I've walked this road, and I'm still on it.

My early years were spent in a Buddhist monastery. That's where I first learned discipline, silence, and the idea that a life could be given to something bigger than itself. I'm grateful for it, and I'm honest that it didn't answer the questions I would carry into adulthood.

I came to Canada at fifteen. Anyone who arrived here as a teenager knows what that's like: a new language, a new set of rules, and a self that doesn't quite fit anywhere. I did what many of us do. I worked hard, I looked fine on the outside, and I fell apart on the inside.

University was the hardest season of my life. I struggled with drug addiction. I hated myself in ways I couldn't say out loud, and there were stretches when I didn't want to be alive. I'm not sharing that for effect. I'm sharing it because some of the leaders reading this are carrying things they've never told anyone, and I want you to know you're talking to someone who has been at the bottom.

In my fifth year, a course required me to write an essay on the Gospels. I read them to get the essay done. I did not expect to meet anyone in them. But somewhere in those four books I met a Jesus who was not disappointed in me, who moved toward the broken instead of away from them, and who did not need me to be fixed before he loved me. I became a Christian at my desk, over an assignment. God has a sense of humour.

That's why Isaiah 61 is the ground I stand on. Good news to the poor. Binding up the broken-hearted. Freedom for the captives. I'm not quoting it. I'm describing what happened to me.

Over fifteen years of planting, three churches grew to anywhere from fifty to five hundred and fifty people. They weren't polished. They were full of immigrants, new believers, and leaders who didn't know they were leaders yet. I learned that a church grows healthy in the same four ways every time, whether it's eight people in a living room or five hundred in a rented school gym.

For the past seven years I've served as a church planting catalyst for a network of churches in Ontario, especially with leaders who plant in their own heart language and culture, which in our region is most of them. When I stepped into that role we were seeing two or three new churches a year. Today it's fifteen to twenty. Between 2020 and 2025 our network saw more than eighty new church plants, and ninety-four percent of those planters were born outside North America. They worship, preach, and care for people in more than twenty languages. Most work full-time jobs while they do it.

I don't share those numbers to impress you. Most of that is God, and most of the rest is the planters themselves. I share them because they're proof of something I want you to believe: leaders like you, with the jobs and the families and the limited English and the big hearts, are not the exception in Canada's church. You're the movement. My job has simply been to see what God already placed in people and help them see it too.

Patience. I'm wired to move, and God keeps teaching me that people grow at the pace of trust, not the pace of my calendar.

Shepherding. Starting things comes naturally to me. Staying with people through long, slow seasons does not, and I'm grateful for the pastors around me who do it well and let me learn from them.

Rest. I spent years believing that if I stopped, the work would stop. It didn't. I'm still learning to trust that, and it's why the health of leaders has become so central to what I do.

Systems. Sticky notes carried my ministry for a long time. I'm building better tools now, partly so the leaders I serve never have to run on sticky notes at all.