The pastor most certain he isn't anxious is often the one nobody dares disagree with.

Rich Villodas told Ed Stetzer on The Exchange that we define anxiety too narrowly. Worry is a feeling, and plenty of confident leaders can honestly say they don't have it. Villodas uses a different measure: anxiety as "the automatic response to distress or disagreement." By that definition it shows up as coercion, anger, and avoidance rather than nerves. His own test is whether he can tell a staff member to push back and mean it.

Villodas has led a Queens congregation for 12 years. It splits roughly in thirds between Trump voters, Harris voters, and people who abstained. A church can hold hard teaching, he argues, when it builds conversation, prayer, and self-examination around the sermon. A single message forms no one, but thoughtfulness and reflection on hard topics across weeks and months benefit the whole. 

Every church loses people over politics, budgets, and building plans. The number worth watching is how many stay through the disagreement. That capacity to stay starts with the person in the pulpit. A leader who can't absorb dissent ends up with a congregation of people who already agree, and a church that size inevitably stops growing in numbers and depth.

Three steps this week:

From Noise to Meaning: Crafting Purposeful Church Experiences | Gloo

Drew Kimball of Braintrust Creative designs church experiences for a living. Before building anything, his team asks what the church’s leadership wants people to think, feel, and do, and then he asks what the members currently think, feel, and do. Most environments answer only the feel question (interestingly, Barna's Making Space research finds about 80% of unchurched adults prefer a calm church experience to an exhilarating one). Kimball's warning lands close to what Villodas says about sermons: a single moment forms no one, and a lobby banner reading "You belong here" that’s paired with a culture of inside jokes and exclusion is empty.

This week: Ask your team for one thing you want people to think, feel, and do this fall. Then go ask five members what they currently think, feel, and do.

Holy Restlessness: What Nehemiah Teaches Leaders About Rest | Outreach

Eric Geiger's favorite chapter in Nehemiah is the last one, where the people break every promise they made. He reads Nehemiah's response as holy restlessness, an unwillingness to accept drift paired with a refusal to stake hope on the people's performance. Geiger names this trap: leaders who care most about the work are the most likely to find their identity in it. Nehemiah rested while the problems were still unsolved because his confidence sat somewhere other than his results. A leader who needs the church to prove something is a leader who refuses to rest. 

This week: Name one area of drift you have been avoiding and one area you have been carrying that was never yours to fix.

What would you like to see more of? Hit reply and let us know.

You're receiving this because you care about growing healthy churches. Forward this to a fellow pastor who could use some encouragement.