2026 Lead Pastors Cohort Invite

If you’re a Lead Pastor, or if you know your Lead Pastor, give me a couple minutes of your time. I think it could be worth it. 

Here’s my premise: if you’re a Pastor, I’d be willing to bet that a sizable percentage of what you do week to week (30%? 60%? 90%?) isn’t what you studied in seminary.  I went to seminary and I’ve worked with tons of Pastors over the years, and in my experience, the gap is real.

• Seminary professors taught you to preach, but then your elders expect you to produce and manage a budget.
• You’re really gifted at sitting with someone in pain, but hiring and firing staff makes you both uncertain and uncomfortable.
• You can read Greek, but church members are looking for vision and answers on why to give to the capital campaign.

 Or perhaps you’re a Pastor more driven to the issues of vision and church culture, and you find yourself getting a little bored now that you’ve been at the job for a while. Your love for “people work” is growing thin as you’d be fine shutting your door, reading Patrick Lencioni and thinking about staff alignment.

The Challenge

What’s going on here? Well, we too easily forget that Lead Pastors are asked to be two things—a shepherd leader and an enterprise leader…both at the same time.

I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, so let me just summarize the idea quickly here:

• Senior leaders in any organization should embody two kinds of leadership—care and organizational oversight
• Lead Pastors are senior leaders and that role requires commitment to specific tasks.
• You can’t outsource the shepherd role or the enterprise role.

Part of the challenge is that churches must do two things at the same time: 1) Provide real spiritual care to members; 2) Be a high functioning, healthy, growing non-profit organization.

You may prefer one of these over the other, but if you don’t do both, you can crash. You either become a well-oiled machine that serves itself rather than God and people, or you eventually crash and burn because you flame out as a leader or fall apart with broken infrastructure.

Over the past 35 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of pastors and churches working through these issues, and in the past eighteen months, we’ve doubled down on this challenge at Cornerstone Coaching.

The Opportunity

Here’s how: my friend and Cornerstone Coaching partner, Phil Sineath, led a Cohort of Lead Pastors across the US and Canada in 2025. This group worked through dozens of tools across the spectrum of shepherd and enterprise leadership. We equipped Lead Pastors to use proven tools across vision casting, organizational strategy and structure, culture and team building, performance development, fundraising, and operations. The list goes on and on. 

And it’s all done in the context of a cohort – a group of other Lead Pastors from around the country navigating the same challenges, so you learn alongside others and from others at the same time.

The first cohort in 2025 was phenomenal. Every one of the participants gave extraordinary feedback, talking about how valuable the time with Phil was workshopping the tools in the context of the cohort.

So, we’re running it back. We’re starting a second cohort in January 2026 and registration is live. If you’re a Lead Pastor who’s seen some value from these newsletters of mine over the years, imagine these kinds of resources tailored specifically to Pastors. Or perhaps you’re a member of a church, and you’d love to see your Pastor refreshed and empowered to run towards the right things at the right pace. If so, please forward this on to your Pastor and encourage him to participate. Maybe even think about helping fund his participation.

Phil regularly refers to a story in the book of Exodus where Moses shows up exhausted. He’s out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, leading the people. It’s a huge job, and he’s been doing great work but he’s doing it in the wrong way. He gets the gift of outside perspective (in this case, from his father-in-law, Jethro), who says, “Moses, let’s change some of the organization so the people get better shepherding.” 

The Potential

So many pastors run into the same challenge—their role demands shepherd leadership and enterprise leadership—and it feels near impossible at times. So, they avoid or outsource, doubling down on what feels like their preference or gifting. But it is possible to use your gifts without exhausting yourself. It’s possible to care for people and lead the church.

That’s why I’m in it. That’s why Phil’s in it. That’s why most Pastors are in it—to honor God and shepherd people for the long haul through a well-run organization. And I really think this cohort can be a gamechanger for you Pastors in that department.

Interested?

Then do three things:

1. Get this 2-page Summary in front of your Elder Board asap for 2026 budget approval.
2. Grab 20 minutes on the phone with Phil to connect.
3. Fill out the application asap. It closes in a few weeks.