Your Ministry Doesn’t Need You to Be Right All The Time

What happens when a ministry leader realizes they’re wrong—but everything inside them wants to explain why they’re actually not?

Sometimes our biggest leadership problem isn’t that we don’t know we’re capable of making mistakes.

It’s that we don’t want anyone else to know we made one.

In this episode of Beyond the Numbers, I tell a story from a youth ministry trip where I made a mistake that could have been avoided. I had plenty of explanations for why it happened. And honestly, every one of them was true.

But I was still the leader.

I had to make an uncomfortable phone call, own my part, and simply say, “I was wrong.”

That experience made me think about something deeper in ministry leadership: the difference between humility and people-pleasing, between an explanation and an excuse, and between protecting our authority and actually building trust.

Because humility doesn’t mean taking responsibility for everything. It means being willing to take responsibility for your part.

And when leaders can’t admit they’re wrong, something starts to happen. Staff stop challenging them. Volunteers stop bringing problems to them. Students learn that leaders don’t have to be accountable.

But when a leader goes first and says, “I got that wrong. I’m sorry. How can I make it right?” something different happens.

Trust grows.

We’re not building ministries around perfect people. We’re building ministries around broken people who look to and follow a perfect Savior.

Your ministry doesn’t need you to be right.

It does need you to be real.

----

00:00 — Sometimes Leaders Need to Say “I Was Wrong”

01:10 — Why Apologizing Is So Hard

03:27 — The Mistake I Didn’t Want to Admit

06:33 — The Phone Call I Didn’t Want to Make

09:40 — When Explanations Become Excuses

11:00 — Humility vs. People-Pleasing

13:06 — When Pride Becomes Unhealthy Leadership

15:26 — What Happens When Leaders Go First

17:56 — Your Ministry Needs You to Be Real

----

Beyond the Numbers: Helping ministry leadership, building healthy ministries, developing more christlike church cultures, and helping with pastoral care.

If this episode connects with something you’re walking through, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

And if you know another ministry leader who needs this reminder, send it their way.

#BeyondTheNumbers #MinistryLeadership #HealthyMinistry #ChurchLeadership #PastorLife #YouthMinistry