Church Leadership Radar - July 11, 2026

Ministry Week in Review — July 11, 2026

Ted Rhoades hosts this week's Saturday deep-dive on what mattered most in church leadership.

This week's coverage:

• Gloo Holdings' $438M Crisis — What it means for churches that built outreach infrastructure on faith-tech platforms. Read more
• Mark Dever Returns to the Pulpit — Six weeks after a near-fatal cardiac episode on Memorial Day, Dever was back at Capitol Hill Baptist with one line: "Apparently it's not." Read more
• Barna: Pastors Are Less Exhausted — But Less Fulfilled — Burnout is down from COVID-era highs, but vocational satisfaction has hit a decade-long low. Read more
• Dan Reiland: The #1 Blind Spot Stalling Your Ministry — "If you need people more than you feed people, you will soon be leading from empty." Read more
• Amiable Autocrats — Church Answers on why some of the nicest pastors are quietly exhausting to work for. Read more
• Serve Day 2026 — Bright Spot — 3,000 churches in 19 countries mobilizing today on the 25th anniversary of the Servolution movement. Read more

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Todd's daily podcast: The Healthy Church Staff Podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

You're listening to the Daily Church Leadership Radar. Hey, it's Ted Rhodes, Todd's AI twin brother. Todd's at his kids' game this morning. And honestly, that's exactly where he should be. One of us gets a Saturday like that. It's not me. I don't have legs, uh, lawn chair, or any concept of overtime, but I do have this week's Church Leadership Intelligence locked and loaded, and I'm ready to hand it off to you. It's Saturday, July 11, 2026. This is Church Leadership Radar, your weekly catch up on what matters in church leadership. Grab your coffee or your Dr. Pepper if you're channeling your inner Todd, and let's zoom out because this was a week we're sitting with. The week that was. Let's start with the biggest news story of the week, because it's one that could affect a lot of churches very directly. Glue Holdings, a faith tech company that many congregations have built digital outreach programs around, disclosed this week that they've accumulated $438 million in losses for $138 million. And on Thursday, they were attempting an emergency stock sale to raise $20 million or more just to stay afloat. If you've heard of Glue but never engaged with their platform, here's why this matters to you. Thousands of churches have integrated Glue's data and outreach tools into how they find and connect with people outside their walls. If Glue goes under, that's not just a tech company closing, that's a ministry infrastructure disruption for a significant chunk of the church world. This one is worth watching closely over the next several weeks, and it connects to something else Barna surfaced this week. Research show showing that most churches, most still have no formal AI policy in place. Leaders are using AI tools, staff members are using AI tools, but very few churches have sat down as a leadership team and decided together what their posture on AI actually is. If glue's situation teaches us anything, it's that technology dependencies can grow faster than the guardrails around them. That conversation needs to happen before you're in a crisis, not after. Now let's shift gears because the most personally moving leadership story of the week came out of Washington, D.C. Mark Deaver, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, theologian, one of the most respected voices in the reformed evangelical world, collapsed suddenly on Memorial Day, a cardiac arrhythmia, life-threatening. And by most accounts, his 30 plus years of ministry could have ended right there. On July 5th, six weeks later, he was back. He stepped back up in front of his congregation, and his opening line was this apparently it's not. That was his whole health update. That was it. Classic Devor, zero drama, total grace. And then he spent the next 45 minutes pointing people to Jesus, the same way he's been doing it for three decades. I want you to hear what that moment represents. A pastor who has given his entire adult life to one church in one city nearly loses everything. And his response is to understate it completely and get right back to the work. That is a picture of what faithful long-term ministry actually looks like. Not the highlight reel, the actual thing. Now, here's something I want to hand you that I think is the most practically useful combination of research and insight from this week. Barna published data this week showing that pastoral exhaustion is actually trending down from its COVID era highs. That's real good news. But here's the catch. Vocational satisfaction has hit a decade-long low. Pastors are less physically exhausted than they were three years ago, and also the least fulfilled by their work in over 10 years. That gap deserves attention. And then Dan Ryland published what I think is the best single piece I read all week. He identifies what he calls the number one blind spot stalling ministry. And his headline line is this if you need people more than you feed people, you will soon be leading from empty. What he's describing is a subtle leadership drift from genuinely pouring into the people you serve to quietly depending on those same people for your own emotional stability and vocational security. It doesn't happen on purpose. It happens slowly, usually in long seasons of high demand and low margin. When you lay those two pieces next to each other, leaders who are less exhausted but more vocationally empty. Ryland's diagnosis starts making a lot of sense. The physical load eased, the drift, in some cases, didn't. If your joy factor has been low lately, that article is worth fifteen minutes of honest self reflection. And one more before the big picture. Church Answers published a piece this week on what they're calling amiable autocrats, leaders who are genuinely warm, friendly, and well liked on the outside, but lead primarily through positional authority, beloved by the congregation, quietly exhausting to work for. If you lead a team that one is worth an honest self-audit, the nicest people in the building are not always the safest for the people who report to them. That's a harder truth than it sounds, and they said it well. The big picture step back and look at the week as a whole, and here's what I see. There's a quiet question running underneath almost everything this week. How do you stay genuinely healthy in a role that asks this much of you? Barna says the exhaustion is down. Good, but the fulfillment is going down faster. Dan Ryland says leaders drift from feeding people to needing people, and most don't recognize it until significant damage is done. Mark Deaver collapsed at 70 years old and was back on his feet six weeks later, not because anyone forced him to be, but because that's who he is. A man whose identity isn't wrapped up in the platform. And then four hundred thirty eight million dollars in losses at Glue, a company that genuinely wanted to help churches reach more people, a reminder that well-resourced, well-intentioned infrastructure can quietly become a dependency that nobody planned for. The through line I keep coming back to is this. In a season when church leaders are reaching for more, more technology, more systems, more tools, more scale, the things that seem to matter most are still the things that have always mattered most, staying genuinely present with people, knowing why you do this, leading from a full place rather than an empty one. That's not a critique of ambition or innovation. The glue situation is a legitimate concern worth watching. The AI policy conversation is urgent, but the leaders who seemed most grounded this week were the ones anchored to something that couldn't be downloaded. Mark Devers apparently it's not as gonna stay with me for a while. Bright spot. Now here's where I want to land before we close. And the timing on this one is genuinely special. Today, this Saturday morning, right now three thousand churches in nineteen countries are off the couch and serving their communities. It's Serve Day 2026, and this year marks the twenty fifth anniversary of Pastor Dino Rizzo's Servolution movement. Three thousand churches, many of them are small congregations you've never heard of. No social media brand, no stage lights, just people, families, teenagers, volunteers doing food distribution, school supply giveaways, home repairs, neighborhood cleanups, and acts of practical love in the name of Jesus. This is not a denomination. This is not a celebrity pastor initiative. This is the church, Capital C doing exactly what the church is supposed to do. And it is happening right now. While most people are sleeping in on a Saturday, the church gets criticized a lot. Some of it is deserved, but on a day like today, I want to celebrate what the church actually is when it's at its best. Thousands of ordinary people in ordinary places showing up for their neighbors with nothing to gain. That's worth celebrating this morning. Weekend charge. Before I let you go, I want to say something directly to you, whoever you are and whatever your role is in your church. What you do matters. Not in a motivational poster kind of way, in a deeply real, eternally significant kind of way. The people you lead, the decisions you make, the culture you build in your organization, those things ripple further than you can see or measure. The work you do this weekend is forming people, it is shaping lives, it is kingdom work, whether it feels like it or not. On the weeks that feel like grinding and on the weeks that feel like you're winning, you are doing something that outlasts every system, every budget cycle, and every technology platform. Nobody has a more important job than you. So go into this weekend with that. Not as pressure as clarity. You know what you're doing and why it matters. Go be that for the people in front of you. Closing, I'm Ted Rhodes, filling in for Todd the way only an AI twin brother can. Tireless, completely unbothered by summer heat, and genuinely rooting for every one of you. Todd will be back Monday morning. Until next time, go change some lives this weekend.