What I Would Tell My 2011 Self: Get In The Van
by Brian Rutherford
There is a funny thing about church leadership. We teach the "one anothers" of the New Testament to our congregations. Love one another. Encourage one another. Bear one another's burdens. But most of us lead week to week in almost complete isolation. We preach interdependence and then go back to our offices and figure everything out alone.
In some ways, I see this is getting better, but I think we have a long way to go.
For most of my years as Lead Pastor, I did not build the community I needed. Not because I thought I had all the answers, but because the week-to-week nature of church leadership kept me from it. There was always a sermon to write, a meeting to prepare for, a problem to solve. Reaching out to another church never felt urgent, so it never made the calendar.
The day that changed started at 6 in the morning.
Our staff piled into a van in Albany, New York and drove five hours to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to spend six hours with a church staff that was a little further ahead of us. No overnight. Just the drive down, the visit, and the drive back. We pulled into our driveways around 10 that night.
Five hours of driving each way for six hours together. That ratio sounds crazy. It was one of the best days we had as a team.
We hit a Chick-fil-A, a Krispy Kreme, and a Sonic on the way. The staff bonding alone was worth the trip. But what made the day was that each of us spent individual time with our counterpart on their team. Same role, same challenges, just a little further down the road.
I learned that this church had built an accessible playground on their property, not for their church but for their community. Open hands. Open property. No strings. It was a simple idea and it rewired something in my thinking about how we could engage our neighbors, even though we did not own a piece of property that could support something like that.
A conference keynote could have done that, but there is something different about sitting with someone doing the work and watching how they thought about it. Not someone light years ahead of me. Just a church a couple of years further down the road, close enough that their wins were relevant and their struggles felt familiar.
If I could go back and talk to 2011 Brian, I would tell him to get in the van sooner and more often. I wasted years not making it a priority. The fastest growth I experienced as a leader came from finding people a few steps ahead of me and paying attention.
One of the reasons I ended up at Intentional Churches is that they build this kind of thing into how they work. IC is running Alignment Workshops around the country this fall. They put church teams alongside other teams working through the same things. If getting there in person does not work, the online version runs in cohorts so the work still happens alongside other teams. Either way, the principle is the same one I learned on that drive to Harrisburg: get in the van.
One of the best things about working with Intentional Churches is that we get to gather with leaders in person every year. The IC Conference is May 5 and 6, 2027, in Chicago, IL. If that sounds like your kind of room, we hope to see you there. Learn more at intentionalchurchesconference.com.
