5 Leadership Hot Takes That Quietly Determine Church Health
On Episode 7 of The LeadingSmart Podcast, Season 3: Leading in Real Time, Holly and I reflected on lessons we keep seeing over and over again in churches—especially the ones that quietly shape health behind the scenes. Churches can look like they’re thriving publicly and still be struggling internally with culture, clarity, and leadership alignment.
Here are five lessons (and hot takes!) from 2025 that I’m taking straight into 2026. I hope they will help your church.
1. The Transformative Shift for Boards from Managing to Governing
One of the biggest themes I saw this year is that a lot of churches have simply outgrown the way their board was designed.
A managing board isn’t “bad.” In a smaller church, when the pastor doesn’t have much staff around them, it can be really helpful for the board to come alongside and help make day-to-day decisions. The challenge is that what worked at 150 people (or even 500) can become the bottleneck at 800, 1,500, or 5,000 in attendance.
That’s where the shift matters: moving toward a governing board that still provides accountability but also provides freedom for the pastor and executive team to lead without getting bogged down in approvals for decisions that aren’t truly board-level.
Many boards are filled with good people who have board experience elsewhere—corporate boards, school boards, nonprofit boards—and they bring assumptions with them. That’s not always harmful, but it can be unhelpful if the church hasn’t defined roles clearly and onboarded people well. I had a board member stop me mid-conversation recently and say, “You just completely redefined my role on this board.” That’s the point. Clarity changes everything.
If you don’t know your bylaws, decision rights, or governance model—make it a 2026 priority. It will save you pain later.
2. The Importance of Healthy Working Relationships Between Men & Women in Leadership
This topic surprised me—not because it’s new, but because it’s still such a real-world challenge even in healthy, growing churches.
I was in a board conversation recently about creating a peer-level leadership arrangement where a man and a woman would lead a major area together. The hesitation wasn’t about competence. It was about proximity and the dynamics that come with shared leadership—travel, brainstorming outside the office, relational overlap, families spending time together, all of it.
Here’s what I’ve learned: churches that are fully committed to championing women in leadership can still end up limiting women in practice because of fear about what might happen. And when that happens, it doesn’t limit men. It almost always limits women.
Regardless of where you land theologically, we can all do better at building healthy, professional, honoring working relationships between men and women so the church doesn’t miss out on the full range of gifts God has placed in His people.
3. Meeting Discipline Determines the Effectiveness of Almost Everything Else
I’m just going to say it plainly: I rarely see healthy meeting discipline at the top of churches.
And what’s wild is you can find churches that are “winning” on the outside (growing, reaching people, seeing baptisms, etc) while being a mess organizationally. Then people say, “Well, does it matter?” Yes. It matters because you see the impact behind the scenes: turnover, relational conflict, staff exhaustion, and unhealthy culture.
Meeting discipline isn’t complicated. It’s basic leadership:
Know why you’re meeting.
Have an agenda.
Capture what you decided.
Assign next steps and ownership.
Bring your notes back up so you don’t have the same conversation again.
A strong facilitator is the difference-maker—someone who keeps things on track. They don’t have to be “the boss,” but they do have to lead the meeting. And if you’ve got strong personalities and fast-moving brains in the room (which most lead teams do), you need that structure even more.
Here’s the honest part: resistance usually isn’t about the tools. It’s about accountability. If you really believed meeting discipline mattered, you’d do it.
4. Lead Pastors Can Stick Around After A Succession
There’s a common succession philosophy out there: when a senior pastor transitions out, they should never come back—no attending, no calls, no emails, no involvement—so the next pastor can succeed.
I understand why that advice exists, and in some situations it’s absolutely the right move—especially when the outgoing pastor can’t handle not being “the lead” anymore.
But I also think, in many cases, it’s both possible and preferable for an outgoing pastor to remain meaningfully connected to the church because this is their community. Their family has roots there. They’ve raised kids there. Sometimes their kids are raising kids there. They still have gifts, energy, and influence.
The key is this: it has to be intentionally designed.
Clear agreements. Clear expectations. Clear lanes. Ideally, a trusted third party who can help navigate emotional friction before it becomes conflict.
When it’s done well, it can be a gift to the incoming pastor, the outgoing pastor, and the church. When it’s done casually, it can get messy fast. So don’t wing it.
5. Deliverables Are Dead (Most of the Time)
Here’s a shift I’ve seen clearly in 2025, especially among executive leaders: most churches don’t actually want another report, binder, or beautifully formatted plan.
They want a wise and experienced guide.
I’ve lost track of how many conversations start with, “We already know what to do… we just can’t seem to move it from idea to execution.” That gap is rarely about information. It’s about leadership capacity, alignment, timing, and follow-through.
Executive leaders feel this tension more than anyone. You’re often the one translating vision into systems, strategy into execution, and complexity into clarity. A 40-page plan sitting on a shelf doesn’t help you do that. What helps is someone who will:
walk with you through ambiguity,
help you sequence decisions in the right order,
surface the hard conversations at the right time, and
stay with you when the plan inevitably needs to change.
In other words: don’t just tell us what to do. Don’t even just tell us how to do it. Stay with us from beginning to end.
Now, to be fair, some professions still require deliverables. If you’re hiring an architect, you should absolutely expect drawings and plans. But in leadership work, especially at the executive level, deliverables without guidance often create more frustration than momentum.
The real value is not the document. The real value is discernment, presence, and accountability over time.
If you’re a pastor or senior-level church leader reading this, here’s the takeaway: stop measuring progress by how many plans you’ve produced, and start measuring it by whether your team is actually moving forward, together.
That’s the work.
And speaking of planning, if your church is looking for a trusted advisor to come alongside you in any of these areas, our team would be glad to help. We spend our time serving churches by solving problems around succession, board governance, strategic advising, and executive coaching. You can book a free discovery call here.
