Stop Starting Over: Why Consistency and Multiplying Leaders Matter

Key takeaways

• Stay with the hard thing. One host told young leaders that if you do not break through a wall today, you will meet the same wall next year.
• Consistency widens your capacity. Adam Mesa argued that longevity grows both character and competency in a way that switching every two years cannot.
• Failure teaches more than wins. A cohort of pastors who took over large ministries spends its time talking about what is going wrong.
• Build people, not only a crowd. Leaders who gather people around their own voice often leave nothing that lasts.
• Let vision set your disciplines. Routines serve a purpose, and the purpose has to come first.

A new plant and a long friendship

The conversation opened with news. Will had just helped launch Beloved New York, a fully autonomous church plant with the same name, vision and values but a separate organization. Its lead pastor was once Will's youth student: Will was eighteen and he was fourteen. The new church gathered 366 people for its first Sunday, which Will said counts for far more in New York than it would elsewhere.

Will said he felt like a grandparent that day. The slides failed and the sound was off, and he could enjoy it all because it was not his responsibility.

Another host, five years into his own church plant, described what comes after the launch. The excitement of newness had faded into the grind, and he said he enjoys pioneering and catalyzing but not managing. That set up the theme of the hour: what keeps a leader steady once the newness is gone.

What Craig Groeschel modeled

Will had just spent time with Pastor Craig Groeschel, who leads Life Church and its forty-six campuses. Will described a talk on hundredfold growth: two for connect, five for drive (people, budget, buildings, staff and systems), and ten for passion. Groeschel then put a pastor in the hot seat, asking whether inspiration can really scale and pressing him on what he actually believed about giving. Will took away that you need to believe your convictions in your bones, not only in statements.

Adam, who joined by video from Arizona, told his own Groeschel story. They once spent forty-five minutes together, and Groeschel spent it asking Adam questions about his transition with his father. Adam said he walks into every room willing to learn. He also noted that Groeschel lives by his routines, including a gym session every day at three in the afternoon.

Learning to watch paint dry

Adam passed along a story about Warren Buffett. A friend of a friend asked Buffett what set him apart, and the answer was that "if you want to be successful, you have to get really good at being able to watch paint dry". Adam said many people give up too fast. He knows people on their seventh business, with seven Instagram pages, because the first one failed after four months.

His example of the alternative was Life Church, which built one Bible app and kept improving it instead of building three. Adam said you have to adapt with the times and stay consistent, in your marriage and relationships as much as in ministry. When someone leaves his church, he tells himself "they may have changed, but I won't".

He also retold a line from a seminary leader. A man said he had been a pastor for ten years at five churches, and the reply was that he had been a pastor for two years, five different times. Adam's point was that longevity enlarges your character and competency in ways a string of short stays cannot.

The same wall, a new address

One of the hosts said he tells the young leaders he mentors that a wall means growth, not failure. If you do not break through it today, you will hit the same wall next year. Another host added that people who leave a place often meet the same problem somewhere new. They are not outrunning it, because much of it lives in what the Lord is doing within them. Move away from one difficult person and you may find another one with a different name.

Adam described the cohort he belongs to: eight pastors who each took over for a leader with a large shadow. They meet for three days, twice a year. He said the time centers on marriage, mental health and personal leadership, and he gave his view of the culture around it: "We want to show our wins, and we don't want to show our losses". In that room the leaders do the opposite. Someone says out loud that he feels he is failing his staff, and the others encourage him and ask whether he has thought about a particular area. Adam cautioned Gen Z and Alpha against moving along too fast, because you learn far more from failing than from succeeding.

Fruit on other people's trees

Adam is finishing a master's in theology and hopes to continue into a PhD. He has been thinking about leaders who build with charisma and a gift for communication, then hand off a church that flounders or shuts down. He said he would never want to learn from a leader who never mentored anyone. He sees Paul leading churches from a distance, in prison or otherwise absent, while those churches kept going. He asked why so many successful pastors have no Timothy or Titus.

A host shared a line from his mentor Dave Ferguson: "my fruit grows on other people's trees". If the fruit grows only on your own tree, you are the bottleneck. The same host pointed to Paul's words about finishing the race.

I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith.

(2 Timothy 4:7, WEB)

He said that finishing well is a worthy goal, but we can forget who we are handing things to. He pointed to the cathedral architects he learned about in Spain, who started buildings that others would finish.

Adam backed this with his own history. As a youth pastor he drew crowds of seven or eight hundred on Wednesday nights, and on one Wednesday fourteen hundred. When he handed the ministry to a friend, the friend heard that he was not energetic enough on stage. The friend wanted to disciple students on their high school campuses instead, and within two years, Adam said, there were church clubs with fifteen hundred kids a week. Adam concluded that his friend was the more successful youth pastor. That lesson shaped his plan to shrink his father's voice and his own so that leaders disciple people, as he sees in the New Testament.

How Adam hands something off

One host asked Adam how he knows when to let go. Adam described two stages. First, he has the person run the meeting or speak while he is in the room, then gives feedback. A month or so later he asks again. When he sees it is working, he sends the person without him and asks others in the room how it went. He listens for whether the person sounds like him but has his own style.

His rule is that no news is good news. If you are not hearing from him, he has given you full trust. If he or a leader he trusts starts showing up at your work, it does not mean you are on your way out. It means his ears are open, perhaps over a family or marriage matter, and he wants to understand before making any change.

Vision before discipline

After Adam left the call, the hosts joked about Buffett's daily Coke and McDonald's breakfast and asked whether health habits matter. One host said the principles stay the same while the application changes with the goal. Buffett's goal was to be the best investor, while a pastor may see fitness as part of his calling. His conclusion: "I feel like the vision drives the disciplines". Rhythms kept for their own sake make a boring life.

Another host passed on a friend's point that capacity is partly in a person's DNA, so copying someone's exact routine will not produce their results.

What this means for you

The conversation gives you a few questions to carry into your own work, home or ministry. Where have you started over because something got hard, and is the same wall waiting at the next place? What is the purpose that your routines serve, and do they serve it?

Who are you investing in so that the work can go on without you? Starting small, such as asking someone to run the next meeting while you watch, is the kind of step these pastors described.