A handful of ideas behind everything I do.

Every ministry context is a story already in progress. When you step into someone's life, or a team steps into a city, the question isn't “what should we do?” It's “which scene are we in?”

Some relationships are in the opening credits: names are being learned, trust is being built, and nothing dramatic is supposed to happen yet. Some are mid-story: the groundwork is laid and deeper conversations are possible. A few are at the climax, where someone is ready to say yes to Jesus. Most first meetings are opening credits. Almost none are the climax.

I first wrote this down for mission teams visiting our planters, because teams that assume they're arriving at the climax leave disappointed and leave our planters exhausted. But it's just as true for a pastor with his neighbour. Know the scene. Play it well. Trust the author with the rest.

When I sit with a leader, my job is not to grade them. It's to see what God has already put in them and help them see it too.

This changes everything about how a conversation goes. Questions become curious instead of testing. Hesitation gets read as cultural respect instead of disinterest. Imperfect English stops being a problem. A questionnaire becomes a spiritual formation exercise instead of an exam.

It also happens to be more accurate. People show you who they are when they feel seen, and they hide it when they feel measured. Revelation gets to the truth faster than evaluation ever does.

Jesus told his disciples to look for the person of peace: the one who welcomes you, opens their home, and connects you to their people. I've never seen a healthy church start any other way.

Most planters are trained to generate cold traffic: flyers, launch events, social media ads, strangers. It's expensive, it's exhausting, and it produces a crowd rather than a church. Warm traffic is the opposite. It's the coworker who asks why you're different, the family who invited you to dinner, the parent at your kid's school who's going through something. They're already in your life. You just have to see them as the field.

When I map relationships with a core team, we always find more people of peace than they expected. Every time.

That's the whole process, in order, and the order matters. Most of us were taught to gather first and figure out the rest later. So we launch a service, a crowd shows up, and two years in we realize nobody was actually discipled and nobody is ready to lead.

Flip it. Engage the people around you. Share the gospel in the relationships you already have. Walk with the ones who respond. Gather them, and now you have a church made of disciples rather than attendees. Develop leaders from among them, because they're already there. Then give the mission away.

The four marks of a healthy church on this site (reach your city, make disciples, raise leaders, multiply) are just this process, slowed down and made visible.

Many plants settle around thirty or forty people. For years I treated that as a problem to solve. I don't anymore.

A church of thirty that is reaching its neighbourhood, forming disciples, raising leaders, and sending some of them out to start another thirty is doing exactly what the church has always done. A church of a thousand that does none of those things is a large event with a budget. Size is not the measure. Reproduction is.

This is also good news for bivocational leaders, who were never going to build the thousand and were told, implicitly, that they'd failed. You didn't fail. You may be leading exactly the kind of church the gospel spreads through.

When outside churches want to help our planters, the old model was one large team, once a year, paired with one planter. It nearly always hurt more than it helped, because one bivocational leader can't absorb a team of thirty and a week of programming.

So we flipped it. Small teams, minivan-sized, visiting more often, aligned to Canadian long weekends. And instead of pairing a church with a single planter, we pair them with a cluster of plants in a region, with a catalyst as the point of contact who protects the planters from being overwhelmed.

The principle underneath is broader than mission trips: support should be shaped by the capacity of the person receiving it, not the enthusiasm of the person giving it.

Every method on this page fails in the hands of a leader who is exhausted, isolated, and quietly falling apart. I've watched it happen to gifted people, and I've been that person.

So I've come to believe that the leader's sleep, food, body, marriage, grief, and rest are not a side topic. They are the foundation the other four marks stand on. A church cannot be healthier than the person leading it for very long.

This is the conviction I'm building on next, and it's the one I hold most personally.