Recently, I’ve been thinking about outcome thinking in ministry¹ and, separately, about the health of leaders, particularly church planters. What I didn’t expect was how much the two would overlap.

I’ve been working through The Soul of a Leader². Neal highlights that busyness is often treated as a virtue in leaders, and that this has gone too far.

“The implicit competition is not over who leads best. It is over who sacrifices most.”³

“Nobody said it directly. Nobody needed to. The message was clear: the busiest person in the room was the most faithful one.”⁴

But:

“The leader who is always running on empty is not a hero. They are a liability—to themselves, to the people they serve, and to the mission they carry.”⁵

This connects to the idea that “we only need to be faithful.” The danger is that our faithfulness, measured by effort, becomes the gauge of how well we’re doing in ministry. The more we do, the better we are, right? The more we sacrifice, the more we show our dedication to the cause. The more we run on empty, the more we love Jesus?

I know this is a pressure I have felt: the pressure to be working, to be seen to be busy, to be worth the money I am being paid.

The problem is that it isn’t more godly, it only leads to this:

“And underneath it all was a kind of exhaustion I couldn’t explain. Not physical exhaustion—soul exhaustion. The kind that sleep doesn’t fix. The kind you carry into every room and set down on the table next to your Bible and your coffee and your sermon notes, and nobody even notices it’s there.”⁶

The advantage of outcome thinking is that it frees you from the burden of doing the most: trying to outcompete everyone else in busyness and making sure your calendar is fuller than anyone else’s. Outcome thinking drives us to ask whether we are using and stewarding our time as well as possible. Mind you, The Soul of a Leader also points out that this needs to flow from our connection with Jesus.

“What if faithfulness is not measured by how much you sacrifice but by how well you stay connected? What if the most faithful thing a leader can do is not push harder but abide deeper? What if the fruit your people need most from you is not the fruit of your effort but the fruit of your connection?”⁷

I would say the key to fruitful ministry is being connected to the vine (John 15:1–8). It’s worth noting that Jesus says nothing about busyness in this passage. So it might be time to slow down and be fruitful.

It is worth asking the following questions:

• Am I being useful or just busy?
• Are there things in my calendar that don’t really need to be there?
• What am I doing to make sure I am not running on empty? Have I scheduled them in?

Footnotes

1. See Andrew Heard. (2024). Growth and Change: The danger and necessity of a passion for church growth. Matthias Media. ↩︎
2. Mark Neal, The Soul of a Leader (2026) Exponential. This is an ebook available at https://exponential.org/product/the-soul-of-a-leader/ ↩︎
3. Neal, p43 ↩︎
4. Neal, p43 ↩︎
5. Neal, p44 ↩︎
6. Neal, pp 40-41 ↩︎
7. Neal, p49 ↩︎