A performative life will always be focused on the fast, not the slow burn.
We spent a summer in the wine region of Stellenbosch, and each night, as we had a drink on the stoop, I let out a sigh of surrender to the life I once knew. Twenty-plus years of ministry, leadership, and a diary that never stopped. My mind ran ahead. It didn’t matter how much I was enjoying a moment; I was always planning the next. The ability to stay rested in the present was incredibly challenging for me.
I am not bitter from this time of giving generously; in fact, it has been the greatest place of learning across my life. I just knew I had to do it differently. I could not keep filling my diary with service without the discipline of Sabbathing. I could not continue the way I had and stay healthy for my family and future.
Have you ever had a season where you felt like no one had noticed that everything had changed except you?
I came home from that month in Africa, and I knew things needed to change. No matter how hard I tried, I thought that it must be just me. That I was the protagonist of my story, and I was the one who couldn’t hold it all together any more.
My executive role, the mistrust of people whom I had pastored, and the exhaustion were always there, waving and asking for more sleep. The more I slept, the harder it got to juggle all the opinions, the conflict and judgment. It wasn’t just one scenario; it was many over hundreds of text messages and emails.
The modern church has built its entire measurement system on performance. It counts attendance, tracks giving, reports baptisms, measures growth, celebrates output, and rewards momentum. Leaders are assessed on what they produce. This systemic issue weighs leaders down with the constant need for more.
Jesus described a completely different economy.
In John 15, he does not say, “produce more.” He says: “Abide.”
What if today you took 5 minutes on a timer to sit and listen? I have created a reset journaling experience that we are journaling with in write club and this is the exact exercise.
5 minutes of connection, without scrolling.
What is God saying to you today?
Stay connected to me.
Remain in the vine. And then, as a consequence of that abiding, his presence resets our focus and attention. The branch does not bear fruit. It abides, and fruit comes.
We spent this last weekend on a farm with our dear friends. Watching their land and the colours change as we move from Autumn to Winter, here in South Western Australia, is a privilege afforded to few.
We sat around a big kitchen table and shared stories of ministry, family and life. It was deeply rich. Yet, we all hold the deep stories of not enough! Did we each know of a minister who hadn’t burnt out, or had a deep crisis of character? Yes, the stories flowed over and over.
This distinction is not a minor theological nuance. It is the difference between a ministry that hollows out its leader and one that genuinely renews life in the human being. It is the difference between a system that burns people up and one that produces people who, over time, become more like the person God formed them to be.
What Performance Does to a Leader
Performance is a relentless creditor. It gives nothing freely. Every result must be earned, every season must be justified, every plateau must be explained. And because output is always finite and demand is always expanding, performance always ends in deficit.
The woman who leads from performance wakes each morning already behind. Brené Brown in Daring Greatly names this precisely: “Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.”
This is the scarcity economy. The belief that there is never enough, that you are never enough, that one more program, one more initiative, or one more year of sustained effort will finally produce the result that proves your worth.
A life lived from this place is not sustainable. It is also, theologically, built on a lie. It assumes that the leader is the source of what grows. That if she stops, nothing happens. That God is waiting for her output.
I often tell my clients, “If you sat on a beach for the rest of your life and did nothing, would God still love you the same as he does today?”
Many of them struggle to believe this to be true. When we grow up in cultures that tell us that our attendance, our service or what we give to the Body of Christ is the reason for our belovedness, life is weighed by the output focused on others.
That is not Christianity. That is a works-based soteriology applied to leadership. And it produces exactly the same result as all works-based systems: exhaustion, shame, and a slow collapse of joy.
Burnout in ministry is not simply a workload problem. It is a theological problem. It is what happens when a leader begins to believe that she is the vine rather than the branch. That the life flows from her rather than through her.
You see, your story is not bad; it is not your fault; it truly is just stuck.
Running on a performance treadmill, you were not designed to walk every day.
What Fruit Actually Means
The Greek word Jesus uses in John 15 is karpos — fruit. It appears twelve times in that chapter alone. It is not a metaphor for numerical growth or program success. In its original context, fruit is the organic, natural, inevitable consequence of a living connection to the vine.
Fruit is not produced by effort. It is produced by health. In my time in Stellenbosch and my friend’s farm in the South West of Australia, they could not make fruit grow by staring at it and coaxing it to perform. The fruit needed the right ecosystem and fertiliser to grow.
A farmer does not produce a harvest by effort alone. She prepares the soil. She plants. She tends. She waits. She works with the seasons rather than against them. And then, in the fullness of time, fruit comes not because she forced it, but because she created the conditions for growth.
The problem with the modern, platform-driven church is that people are weighed by their performance, rather than their fruit.
Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not one of these can be manufactured by will alone. Not one of them appears in a church growth report. And yet these are precisely what the New Testament holds up as evidence that God is genuinely at work — in a person, through a person, and into a community.
God moving in the neighbourhood.
Galatians 5:22-23 The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Notice what is not on that list. Productivity. Growth rate. Platform. Reach. Influence. Budget. Attendance. Conversion numbers. Not one of the metrics the modern church uses to measure success appears among the fruit of the Spirit.
This is not an argument against growth, impact, or reach. It is an argument about what produces them, and what kind of leader is capable of sustaining them over a lifetime of faithful ministry.
Fruit Grows
The fruit of the Spirit is a set of character qualities. They are not things you do. They are things you become. And becoming takes time. The kind of slow, unglamorous, often invisible time that performance cultures cannot afford to prioritise.
“We are as mature as we are like Christ, and no more.” — J Oswald
Maturity is not measured by what has been accomplished. It is measured by who the person is becoming, in the ordinary moments, in the difficult conversations, in the response to failure, in the quality of presence offered to the people closest to them.
This is the picture the whole of Scripture uses for the kind of leader God is forming. The farmer. The shepherd. The gardener. The one who tends, waits, and trusts the life of things to God.
The Vine and the Branch
John 15 is the theological centre of what it means to lead regeneratively.
John 15:4-5 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
The word abide — meno in Greek — appears ten times in this passage. It means to remain, to stay, to dwell, to continue in. It is a word of settled presence rather than urgent activity. It describes a relationship of sustained connection rather than a transaction of effort and reward.
Jesus does not say: Work harder, and you will produce more fruit. He says: Remain in me and you will bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. The branch’s only contribution to the fruit is to stay connected to the vine. Everything else flows from the vine through the branch as a consequence of that connection.
The Sabbath
The Sabbath was God’s first structural provision against the performance economy. One day in seven, everything stops. Not slow. Stops. The work is not done. The output is not maximised. And yet the commandment says, “This is holy.”
The Sabbath is the theological claim that rest is not laziness and that the world does not depend on our sustained effort to hold together. It is the weekly practice of letting go of the illusion that we are the source of what grows.
A woman in ministry who never rests is not being faithful. Afraid that if she stops, nothing will grow. Afraid that she is the vine rather than the branch. The Sabbath is the weekly practice of releasing that fear of choosing, in concrete bodily form, to believe that life belongs to God.
What Changes When You Lead from Fruit
The shift from performance to fruit is not a shift from activity to passivity. It is a shift in the source of the activity. A branch connected to the vine is not inactive; it is the most productive thing in the vineyard. But it produces from connection rather than from striving.
For a woman in ministry, this shift changes several things at once.
How she measures herself
She stops asking: “What did I produce today? She starts asking: Did I abide? Was I present? Did I lead from connection or from compulsion? Is there more love, more patience, more gentleness in me than there was a year ago?”
How she treats her own needs
She stops treating rest as an interruption to the work and begins treating it as a condition of the work. She stops withholding from herself what she would freely give others. She begins to close the compassionate gap. It is not selfish because she has convinced herself she deserves it, but because she understands that a depleted branch cannot carry life to the people around her.
How she leads others
She stops managing for output and starts tending for growth. She asks different questions: who is this person becoming? What does this community need in order to be healthy? What are the conditions for belonging, and am I creating them or consuming them?
How she experiences time
She stops living in the deficit of what has not yet been achieved and begins to notice the fruit that is already present, slow, ordinary, unglamorous, and real. The conversation that mattered. The person who stayed. The community that grew in patience and kindness, even when the numbers did not move.
The Woman Who Bears Fruit
The women we remember most in the history of the church were rarely the ones who built the biggest platforms. They were the ones who stayed. Who tended. Who remained connected to the source through the seasons when nothing visible was growing.
Mary sat at the feet of Jesus while Martha worked. Phoebe, who carried a letter across an ocean and explained it faithfully. Lydia, who opened her house and became the foundation of the first European church, not through strategy, but through the simple regenerative act of welcome.
None of them appears to have had a platform in the modern sense. None of them built empires or movements or brands. They bore fruit — the slow, particular, local, lasting kind that feeds people for generations.
This is what regenerative ministry produces.
Regenerative ministry is the art of leading from a life that is genuinely being renewed. It produces fruit rather than performance. And that changes everything.
John 15:16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.
Come write with us this week, and let’s reset together.
