Crossroads District of The Wesleyan Church

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Crossroads District of The Wesleyan Church

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The Crossroads District of The Wesleyan Church exists to develop and equip thriving pastors and churches who make disciples, mobilize leaders, and multiply churches across Central and Northern Indiana.

06/01/2026

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you... and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

“...and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

Forty percent of the people alive today, four in ten, have no meaningful access to the Gospel. They are not unchurched. They are not nominally religious. They live in places where the message of Jesus has never arrived in a form they could understand, receive, and pass on to someone else. If they wanted to follow Christ tomorrow, they would not know where to begin, because no one near them does.

That is not a statistic. It is a moral emergency.

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05/26/2026

John Wesley did not save souls on Sunday and ignore their suffering the other six days of the week.

The movement he helped launch in 18th-century England was built on the conviction that personal holiness and social engagement are inseparable. Wesley mobilized a movement that addressed poverty, education, physical needs, and injustice alongside the conversion of individual souls. He preached in the fields and then organized his converts into small groups that held one another accountable to growth in both personal holiness and practical love of neighbor. The inner transformation he called for always produced an outward expression. You could not claim to be changed by grace and then walk past the suffering at your doorstep as if it had nothing to do with you.

We are his theological heirs. The question is whether the churches we lead actually show it.

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05/18/2026

This week, The Wesleyan Church’s General Conference is gathering in the same spirit it always has: the connectional church, across geography and generations, discerning together what God is calling his people to do. There is something worth pausing to honor in that. No local congregation fulfills the Great Commission alone. The connectional church is a reminder that we are accountable not just to our congregation but to something larger, a shared mission with stakes that outlast any single generation. That accountability is not a burden. It is a gift.

And it is precisely the theme of this issue.

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05/11/2026

There is a kind of church that is remarkably busy.

The calendar is full. The committees meet. The programs run. The pastor preaches every Sunday, visits the hospital on Wednesdays, attends the board meeting on Thursdays, and squeezes sermon prep into whatever is left. People are engaged. Volunteers are serving. The lights are on and the doors are open.

And yet, if you were to sit down with that pastor and ask a simple question: What is this church trying to accomplish, and are you accomplishing it? The answer would take a long time to arrive, and it would not be particularly clear when it did.

This is the clarity problem. And it is the most common leadership failure in the local church today.

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05/04/2026

There are two ways a pastor can fail the people in their care, and they look nothing like each other.

The first is the pastor who leads from the top down. This pastor has the vision, sets the pace, makes the calls, and expects the congregation to follow. There is energy here, and often real movement. But over time, people in this kind of church begin to feel like assets being deployed rather than souls being developed. The leader has direction but no tenderness. The flock moves, but not because they trust the shepherd. They move because they have learned not to argue.

The second failure looks more spiritual on the surface. This is the pastor who has confused humility with passivity. This pastor defers to every opinion, avoids every hard conversation, and frames their reluctance to lead as a commitment to “letting the Holy Spirit move.” There is warmth here, and people feel heard. But nothing ever changes. The church drifts from one season to the next without direction, without challenge, without anyone willing to say, “This is where we are going, and we need to go there together.”

Both of these are distortions. And both are common.

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04/27/2026

There is a cost that rarely shows up in the budget, never makes it into the annual report, and almost never gets discussed at a board meeting. But it is the most expensive thing in ministry.

It is a depleted pastor.

I am not talking about burnout in the clinical sense, though that is real and it happens. I am talking about something more subtle and far more common: the pastor who is still showing up, still preaching, still attending the meetings, but who has been running on empty for longer than they can honestly remember. The pastor whose quiet time has slowly become a sermon prep session. Whose prayer has become a professional activity rather than a personal one. Whose inner life has gone quiet in a way they have learned to manage but never quite address.

That pastor is not simply struggling personally. They are a liability to every person in their care.

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04/20/2026

There is a feeling most pastors carry but rarely name out loud.

It usually surfaces somewhere in the middle of ministry, not at the beginning, when everything feels charged with possibility, and not necessarily at the end, when there is something to look back on. It surfaces in the middle, somewhere between the person you thought you would be by now and the person you actually are.

The gap feels like failure. It is not.

It is formation.

The apostle Paul understood this better than most. He did not write from the comfortable vantage point of arrival. He wrote from the road. “I want to know Christ,” he said, and then, almost immediately: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3:10, 12). The man who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, who had been caught up to the third heaven, who had planted churches across the known world, was still becoming. He was pressing on. He was being held by the One who had taken hold of him, and he was running toward something he had not yet reached.

That is not a concession. That is the whole point.

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04/13/2026

You can usually tell the difference within the first ten minutes of a conversation.

The pastor who owns the church talks about it a certain way. My church. My vision. My people. What I have built. They speak of transitions with anxiety and critics with defensiveness. They protect their turf and guard their influence. They make decisions based on what keeps them secure rather than what keeps the mission moving. They are not bad people; many of them genuinely love God and love their congregation. But somewhere along the way, a subtle and dangerous shift took place. The church stopped being something they were entrusted with and became something they possessed.

This is not a fringe problem. It is one of the most common and most quietly destructive dynamics in pastoral ministry, and it shows up at every level of leadership, from the smallest rural congregation to the most prominent platform in the denomination.

There is a better way to hold the work. It begins with a single, load-bearing conviction: the church belongs to Jesus, not to you.

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04/06/2026

The prophet Habakkuk received a word from God and was told to do something specific with it: write it down. Make it plain. Put it where people can read it on the run.

“Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.” — Habakkuk 2:2

There is something instructive there for leaders. Clarity is not accidental. Vision doesn’t communicate itself. The work of articulating what you believe — plainly, specifically, memorably — is itself a leadership act.

So let me be plain.

There are four things I believe about the Crossroads District. Not four programs we are launching. Not four initiatives we are evaluating. Four convictions: settled beliefs about what is true, what matters, and what God is calling us to pursue together. These convictions will shape everything we do in this next season. Every coaching call, every training event, every resource we invest, every conversation I have with a pastor or board — it all flows from here.

I want you to know what they are. I want you to be able to say them. I want them to become our shared language.

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03/30/2026

"Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things." Joshua 3:5

You are days away from Easter Sunday.

By the time you read this, you are probably already in that particular kind of holy intensity that pastors know well — the final sermon details, the logistics of a bigger crowd, the quiet prayer that this Sunday would be more than just a well-attended service. That this Sunday, something would actually happen in people.

I want to start there. Because I think it matters that this conversation begins on Easter week.

Everything I want to say to you over the next thirteen weeks grows out of what we celebrate this Sunday: that death does not get the final word. That God raises what appears to be finished. That the same power that rolled away the stone is available — not just in first-century Jerusalem, but in your church, in your community, in your leadership, right now.

I believe that. I hope you do too.

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Address

5316 S Western Avenue
Marion, IN
46953

Telephone

(765) 674-8593

Website

https://www.crossroadsdistrict.org/

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