September 2026 will mark a full 3 years of me working with the Mountain Sky Conference of the United Methodist Church on the Compelling Preaching Cohorts, a Lilly Endowment funded program through the Compelling Preaching Initiative. Before those 3 years even began, I also wrote the grant proposal. I checked my inbox and the first email I got about this project was on March 6th, 2023, when my children were three months old. My next on-site for the contract will be later this month in Utah, with my children, now preschoolers, tagging along. That on-site will also mark my last day on the project. 

You see, we at Ministry Incubators are always trying to work ourselves out of a job. It’s our goal to build systems of innovative sustainability that can make projects into self-perpetuating engines of growth and learning. For grant projects like this one, it’s a long learning curve, everything we’re creating, we’re creating from scratch, for a totally new audience. But I can confidently say that, after working with this team for 3 years, they are more than ready. They not only have effective systems, competent staff, and smooth procedures, but a cadre of impressive, devoted volunteer leaders. These leaders not only get the program and like it, they’ve fully internalized it; they are fluent in the pillars, the concepts, the reasoning behind every activity and design choice. 

I sat in on this year’s peer leader training, which was led by one of the executive leaders (also a volunteer), and listened to a man who I had never met, confidently explain the curriculum I wrote to a room full of people I had never even heard of. I heard him answer questions about why there were certain choices in the curriculum, I heard him give allowance for personalization, all with the easy confidence of someone who feels like something is theirs. I made eye contact with our program director (who I now confidently call a friend) across the zoom room, and I could have cried. We did it. It feels like the same look my husband and I make when our kids are all of a sudden walking, talking, little humans, telling stories and sharing snacks: they grow up so fast! 

But unlike my actual babies, which will be in my house for at least the next decade and a half, this program really doesn’t need me anymore. As I wrap up this contract, I am not shoving in as many tasks as I can manage, trying to make sure they have some lead time before they fall off a cliff. If I’m honest, I’m actually a little bored. They’ve got it. I am confident this program will continue to change and adapt over time, just like it has in the last three years, but I am also confident that the people leading it know it so deeply that those programmatic changes will be aligned with the project’s mission and vision, probably more deeply than anything I dreamed up. 

The program has a group of leaders who design their own programs, recruit their own people, train their own leaders, and it’s quite something to watch. It had me thinking about what conditions create this kind of sustainability, and about how we can build it in a predictable way. I noticed three conditions that, in my work, have made that kind of ownership possible, in this project and in others, and they are somewhat sequential and interconnected: collaborative iteration, meaningful boundaries, and trust. 

Over the next three weeks, as I wrap up my time with my friends in the Mountain Sky Conference, we’ll be talking about those conditions, and how they show up (or don’t) in church spaces. I hope you’ll join me, and tell me the stories about the programs you’ve dreamed up and raised through their awkward first steps, and sent out on their own.