From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Healthy Church Leadership Begins
What has God taught you through the process of planting and leading Beloved Church?
God has taught me and is still teaching me that faith really works. You have to live by faith, and by faith I don’t mean to believe but to trust in his leadership. I think faith requires a level of vulnerability, because faith means to trust God in the unknown, trusting his leadership prompted by the Holy Spirit without any sense of certainty. Prior to 2020, I would say I lived by belief. I believed, but it wasn’t trust because in many ways I was recreating or copying what I learned. But starting the church in a new way of living and operating has required such a level of vulnerability, because I was trying to create something I myself had never seen.
I was trying to trust the still, small voice that is leading me to be courageous with what I believe, and trust what God is asking me to do. It’s this continual back and forth of entering into the unknown because you know God is there. It’s this relational invitation to follow him by yielding to the leadership of his Spirit.
What were some of those ways that God led you into the unknown in starting this church?
I was so broken. Before my wife and I started our church, I said, “Hey, this is a one-year experiment. If I think this church takes me back to where I was pre-2020, we gotta quit the church. I would rather have God than have a successful church.”
During my sabbatical and during that two-year process, I’ve had many moments with God. One of the moments was I felt like there was an altar and God was asking me to lay down church and lay down ministry—or on a deeper level, what I saw as success—at the altar. And I felt like God was saying, As long as you put that on the altar in exchange, you will have more of me.
It felt excruciating at that time, because I had found my sense of worth and being in what I defined as success in ministry. So it’s learning how to keep that on the altar as I’m leading.
I was so broken that I didn’t know if I [could] lead. And over the last four years of our church, God has taught me and has continued to teach me how to lead from weakness. I think about how the apostle Paul asked God in 2 Corinthians 12, “Take this thorn, take this thorn, take this thorn,” because a thorn was a hindrance, because the thorn made him weak. But then Jesus says, “My grace is sufficient for you. For my power is made perfect in your weakness.” And that’s the gospel. Did not God become weak? God became man. He took on flesh. He took on limitations. He took on weakness.
For me, these past four years have been ones of learning how to live from and lead from a place of weakness so that the beauty of the gospel and the grace of Jesus shines through my life to our community. That’s been a huge thing I’ve learned, and I’m still learning and I’m still holding on to [in order] to pastor and to shepherd well.
Let’s talk a little bit about healthy church multiplication. You are looking to plant a church in New York this year. Why do you feel like that is an important move for you to make?
Well, for me it’s just the Great Commission. Matthew 28, right? So, I want to raise up disciples and send disciples out to obey the Great Commission. I want to see God’s glory multiplied, and I think the best way to do that is to raise up leaders and to send them out to fulfill their own calling.
I like to say that the church doesn’t just transform the city that they’re in, but I believe the church is a transformation center that sends out agents of transformation to bring the light and salt where they are. I have a desire to send out leaders to plant more churches and to equip everyday believers to live out their callings wherever they are.
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I will always be the ceiling to our church. In order to break the ceiling, I’ve always felt a conviction to plant autonomous churches where the best that we have is sent out to plant churches. The church we’re planting in New York, even though it’s called Beloved Church, it’s an autonomous church. I actually wanted it to not be named Beloved, but the guy who is planting the church [Jimmy Bae] was my youth student 18 years ago, so he was like, “Hey, you’re my pastor, you’re my leader, Beloved is what I believe in.” So he’s planting a church, and we just got a new resident as well who’s also going to be planting another church in about 18 to 24 months.
You’ve seen ministry from all these unique angles: You’ve been a youth minister. You’ve been a missionary. You’ve been a pastor and a church planter and a multiplier. What do you feel like is the thread that ties all these pearls of your life together?
On my side, the thread is just obedience. The way I define disciples is the same way Dave Ferguson defines a disciple: someone who hears God and does what he says. But I’m trying to raise up disciplers, which is the same thing, but as one add-on to that, a person who hears God, does what he says, and then helps others do the same.
After I became a Christian, there was this innate supernatural new desire that wanted to obey God. Ezekiel [36] says, “I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I’ll put my Spirit in you, and my Spirit itself will cause you to obey my commands.” So for me, the thread has just been obeying God through Scripture as well as the Holy Spirit, which has continued to lead me in this direction.
