The Leaders Who Will Navigate What’s Coming Won’t Do It Alone
by Doug Parks
Over the past several weeks, Bart and I have been writing about what working with over 1,000 churches taught us. Alignment comes before strategy. The Great Commission has to be personal before it can be organizational. Evangelism and discipleship can’t be separated. And the hardest obstacle to overcome is the one you can’t see.
Every one of those lessons came from the same place: being in the room with other leaders. We didn’t figure any of it out alone. We figured it out because we were sitting across from pastors and teams who were willing to be honest about what was and wasn’t working, and because we were learning alongside them in real time.
The pace of change in culture, in technology, in how people think about life, faith and community, has accelerated in ways that make it harder to lead alone. What worked five years ago may not work in your context today, and the leaders I watch navigating that well are not the ones who found better information. They’re the ones who found a community of other leaders aligned around the same mission and committed to figuring it out together.
Almost every pastor I know carries some version of the same weight. Am I doing this right? Is anything changing? Why does this feel so hard? Those questions don’t go away. But they sound different when you’re asking them in a room full of people who are asking the same thing.
You were never meant to do this alone. If you already have leaders around you who sharpen your thinking and challenge your assumptions, invest in those relationships. If you don’t, go find them. Join a cohort. Show up at a workshop. Start a conversation with another pastor in your community. The format matters less than the commitment to stop leading in isolation.
We discovered how important this was along the way, and honestly, we’re still figuring out how to make communities of leadership more available. We’ve tried some things that failed. We’re trying some new ones. All we know is that leaders learning together is one of the most powerful things we’ve seen in this work, and we’re going to keep looking for ways to make that happen for as many churches as we can.
If you want a more structured way to do that work, the Radical Alignment Assessment (alignmychurch.com) gives your team a common framework to rate where you actually are — together — before you talk about where you're going.