who are you becoming
in 2025?

“The Fruit of the Spirit is success: a rapidly growing church, everyone thinking you’re special, God answering all your prayers, all your sermons being life-changing.”

– not Galatians 5:22-23

WHO ARE YOU BECOMING IN 2025?

This is an odd question to start the year with, I know. As January rolls around, most of us are focused on our plans, hopes, and strategies. You might be wondering what the most effective way to reach new people might be this year, how to set up this or that ministry better, how to find a new building or deal with the latest crisis. In other words, we think and pray through how to be most “successful” in our ministry (we like to call it “fruitful,” but more on that later) and how to avoid “failures,” hoping that God will guide us in achieving the former and avoiding the latter.

But as you enter 2025, let me ask you a question: What if God is not as interested in how successful or unsuccessful you are this year? What if your “fruitfulness” is not His highest priority for your life or your ministry? What if He is way more concerned about how your fruitfulness or un-fruitfulness will shape you – or better: how you will let these successes and failures shape you?

Let me tell you about what happened to me just before Christmas last year. For the past few years, I have delved deeply into Systems Theory and its application to leadership, faith, and a quiet heart. This stuff has become very meaningful to me, so when I got invited to take a small group of people through my learnings last fall, I was very excited. I poured my heart into crafting five great sessions and couldn’t wait to lead the nights. And what can I say? I thought they went really well, and that people had gotten lots of food for personal and spiritual growth.
But here’s what happened just before Christmas: The group got together (without me) to evaluate the sessions, and their feedback was crushing! Those Germans don’t hold back, let me tell you. From what was shared with me, no one found any real value in these nights: They found it flat, uninspiring, and unhelpful. Despite my best efforts and many prayers, God didn’t seem to have spoken to any of them through it. I’ve received plenty of bad feedback before, but this one hit hard.

CRITICAL GERMANS WITH POOR MOTIFS

And it stung. For weeks, I carried it in the back of my mind like a dishwasher running in the next room, always making noise, infiltrating my thoughts, influencing my mood. I had countless imaginary conversations with individual members of the group, trying to figure out which malign motives might make them downgrade my work like that. I made grand plans to redo the workshop, become super famous for it, and someday show them how blind they were to the gold I’d offered. I also prayed about it repeatedly, giving it to God over and over and over again. Nothing helped. It was still there.

Now, here is what I know by now: This experience has great potential to shape who I am becoming in 2025. Not consciously, of course, but subconsciously. Because eventually, the noise in my head will fade. If I try to move on, keep my phone close to distract myself whenever unpleasant thoughts come up, and just focus on what’s next, I’d soon be “fine.”

But if that’s the route I’m taking, it will be horrible for my soul – and, in turn, for my leadership … because all this would do is to simply push the pain deeper, underneath the surface, and drive me subconsciously from here on out. It will keep me slightly uneasy, always feeling the need to prove that I have lots of great wisdom to offer, and therefore charge every workshop and sermon with way more significance than they actually have. This will make me work extra hard, be extra focused, and thus not be present with my kids or the people I’m currently around. Every morning, I will be tempted to check how many people have signed up for my stuff, how many downloads my sermons had, or how intensely others might be experiencing God on my retreats. The pressure will be on! In other words: If unaddressed, I will become more driven, tense, affirmation-seeking, and critical in 2025 – it’s not a pretty picture.

THE GREAT DANGER

But here is what I felt God reminding me of over the past few weeks: My ministry “successes” and fruitfulness are not his primary goals with me. In fact, His definition of fruitfulness is quite different from ours. Think about it: God apparently found it quite fruitful to keep Moses in the middle of nowhere for 40 years, watching sheep. So many years with nothing to show for! So much wasted potential. And yet, something was happening underneath the surface that Moses probably wasn’t even aware of: He was being formed into the likeness of God. God was shaping him to become a human being who would, if you encountered him, leave you with a lasting sense of what God must be like. In all his leadership, Moses’ key contribution was never his winsomeness, strategy, or ability to cast a great vision – but who he was as a human being, and his intimate familiarity with God that was bursting at the seams.

This thought is all over Scripture. The fruit of the Spirit in Gal 5 focuses solely on who we are becoming, not what we are accomplishing. Paul’s famous line in Romans 8 – “For those who love God, all things work together for good” – is quickly followed by explaining that this “good” God is using all things for is to “be conformed to the image of his Son.” In other words: If your church plant grows this year, praise God! If your sermons go viral and bless many, wonderful. But God’s focus will be whether, at the end of the year, the person sitting across from you glimpses more what it must be like to be around Him.

SURPRISING PRIORITIES

Thankfully, this transformation is God’s job, not ours! The fruit of the Spirit is His fruit, and Romans 8 clearly portrays God as the protagonist. Still, we can align ourselves with what God is doing this year by opening ourselves up to the inner work God wants to do in us. Which brings me back to my harsh German critics …

I know by now that enough distraction and focusing on what’s next will make the pain go away, but set my soul on an unhealthy path. Thankfully, I’ve discovered an alternative. And though it’s not an easy alternative, it starts very simple: All I need to do is admit to myself (and others) that this criticism hurt! It hurt a lot. And I will need to sit with that, allowing my heart to hurt and bring the pain to God. I will need some time alone, a long walk, or an afternoon by myself without any distractions. I might need to cry, or scream, or both, or neither. And then, if it still hurts, another walk. And another one after that. We want to be so efficient with our souls, but that’s not how they “function.” This inner work needs time.

But it is essential! And more than worth it. Because eventually, here is what will happen: another still, small voice will start speaking. A voice that will remind me that I am not my successes or failures. In fact, my worth is entirely separate from how “fruitful” my work is. My Father will say that I am His beloved son, with whom He is well-pleased (thank you, Jesus, for giving me that status!). I am Alex, a human being in whom he delights, first, with Alex, the church planter/ministry leader being a distant second. He does not care whether my workshop connected with the audience or not – he cares that I offered my gifts and my learnings, and the rest is up to Him. And, as for me: Isn’t there so much life in His presence to be enjoyed in the meantime?

A LIFE-GIVING ALTERNATIVE

Friends, as we start into this new year, let’s rethink what is most essential for our lives and ministry in 2025. And I invite you to take a step back and think: If God’s priority is who I am becoming this year, how can I align myself with that?

·      Where and how will I create space to process what’s going on in my heart and to detach from “church planter Alex” and simply be “human being Alex in God’s presence?”

·      Who will I allow to shape me this year – and does sitting with them feel like sitting with God, or are they just impressive for what they accomplish?

·      What will be life-giving to me this year? Who would be life-giving to me this year?

These are some of the questions we’ll also explore on our “Quiet Heart Journey” together in 2025. I hope you’ll join in, whether with me or through a similar path. But let’s experience the deeply healing and joy-bringing presence of our God for ourselves this year and see how He might use it.

YOUR FOCUS FOR 2025

WHERE TO START

still to be added …