepped into?

That’s the legacy question. Not “what’s your net approval rating,” but “what did you make someone else believe was achievable, just by being consistent in front of them.” A presidential library will outlast all of us in marble and glass. But the kid who decides to stay in school, get married, build something, lead with dignity because they watched somebody do it up close, that’s a monument too. It just doesn’t have an address.

Build that one. It’s the only legacy metric that was never going to show up on a spreadsheet anyway.

Rufus Chambers III, D.Min., co-hosts With Love, The Chambers with his wife Jamila and leads The Vision Engineering Collective. He's the author of Does Your Vision Need an Engineer? and I Stand: The Road to Manhood.

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In our very first on-camera episode, I shared something I hadn’t fully unpacked publicly before: in January 2023, during a revival at our home church, I received a clear unction to bet on myself — to step into entrepreneurship. I knew exactly what I’d heard. And I still waited two years to act on it.

Not because I doubted the word. Because I had a mortgage. Daughters in college. Car notes. All the practical weight that makes faith feel like a luxury you can’t quite afford yet.

If you’re in that in-between right now — holding a word from God in one hand and a list of responsibilities in the other — I wanted to share this clip with you. It’s a short piece from that conversation, but it captures something I think a lot of us live through quietly: the tension between obedience and timing, between faith and what’s “responsible.”

🎬 Watch the full episode here:

With love,

Rufus & Jamila

There is a particular kind of math that only shows up generations later. You cannot see it in the moment a man chooses to stay, to show up, to coach the team he never wanted to coach, to sit through the recital he is too tired to attend. The math reveals itself decades down the line, in a grandchild’s confidence, in a great-grandchild’s sense of safety in the world. Fatherhood is compound interest paid out across bloodlines.

I know this because I have lived on the receiving end of that math. My life, and the life my own children now get to live, is a direct deposit from my father’s account, and from the accounts of the men who stood behind him: grandfathers, uncles, a pastor who would not let me drift, mentors who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. I did not build the foundation I stand on. I inherited it. And inheritance, biblically and practically, was never meant to be hoarded. It was meant to be passed forward.

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This is why Father’s Day cannot be reduced to neckties and brunch. For the men who are actually doing the work, the day deserves to be named for what it is: a checkpoint in a multigenerational assignment.

The Crisis Hiding Behind the Celebration

Sociologists have documented for decades what communities have felt for generations: father absence correlates with measurable disadvantage in education, economic mobility, incarceration risk, and emotional development. The data is real and it matters. But data alone can flatten a sacred truth into a statistic, and statistics do not change behavior. Conviction does.

So let me say plainly what the research only gestures toward: a father’s presence is not a nice supplement to a child’s life. It is structural. It is load-bearing. When a man shows up, consistently, imperfectly, faithfully, he is not simply meeting a need in the present. He is setting the terms by which his children will understand love, safety, conflict, and their own worth for the rest of their lives, and likely passing those terms to children not yet born.

This is the urgency I want to name. Fatherhood is not a sentiment. It is an assignment with multigenerational consequences, and the clock on that assignment does not pause for excuses.

Retiring the Shallow Excuses

I have heard them, and at different seasons I have been tempted to use them myself: I didn’t have a model. I’m too busy. Their mother and I aren’t together, so my hands are tied. I show up financially, isn’t that enough?

These excuses are not without some real pain underneath them. Many men were genuinely under-resourced, under-fathered themselves, handed wounds instead of wisdom. I do not minimize that. But pain explains; it does not excuse. A man who was not poured into still has the responsibility, and by grace the capacity, to pour out. Brokenness can be the raw material for breakthrough, but only if a man does the work rather than hides behind the wound.

Engagement does not require a perfect biography. It requires presence by any means necessary: a phone call when geography separates you, a court-ordered visitation honored without resentment, a mentorship claimed when biology did not provide a father, a willingness to be corrected and to keep showing up anyway. The means will look different for every man. The necessity does not change.

Starring in the Role, Not Merely Filling It

There is a difference between occupying a role and starring in it. A man can technically be present, in the house, on the payroll, in the pew, and still be absent from the actual formation of the people who carry his name. Starring in fatherhood means being known by your children, not just providing for them. It means your sons and daughters can name your values because they have watched you live them, not just heard you state them.

This is the pastoral charge underneath the academic data: presence is a discipline before it is a feeling. You will not always feel like the father your children need. Show up anyway. The feeling tends to follow the faithfulness, not the other way around.

To the Men Reading This

To the biological fathers, stepfathers, foster fathers, grandfathers raising grandchildren, uncles who became the steady hand, coaches, pastors, and mentors who chose to father a generation that was not biologically theirs: thank you. You are not a footnote to someone else’s family story. You are an author of it.

Whatever shoulders you are standing on, someone is now standing on yours. Stand still long enough, and faithfully enough, for them to find their footing.

Happy Father’s Day.

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