This coming Sunday is exciting for me. Dr. Ananthi Jebasingh will be joining us at Grace Resurrection. She is the founder and director of the Friends of the Good Samaritan School in New Delhi, India. In 2024, I traveled to the school, and that experience changed me in ways I am still discovering. It is a place where the Holy Spirit clearly dwells.
There are moments in life when you know something has happened before you are even ready to acknowledge it. Somewhere between Kentucky and New Delhi, I knew that was happening.
I left America with a ministry I had begun to struggle to relate to. I came home knowing I would never look at ministry the same way again.
The years surrounding the pandemic and the implosion of the United Methodist Church had taken a toll. Friends drifted away. Relationships changed. Some told me I had changed. We all had a story.
Ironically, our church was thriving. We were growing, had a strong budget, amazing worship, and a major sanctuary project underway. I was casting vision and dreaming about expanding from two campuses to three. Things looked great on paper.
But internally, I was struggling.
I had begun taking shortcuts I never thought I would take. I was choosing which battles to fight and keeping people in leadership because I wanted my vision to succeed. I was becoming more concerned with protecting the ministry than confronting the things that were hurting it.
I was trying to protect my machine.
On Easter Sunday 2024, I became convinced God was calling me to something else. I didn’t know what was next, but I knew I needed to leave. I had always been someone who stayed and fought for the church. This time, I wasn’t going to fight. I wanted to disappear quietly and move on.
God had other plans, of course. My departure was difficult, and the circumstances surrounding it brought me into a dark place for a season. I found myself sitting next to Natalie, asking God what He was doing.
I didn’t have all the answers. I just knew something had to change.
And then I flew to India.
After a 17-hour flight, I stepped off the plane in New Delhi. Everything around me was different. I smelled spices, exhaust, and body odor all at once. The streets were crowded. Smog hung in the air. Poverty surrounded us.
But something else happened.
Everything had color. Living color.
I wasn’t thinking about denominational politics, church growth, budgets, or leadership struggles. I was surrounded by people whose faith was costing them something. These believers worried about government restrictions and whether they would be free to practice their religion. They had few resources and little security.
Yet they followed Jesus with everything they had.
I grew up poor. I spent much of my childhood in the projects, and I thought I understood poverty. I didn’t.
We visited families living in one-room homes smaller than my kitchen. We visited schools where children were packed into tiny classrooms. Across the street from the school, we could smell the burning of bodies at the crematorium.
These people had so little.
They wanted to give us everything.
One day, my teammate Robert and I visited a family. We had been told not to eat or drink anything offered to us because our bodies might not handle the germs well.
We sat with the family, communicating through an interpreter. At one point, the mother said something to her young son. He ran outside and returned with an opened bottle of Coke.
She poured some for him and handed one to Robert and one to me.
We looked at each other.
We both knew what we had been told. We also knew what refusing would communicate to this family.
We thought about pretending to drink it.
We both failed.
Robert drank some, and then I did too.
That Coke probably cost her two days’ wages.
Two days.
She had almost nothing, yet she wanted to share something special with us. She wanted to show us hospitality.
I left that home thinking about more than a bottle of Coke. I was confronted by a woman who had so little but was willing to give something she could hardly afford.
I had spent years learning how to build successful ministries. I knew how to manage budgets, develop leaders, navigate difficult relationships, and create something people could admire.
But what had I learned about surrender?
As I walked back toward our van, children surrounded me, smiling and waving. They acted like I was famous. I couldn’t understand how people with so little could seem so full of joy.
I started crying.
I was embarrassed to let the rest of my team see me, but I knew I wasn’t the same person who had boarded that plane in Kentucky.
These believers didn’t have a Plan B. They didn’t have a denominational board, a retirement plan, or a safety net. They had Jesus, each other, and the faith to believe they could follow Christ tomorrow.
And I wondered how far I had strayed.
A pastor I knew in Eastern Kentucky had once told me that some people believed pastors shouldn’t be paid to serve the Lord. If you were paid, you were a hireling. I had always disagreed. Pastors have families and responsibilities, and churches should support those who serve them.
But that word came back to me in India.
I began comparing my comfortable life as a pastor with the lives of the pastors we were serving alongside. These were people who had given their lives to the Gospel despite having so little security.
My stomach turned.
What does it mean to be a pastor? What does it mean to care for people? At what point did we start caring more about how ministry works than about the mission behind it?
I’m not saying pastors shouldn’t be paid. That’s not the point.
The question is whether we have become more invested in what ministry can do for us than in what ministry asks of us.
When I returned home, I knew I was leaving my church. We were thriving. We had plans, resources, and a future that looked promising. There were plenty of reasons to stay.
But I had begun to recognize something in myself that I couldn’t ignore.
I was choosing my battles based on whom I might upset. I was keeping people in leadership because I wanted my vision to succeed. I was trying to protect something I had built rather than trusting God enough to let Him do what needed to be done.
I had become very good at building a ministry.
I needed to remember how to follow Jesus.
For the first time in my ministry, I stopped fighting. I stopped trying to prove my point or convince everyone that I was right. I listened. I began letting go of the need to control every outcome.
God was asking me to surrender the very things I had spent years building.
I wasn’t comfortable with that. I was used to leading, talking, and doing. I was used to seeing results and receiving affirmation for what I could show others.
But God was teaching me that ministry isn’t ultimately about what we build, how many people attend, or how impressive our plans look.
It’s about following Jesus.
You may not have to travel to India to discover God’s plan for your life. But sometimes you do need to step away from the privileges, resources, and systems you have learned to depend on.
Jesus never promised us a bed of roses. He told us plainly, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
The believers I met in India understood something I desperately needed to rediscover. They weren’t following Jesus because it was convenient, comfortable, or professionally rewarding. They were following Him because He was worth following.
And somewhere between Kentucky and New Delhi, the colors came back.
I began to see ministry differently. I began to see people differently. Most importantly, I began to see Jesus differently.
I would rather lose the ministry I built than lose the reason I started building it in the first place.
Jesus never promised us an easy road.
He promised us Himself.
And that has to be enough.
In Christ,
James