Leading While Letting Go
Reflections and lessons from a year of growth, limits, and trust.
Last week I shared some of the things that have remained the same this year. Thankfully, most of my core convictions haven’t changed much over time, despite tweaks and learnings along the way. That said, there are always lessons to be learned. As I sat down to reflect on 2025, here are the key takeaways.
Dying to the Self
There is a paradoxical, and for those who haven’t walked the road, probably surprising, reality that leaders have to confront as they lead. Namely, they have to relinquish control and replace it with influence. As our movement has grown, my direct control over details has slowly eroded and been replaced by a much more ambiguous, relational, influence-based style of leadership.
When a church is small, or centred in a single city, it’s possible for a leader to have a fairly high degree of direct visibility and control over how the vision and values of the community are expressed. However, as we grow, my awareness of what’s happening is increasingly disconnected from what’s happening on the ground. Much has been said about how to lead through these tensions, but there is something that isn’t so obvious: it is emotionally quite challenging for a leader to relinquish that control.
Subjects that were formerly under my domain are now many degrees of separation removed, and often our leaders don’t approach a scenario as I would. This can create a sense of uselessness and decision paralysis. Over time, I’ve learned that the answer isn’t to grasp for control or step into situations to “fix” things. That almost always creates a mess. Rather, I have to die to myself and slowly work to relationally influence a situation if I believe a course correction is needed or give up influence altogether and let it go.
The Best Ideas Come From Others
Related to the decreasing direct impact I can have is a great, but also disorienting, reality: the best ideas no longer come from me, but from the breadth of experience among our disciple-makers.
In the early phases of leading our movement, many of the drivers of change originated in my planning or within our leadership team. Increasingly, however, the best ideas come from those closest to the ground.
This means we need to continually find ways to remove roadblocks and listen carefully to what younger leaders desire to accomplish.
Discipleship Is Never Linear
As an engineer, I tend to think in terms of predictable inputs and outputs. Disciple-making, however, isn’t linear. People are not functions that produce predictable outcomes from a given input. While we can and should create systems, those systems will often fail. Disciple-making is not a steady progression “up and to the right.”
This year, I spent over a year investing in a particular individual on a one-on-one basis, only to have them eventually ghost me. While I am no stranger to this kind of experience, it was a healthy reminder that disciple-making is always a partnership with the Spirit and another person’s will, neither of which I can control.
Clarity of Why Is Vital
Our primary grid for leading teams is an acrostic, VITAL, which begins with Vision. Yet it has become clear to me that in many of the things we do, the purpose or desired outcome is often not as clear as it should be. While disciple-making is non-linear, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be crystal clear on why we are doing what we’re doing.
One of the major projects I’m spearheading as we head into 2026 is helping our operations team better articulate the purpose of each initiative. The goal is to lead more effectively the many people who sacrificially invest their time to see this work succeed.
Less Is More
As we grow—especially as we plant two more churches at the far end of our province this January—it’s become apparent that we need to reduce the number of things we’re carrying at once. The larger we grow, the more selective we must be about where and how we invest our energy.
This is true for two reasons. First, the logistical complexity of our work is increasing significantly. With that comes a much greater need for preparation, planning, and communication. Second, the importance of agency for our local leaders, to self-determine how to lead, serve, and activate their disciples, has also increased. In most cases, they know how to lead in their specific context better than I do.
At the same time, the work we do in producing resources, hosting events, organizing leadership gatherings, and consistently speaking vision, values, and culture has never been more important.
All of this has clarified a personal priority for me as we head into 2026: to better articulate our vision, values, and culture, while becoming a more hands-off, empowering, and servant-hearted leader. In all of these learnings, I see the character of Christ and I pray that these lessons are forming that same character in me.
What did you learn in 2025 and how might it form Christ in you as you make disciples?