Author: Amanda Viviers

Last night I stayed up late, reading community chat comments about my local town. It’s not something I do often these days, but I have been deeply concerned about how the internet is used to shame people. Words of shock, condemnation and words of not enough.

The chat was calling out leaders in our municipality, and I found myself deeply concerned.

I know there are places like Reddit and chat groups on the internet that draw out our collective mean, but there is an integrity gap when we create forums of intimidation that criticise humans on the public stage. Last night I watched an interview with a journalist and a politician. I don’t agree with his policies, but the way the interviewer spoke to this man, with disrespect, goading him into an answer he didn’t want to give, was appalling.

We have entered a season of disrespect for the basic human right to free speech. An era of assumption and escalating violent communication.

There was a historical season in the world where a similar groupthink shaped the annals that record the insights of the day. Where people were pulled into the public arenas, shamed, yelled at and criticised. The witch chronicles. Where meanness was deeply endemic, and people were categorised through fear and intimidation.

In those centuries, an accusation was enough. Evidence was optional. A whisper from a neighbour, a rumour passed at the market, a grievance dressed up as concern. Mostly it was women who were dragged into the square. Women who healed, women who spoke, women who lived a little differently to the crowd. The accusers often stayed faceless in the record, but the accused were named, paraded and remembered in shame.

I wonder how different our comment threads really are.

The technology has changed, but the mechanics are eerily familiar. Anonymous voices, emboldened by the crowd, deciding who is guilty. No conversation with the person themselves. No knock on their door. No cup of tea across a kitchen table. Just a pile-on in the public square, where each new comment is another stone gathered.

This intimidation is used to mark people’s reputations and lives, contrary to the desire for public debate and expression of individuality.

I keep thinking of the story in John’s gospel, where a woman is dragged before a crowd already certain of her guilt. Jesus does not join the shouting. He bends down and writes in the dust, and then he says the words that undo the whole arena. Let the one without sin throw the first stone. One by one, the crowd walks away. He is the only one there with the right to condemn her, and he chooses restoration instead.

How do you meet your mean?

Intimidation is rife in our community. It begins with comparison and ends with self-righteous justification.

That inner critic, who longs to pull down others, to make yourself feel more justified. Maybe it’s a friend chat and the way you speak about someone in your community. Maybe it’s your regular coffee date or the reels you send through messages late at night, making fun of someone in your life. It seems innocent and playful, and it can even create a sense of connection with your friends, but this is where meanness becomes acceptable and is learnt by those close by.

I remember a time when I wrote something really innocently in a school group chat. Asking about recommendations for a sports team for my son. A suggestion if anyone was interested in forming a team. It was an adult group, without any children on the social media forum, but later that week, my son came home from school mortified because children were making fun of this request on social media. The thing that was so insidious about this bullying is that a parent would have started this mimicking with a child and repeated the content for them to start this thread of condemnation.

Encouragement breeds encouragement

Gossip breeds gossip

Criticism creates pathways of negative thinking, and the impact is vast.

Your intimidation of others creates intimidation in the community, and you don’t realise the hold it has on your heart and life.

The epidemic of not-enoughness that lies at the heart of relationships and our creativity is formed somewhere, and we need leaders to reshape this narrative.

That is the posture I want to learn as a leader, and it is the heartbeat of this regenerative series. Regenerative leadership asks a simple question of everything we do: does this give life, or does it strip life away?

What words have you spoken about others that are creating untruths about their lives, and how can you reframe them?

Because words are not neutral. Scripture says the tongue holds the power of death and life, and anyone who has been on the receiving end of a comment thread knows this is not poetry; it is fact.

Anonymous criticism is extractive. It takes courage from good people. It takes gifted leaders out of public service. It takes the childlike willingness to try something new and buries it under the fear of being next.

Read that again: the courage required to lead our communities through lasting change in this era of great disruption requires curiosity, not shame. Every leader makes mistakes, every human makes mistakes, but new pathways and innovation will never come from environments of criticism, intimidation and outright human meanness.

Here is the cost we rarely count. Every time a community shames its leaders anonymously, it teaches its watching children that leadership is dangerous and hiddenness is safe.

We are not just wounding individuals. We are composting fear into the soil of the next generation. It opens up a different kind of leader that takes public positions. A leader who is immune to the crowd is often narcissistic and hardened, yet it takes a compassionate leader who cares to reform communities in times of crisis.

Have you created a narrative about someone in your community that is not true? The difficult part of this honesty is when it is done in the name of Christ. When God’s name is used in vain to try and make yourself seem more holy than another.

So what does regenerative speech look like? I do not think it means silence, or pretending our leaders are beyond question. Accountability matters. But there is a world of difference between critique that carries a name, a relationship and a hope for repair, and condemnation flung from the shadows. One is pruning, which helps a thing grow. The other is felling, a killing field for courage and curiosity.

Here is what I am practising, imperfectly:

I am putting my name to my words. If I would not say it in person, it does not deserve to be said.

I am asking whether I have earned the right to speak into a situation. Have I prayed for this person? Have I ever thanked them? Do I know the weight they carry?

Am I allowing intimidation to lead my conversation or connection?

I am choosing curiosity before condemnation. Behind every decision I disagree with, there is usually a story I have not heard.

And I am learning to leave the arena. Sometimes the most regenerative act is to close the laptop, refuse to gather stones, and let the crowd thin out by one.

The witch chronicles ended, eventually, not because the accused defended themselves better, but because enough ordinary people stopped believing the shouting. Communities changed when someone had the courage to say, this is not who we want to be.

Perhaps that is our invitation too. Our towns do not need more anonymous critics. Our churches do not need to be shaped by intimidation, control and shame.

They need women and men who will speak life in public, disagree with grace, engage in good public discourse, and remember that the person on the other side of the screen is human. Your words create life or death; you choose.

A question for reflection: Who do I need to apologise to this week because of the impact of my hastily said words?

Write it out plain and clear; maybe you can tear up the writing or, better yet, send it to repair the relationship.

A journaling prompt from Write Club asked me this. Write about a time when you felt yourself completely. What was true about that moment?

My answer came quickly. I love to travel. Not for the destination, but for the space that hangs in the air between home and arrival. It gives me permission to be anyone I want to be. I don’t change my character or my integrity. But the sense of permission that comes from stepping outside my everyday life brings so much relief.

This is why I love to run retreats: in a new space of in-between created for women seeking refuge from the Groundhog Day of their story.

In an airport, it is called airside. The passageway between landside and the plane. Secure, often quiet, full of promise. As I walked through the terribly overpriced shops, I realised something. There is a part of my story that needs to be released. The in-between of an airport passageway means I am free to think.

Where do you think the most freely?

The cost of people pleasing

People pleasing is something I have always struggled with. In the not-for-profit and church leadership world, it was incredibly difficult to reset. I want people to like me. So feedback, team conflict, and pressure often looked like me bending toward approval.

This is the opposite of thinking freely. Worry, anxiety: how can I please the opposing instructions?

As a leader, when budgets shift, when transitions come, you cannot lead from a place of wanting to make everyone happy. There is a harder conversation underneath this too. In spaces where control overtakes leadership culture, people lose the freedom to think differently from the group.

Creativity requires divergent thinking, yet I find that in these leadership spaces, there is never enough time for people to free their thinking and to emancipate oppressed voices.

The frontline care sector can be a strange and difficult place to lead. The passion that draws people to the work is real. Yet the pressure inside the culture can be brutal. Autonomy is rare. Bullying can be fierce. The ability to listen and care deeply for staff is often misunderstood or simply missing.

New Research About Burnout in the Sector

The not-for-profit sector is facing a significant and growing leadership crisis. The Centre for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 report found that the proportion of nonprofit CEOs naming burnout as a primary concern rose from 29% in 2025 to 46% in 2026.

More than half of nonprofit leaders now describe their organisational climate as fearful and chronically stressed, with morale measurably declining. Burnout is no longer something to manage privately. It is a structural condition that the whole sector needs to face together.

One thread runs through so much of this. Control. Requiring people to seek permission for every small decision, without the trust and bandwidth to lead with courage in uncertain times. Sometimes this comes from a board. Sometimes from an executive team that has not been clear in its own strategic planning, and so cannot equip those underneath them to run with the big idea.

It is a draining and complicated part of the sector. I have recently accepted a non-executive role on a board, and it has made me think deeply about what kind of culture fosters good faith between an organisation’s strategic leadership and the operational life that brings the strategy home.

Every retreat I run, without fail, I start the retreat with this one question.

What do you need to give yourself permission to do?

The constant approval seeking I have seen in boardrooms, families and churches is its own kind of airside. A holding pattern. Neither landside nor truly flying. An environment where legalism and culture are used for coercion and control. What are you seeking approval from others to do that you know God has already given you a vision for?

What regenerative leadership asks of us

A regenerative farm does not force a harvest. It tends the soil, trusts the season, and lets growth come in its own time. I wonder if leadership, especially leadership inside ministry and mission-driven work, is being invited into the same rhythm.

Jesus led from a settled place, not an anxious one. He withdrew to quiet places before he made decisions. He trusted the twelve with real responsibility rather than controlling every step they took. He let Judas walk away rather than chase approval at the cost of his own peace. He was secure enough in who he was that he did not need everyone to like him.

Seasons change and so do friendships.
Callings deepen, and new doors open.
Leaders bring a new direction, and that doesn’t mean you are meant to follow it.

A regenerative kind of leadership trusts people, tends culture slowly, and makes room for courage even when the way ahead is unclear. Conversations are honest. People are inspired to bring their best, their voice and their reflections to the table.

An environment that looks and sounds the same, where every leader has the same clothing, speaking style, and expression, and where leadership is uniform, is not a healthy one. The size of an organisation does not mean it’s healthy. Look at the size of nations in the current season: a dictatorship may look controlled and at ease, but that doesn’t mean it is empowering its citizens toward their destined future.

Reflection:

Where in your own life or leadership are you living airside, caught in that holding pattern between control and trust?

Maybe the invitation, like mine in that terminal, is simply to notice it. To let go of the part of the story that no longer needs to be carried. And to trust that growth, like grace, was never meant to be earned in a hurry.

Seeking permission from your leader for decisions that you already know the answer to is a sign of control. The beauty of a regenerative leadership environment is the way that every person is given permission to live their own life with autonomy and freedom.

Today, our family is getting a puppy. We have never had a dog before, and it feels like a seismic shift.

We were always too busy to have any more commitments at home. We have a cat, but she lives up to her name, “Freedom”, and is outrageously autonomous. The invitation for a small puppy to come into our home brings a newborn-like fear and trembling, knowing we are about to be disrupted.

The promise of my teenagers, loyally spending time walking her around the park and snuggling whilst watching television, I hope, draws them away from screens.

Across the last decade, I have always travelled extensively for work. The beauty of this rhythm is that I have friends all over the world, and I love them dearly. There was a ritual that I formed around packing, unpacking and coming and going. The blessing of this lifestyle was that I was often reminded how much I love being home. Gratitude flowed at simple pleasures of oats for breakfast, unfinished knitting projects, bed socks and lounges that knew my shape.

The cost is the simple pleasures of Saturday rhythms that are not disrupted, like gym classes, neighbourhood connection and planning my social life with ease.

Research from Paul Gilbert was a key part of my recently submitted thesis, which helped me name what was happening in my body during the seasons of relentless ministry pressure. It was central to this understanding, and it changed the way I see leadership, burnout, and the invitation to something more regenerative.

Gilbert’s work in compassion-focused therapy describes three systems that regulate how we feel and function. The threat system is the brain’s oldest defence mechanism, vigilant, and extraordinarily fast. When it fires, our bodies flood with cortisol, our hearts quicken, and we shift into survival mode. This system does not pause to check whether the danger is physical or social. A colleague. A critical email. A split board meeting. People’s disapproval. To the threat system, these are experienced in the body as equivalents.

For those of us in ministry leadership, this is confronting and clarifying in equal measure. The weight of criticism, financial pressure, theological conflict, and the creeping fear of moral failure activate a system designed to help us flee or fight. And when it fires chronically, without relief, it dismantles our capacity to reflect, empathise, and make wise, spacious decisions.

We were not designed to live in the threat system. We were designed to move through it. God’s language is flowers. Nature is His poetry. Silent expressions of divine beauty, love, and hope. He brings beauty from ashes and creates new pathways from fallow ground.

Our organisations are designed to crunch people into policies and systemic ways of producing from a capitalist lens. Only yesterday, I could feel my body rising to the knowledge that it was the end of the financial year and the pressure should be on. Do more, be more, find the donors, work harder— shape your identity through work.

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The drive system pushes us toward achievement and reward, and Christian organisational culture has learned to worship at its own altar. The soothing system is what most of us in leadership have neglected: the capacity to rest in safety, connection, and stillness. To receive care as well as give it.

To rest.
To renew.
To trust God’s timing and answers over our own.

This morning, as I drove the kids to school, a song from our church service on Sunday repeated in my mind.

I wonder if that is why the puppy feels significant today. Not because she represents one more thing in an already full life, but because she represents something my family is choosing: slowness, presence, and a willingness to be needed at home more.

Regenerative ministry is not about doing less. It is about learning to move between these systems with intention and grace. To let the threat pass through rather than take up permanent residence. To receive soothing as a spiritual practice, not a luxury.

I think that is what I am slowly learning in this season. And I have a feeling a small dog is about to teach me more than I expect.

I pray today that if you are facing a battle, you learn to soothe, stepping into God’s ways above your own.

What is one way you can create more rest at home this week? Write in the comments, I’d love to lean in and have a conversation.

Let’s rewrite these stories together.

Meet Cashew: our Cavoodle.

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.

I have noticed a pattern in recent times: a move once again towards control, especially over women’s voices, and an either/or theology. What interests me, however, is the number of times in the Bible women are asked not to speak in church (twice) compared to the number of references to the sins of omission and anger, and to the consequences of shame.

Shame does not primarily live in obvious failure. It is the way we speak to others to try to control the outcomes of our conversation. Shame lives in the gap between who we are and who we believe we are supposed to be. And in my experience, many unmet expectations in church communities, when reflected upon, are not biblical.

Imagine a group of teenagers and the shame that lies beneath the surface of being constantly told they are bad. When a youth pastor shouts and yells at the congregation, it says more about their leadership health than the body of Christ. The compassionate gap is enormous. The standards are impossible. The measurement is constant. And the theology many of them have inherited is not actually the gospel. Belonging and healing cannot co-exist in this unsafe environment. It is moralism with gospel language on top.

I have just finished my thesis for my Master’s of Divinity, and the title is “Addressing Burnout in Christian Leadership with an Integration of Biblical, Theological and Psychological Concepts of Self-Compassion” As a part of my research, I studied a report by Maslach and Leiter, which found burnout in ministry is formed from these three environments: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment.[1]

The Barna Group has shown that 40% of pastors now face a high risk of burnout, a 400% increase since 2015.[2] The impact of social unrest, food instability, community polarisation, and the COVID-19 pandemic is evident.

It is shown that when people are under stress, they revert to places of control and shame-driven dialogue to try to redirect the uncertainty that they are experiencing.

It sounds like this:

God loves you. Therefore, you must be good. And if you are not good enough, not holy enough, not sacrificial enough, not fruitful enough, not available enough, then you have failed the God who loves you.

Which means the love is conditional.

Ie: You are not enough.

This is not Christianity. This is the fig leaf in Genesis 3: the human impulse to cover inadequacy with performance, to manage God’s perception of us through behaviour, to earn what has already been freely given. The fig leaf in Genesis was the first performance metric. Our program-driven communities are being measured by a metric that was never designed for human-centred flourishing.

What is Shame?

Brené Brown’s foundational research draws a clear line between guilt and shame. Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says: I am bad. Guilt is connected to behaviour. It can motivate repair, apology, and change. Shame is connected to identity. It says that what happened is not a reflection of something you did, it is a revelation of something you are.

For a leader in ministry, the slide from guilt to shame is almost automatic in a performance-based system. When the ministry declines, when the program fails, when the congregation splits, when the numbers fall, it does not feel like something went wrong. It feels like something is wrong with them.

This is not an overreaction. It is the predictable consequence of a system that has taught the community that their worth is based on their output. If the output is the measure of worth, then insufficient output means insufficient worth. That is shame personified. And it lives, as Brown describes it, in secrecy, silence, and judgment.

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging” —Brene Brown

A church that exists from a shame-based dialogue is unsustainable, and this model will fail.

“For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” —Colossians 3:3-4:

Performance and Shame Co-exist

Performance and shame are not two separate problems that happen to coexist in ministry. They are the same wound expressing itself in two directions.

Performance is the external expression: what the leader shows the world. I am productive. I am capable. I am useful. I am worth the space I take up because of what I produce.

Shame is the internal disposition: what the leader carries in private. I am not enough. I am never enough. If they really knew me, they would see that I am not who they think I am.

The performance is driven by shame. The leader produces more because the shame tells her that what she has already produced is insufficient. They give more because the shame tells them that who they already are is not enough to justify belonging.

Maslach and Leiter identify six organisational factors that contribute to burnout: workload (demands exceeding capacity), control (lack of autonomy), reward (insufficient recognition), community (absence of supportive relationships), fairness (perceived inequality), and values (ethical conflicts).[3]

They cannot rest because shame tells them their worth ends the moment their output does.

This is why the compassionate gap exists. A person living under shame cannot receive compassion for their present because receiving compassion requires acknowledging need, and acknowledging need confirms what the shame already whispers: that they are lacking, that they are inadequate, that they are not enough.

So the church keeps requiring more. They keep producing. They smile at the right moments and push through the hard ones. And the gap between who they are and who they are supposed to be grows wider with every year of unsustainable, shame-driven ministry.

Polarised Theology of Good and Bad

Christianity, like this, has been flattened into a system of morality. It knows about grace in the abstract. It can articulate justification by faith. But in practice, in the lived reality of daily leadership, it operates almost entirely on the logic of good and bad. Good leaders do not burn out. Good Christians do not need that much rest. Good ministers are available. Good women do not take up too much space. Good families do not have needs of their own.

This version of Christianity does not produce regenerative leaders. It produces exhausted performers who have learned to hide their depletion so well that even the people closest to them cannot see it.

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Jesus told a story about this exact dynamic in Luke 18. Two men go to the temple to pray. The Pharisee prays with confidence: I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all I get. I am not like other people. The tax collector will not even lift his eyes. He cries, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Jesus says the tax collector went home justified. Not the Pharisee.

The Pharisee is not a villain. He is a performer. He has built his standing before God on his output, on his fasting, his tithing, his comparative righteousness. He does not appear to be lying. He genuinely believes he has done what was required. And he cannot receive grace because he does not believe he needs it.

The tax collector cannot perform his way to God. He has nothing to offer. So he comes with open hands, which turns out to be the only posture in which grace can actually be received.

A regenerative community is invited to become the tax collector. To come with empty hands. To stop performing goodness before God and before the people she leads, and to receive what she could never produce for herself.

Regeneration: to Rebirth

Regeneration is the most radical element in this framework. Not because it is new, but because the church has almost entirely forgotten to apply it to the leaders who serve within it.

Regeneration does not say, “Try harder, and eventually you will be good enough.”

Regeneration says, “You have been made new.”

I had a dream a few years ago about a barnacled heart. One where the church’s ecosystem had created hard barnacles on the church’s soul, making it difficult to breathe and move freely.

When a boat has been in the water for too long and barnacles form, it requires fresh water to renew it to its former state. A softness of God’s presence must be released upon the earth in this season. The louder we shout with vengeance and performance-oriented expression, the more muddy the understanding of who God is and his passion for relationship over religion.

Not improved. Not reformed. Not given a better set of tools to manage your inadequacy. Made new. Given a new heart. Brought from death to life. Not because you performed your way there but because God, who is rich in mercy, acted on your behalf before you could do anything to deserve it.

Freedom looks like a lighter spirit.

Freedom looks like laughter in the neighbourhood

Freedom looks like people eating and listening to one another with intentionality.

Ephesians 2:4-5  But God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved.

Ephesians 2:8-9  For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.

The theological antidote to shame is not better performance. It is not trying harder to be good. It is the complete reorientation of identity from what I do to who I am in Christ.

Belovedness

One of my dear friends who has passed on to heaven had this word tattooed on her wrist. It was a reminder above all else that she was beloved.

Do your youth in your church feel beloved before all else?

Do the elderly feel beloved as they walk a little slower?

Do women feel beloved in the way you listen to their perspective and insight?

Before Jesus did anything in his public ministry, before he healed anyone or taught anyone or challenged anyone, God spoke over him at his baptism:

Matthew 3:17  “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

He had not yet preached a sermon. He had not yet fed the five thousand. He had not yet called the disciples. He had not yet done anything that a performance economy would recognise as success.

Do you realise you could sit on the beach for the rest of your days and God would love you just as much as if you moved to the worst slum in the world and served the vulnerable?

God calls you beloved.

The Six Ideas as Acts of Resistance Against Shame

Could you reframe your leadership through the following lens?

Return — Coming back to yourself and to God

Shame says:  You should not be here. A good leader would not have ended up depleted.

The gospel says:  Come. Just as you are. I will give you rest.

Journaling Prompt: What Barnacles have hardened my heart in this season?

Receive — Learning to be replenished

Shame says:  You have not done enough to deserve rest yet.

The gospel says:  He makes me lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul.

Journaling Prompt: When was the last time I felt truly relaxed?

Reconnect — Recovering identity beneath the role

Shame says:  You are what you produce. Without the role, you are nothing.

The gospel says:  You are beloved. Before the role, before the work, before the results.

Journaling Prompt: Where do I gain my notoriety and identity from?

Reimagine — Designing a sustainable model

Shame says:  Your needs are inconvenient. A good leader would not ask for this.

The gospel says:  Ask, and it will be given. Seek, and you will find.

Journaling Prompt: When was the last time I asked for help?

Release — Leading from fullness

Shame says:  You must keep giving or you will not be needed.

The gospel says:  I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.

Journaling Prompt: What behaviours am I being led to lay down in this season?

Reproduce — Nurturing the next generation

Shame says:  Earn your place. Prove you belong before you are given responsibility.

The gospel says:  The table was always yours. Come and eat.

Journaling Prompt: What would I say to a teenage version of myself? Write a letter of forgiveness.

It is time to make our service and communities sustainable.

A leader who has done the interior work of regenerative ministry, who has named their depletion, received grace for it, and learned to lead from a place of genuine fullness rather than shame-driven performance, that leader is magnetic to the next generation, not because they are impressive but because they are free.

You cannot create a sense of belonging for others if you do not believe you belong. You cannot extend grace to the next generation if you are living under a theology that withholds it from yourself.

The regenerative church: the tapestry of community where God is moving across the neighbourhood is not built by leaders who have achieved sufficient goodness. It is built by leaders who have received sufficient grace. Leaders who know they are enough not because of what they have done but because of who they belong to.

A Different Kind of Enough

Brené Brown observed that the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It is enough. I am enough. My kids are enough. My house is enough. My message is enough. I have done my best, and that honours God.

Enough is not a destination. It is a posture, like that of the tax collector, the posture of the woman at the well, the posture of the one who comes with empty hands and discovers that this is exactly what God was waiting for.

Zephaniah 3:17  The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love, he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.

There is a God who sings over you. Not over your performance, your program, your platform. Over you.

Regenerative ministry begins the moment we believe this is true.

[1] Maslach, Christina, and Michael P. Leiter. “Understanding the Burnout Experience: Recent Research and Its Implications for Psychiatry.” World Psychiatry 15, no. 2 (2016). 103–111.

[2] Barna Group, The State of Pastors, Volume 2 (Ventura, CA: Barna Group, 2024), 13.

[3] Maslach and Leiter, “Understanding the Burnout Experience,” 105-107.