Kingdom Leadership (Fountain Gate)

INTRODUCTION:

Good morning. Thank you, Pastor Dominic, for the invitation to be here. Thank you, team, for opening the door to your gathering. I want to say up front — it is not lost on me what room I’m standing in.

This is a church that has been a friend of the Holy Spirit for more than thirty years. Pastor Scott and Mary spent the better part of their adult lives planting and pastoring this place. And in 2024, the mantel got handed off. Pastor Dominic. And now you’re standing in a season where there is a brand-new sanctuary going up in Clyde and a brand-new chapter going up here in Abilene.

Which means, on a morning like this, the conversation that matters isn’t logistics. It isn’t programming. It isn’t even strategy. The conversation that matters is culture.

Strategy will set your direction. Culture will determine your behavior. As a staff, culture starts with you. You are the lid. You are the floor. You are the room temperature for everyone who walks in. Whatever is normal in this room becomes normal in the lobby. Whatever is celebrated at this table becomes celebrated from the platform. Whatever is permitted among the leadership becomes permitted in the pews.

So I want to spend our time together this morning answering one question: what does Kingdom Culture look like? And to answer that question, I want to take you to the most famous sermon ever preached, by the only senior pastor whose ministry never plateaued.

Why Culture Is Everything

Open your Bible to Matthew 5. While you’re turning there, let me set the table.

Jesus didn’t start his public ministry with a strategy session. He didn’t start with a building campaign. He didn’t start with a leadership pipeline. He started with a sermon — and the sermon started with a description of a kind of person.

Before the miracles, before the structures, before the mission strategy, Jesus is forming a people. The Sermon on the Mount is not random teaching. It’s nota list of moral upgrades. It’s the blueprint for the culture of his coming kingdom. It answers the question every leader has to wrestle with sooner or later:

What kind of people embody the kingdom of God?

And here’s why that question is uncomfortable for those of us in ministry. Because most of us have been trained to ask different questions. We’ve been trained to ask, “What kind of programs grow a church?” “What kind of platforms attract a crowd?” “What kind of systems scale a movement?”

Those aren’t bad questions. But Jesus asked one before any of those, and if we don’t answer his first, we’ll get every other question wrong.

Here’s the crisis I see in modern church leadership. We are tempted to build:

• Programs without formation.

• Platforms without character.

• Growth without transformation.

And what we end up with is a Christianity that has been reduced to belief instead of a whole-life way of being. We have churches full of people who agree with the gospel but do not yet look like the kingdom. And it’s because somewhere along the way, we stopped paying attention to culture.

If you don’t define culture, culture will define your church.

So here’s what we’re going to do this morning. We’re going to walk through the eight beatitudes — the opening of the greatest sermon ever preached — and we’re going to read them as a leadership formation arc. Three triads. Three movements. The same blueprint Jesus used for his disciples is the blueprint we need for our staffs.

And by the time we’re done, my hope is that every one of you walks out with a clearer picture of who you’re being asked to be — not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the people who you’re called to lead

Triad 1 — Foundations: The End of Me

Look at Matthew 5, verse 3. Jesus opens his mouth and the very first sentence out of it is going to confuse everybody in the crowd. He says,

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” (Matthew 5:3)

Now, in my preaching at our church, I’ve been paraphrasing this beatitude as: blessed are the helpless. And I want to give it to you the same way this morning, because I think that’s closer to what Jesus meant.

The Greek word translated “poor” is the picture of someone crouching, begging, with empty hands. And “spirit” means your inner energy — your get up and go, your vitality, your vibe.

So “poor in spirit” means a person who has nothing left in the tank. The battery is drained. The car is out of gas. They cannot move forward without God.

And Jesus looks at that person — the one who has run out of personal resources, social, emotional, spiritual, financial — and he says, “That’s the kind of person who possesses the Kingdom.”

That is not a sentence we naturally write into our staff job descriptions. We hire for capacity. We promote for competency. We platform for charisma. And Jesus says, “The kingdom belongs to the helpless.”

Why? Because if your hands are empty, they’re free to grab onto something else. If your hands are full, you’ve got nothing left to receive what God is offering.

Listen — every one of us in ministry started somewhere near empty hands. Most of us were called by God in a season of need. We didn’t feel qualified. We didn’t feel ready. And God did something through us we couldn’t explain.

And then we got better at this. We grew. We got hired. We got titled. We got platformed. And somewhere along the way, the empty hands closed around our resume. We stopped living from a place of need. We startedliving from a place of competency.

And the moment that happens, kingdom culture stops being possible through us. Because you cannot build a culture of dependence if you are self-reliant.

Kingdom culture begins exactly where self-reliance ends.

Pastors, here’s the leadership implication. The myth of the self-sufficient leader is a lie. The minute you start building this church on your gifting, your strategy, your magnetism, your follower count — you’ve already lost the only thing that makes a church a church. The presence of God doesn’t fall on full hands. It falls on empty ones.

Or as the old hymn puts it: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” That’s the first beatitude. Empty hands. The end of self-reliance.

Blessed are the heartbroken (Matthew 5:4)

The next sentence out of Jesus’ mouth is just as disorienting:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)

In my notes, I’ve paraphrased this one: blessed are the heartbroken. The Greek word for “mourn” is not vague sadness.

It’s the deep, lasting grief associated with death — the kind of grief Jacob felt when he thought Joseph was dead. The kind Nehemiah felt when he heard about the broken walls of Jerusalem. It’s loss you can’t talk yourself out of.

And Jesus looks at the heartbroken and says, “The good life belongs to you.” That is astonishing.

Because the rest of the world — especially American Christianity — equates flourishing with positivity. We medicate, distract, scroll, perform our way around mourning. We even feel guilty for feeling sad at our own funerals. But Jesus equates flourishing with honest lament.

Why? Because mourning is not emotional fragility. It’s moral clarity. It’s the soul’s refusal to pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s the refusal to call light what is dark. The mourner has stopped lying to themselves about sin — their own, their team’s, their world’s. And only people who can see what’s actually broken can be positioned to receive what God wants to fix.

Until our sin be bitter, God’s grace will not be sweet.

Now apply that to a staff team. Most of the dysfunction I have seen on church staffs over the last decade traces back to one root issue: we pretend.

We curate. We bring our best version into the staff meeting. We laugh at the right jokes. We don’t bring up the thing we’re actually struggling with. And then we wonder why our staff culture is brittle.

Here’s what I want to say to you, gently and directly: a team that cannot mourn cannot be healed. A team that cannot lament cannot be led.

If your team has no place for grief — over your own sin, over the brokenness in your families, over the people who left, over the failures of last season — then your team has no place for the comfort of God either. The two come together or not at all.

The leadership implication is hard. Leaders have to refuse image management and emotional suppression. We have to cultivate truth-telling cultures.

The staff meeting cannot become the place where everyone wears their armor. It has to become the place where the armor comes off, because that’s where the comfort of God shows up.

Empty hands. A grieving heart.

Blessed are the humiliated (Matthew 5:5)

The third beatitude is the one most of us have memorized but few of us have understood:

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)

In my paraphrase: blessed are the humiliated. Because the Hebrew word behind “meek” — ani — doesn’t mean polite or soft-spoken.

It means lowly. Afflicted. Pushed off the road. The kind of person who has been overlooked, taken advantage of, walked past. And Jesus says, “That’s who inherits the earth.”

Now here’s the leadership move inside that beatitude. Meekness in Scripture is never weakness. It’s power under restraint. It’s the horse beneath the bridle. It’s the engine revving but the foot is on the clutch.

It’s the person who could retaliate but chooses not to because God said. The person who sees injustice but refuses to mirror its methods. The person who entrusts ultimate vindication to God.

That is not the leadership style of our age. The leadership style of our age is grasping. Defensive. Brand-protecting. Outcomes-controlling. Public retaliation in 280 characters. The leadership style of our age trusts itself for vindication.

Meekness trusts God for vindication. And that means the meek leader is the one who refuses to seize control of the narrative, the team, the outcome. They give the steering wheel back to God in the staff meeting, in the elder meeting, in the comments section.

Anybody who has been in ministry long enough has had a moment where they had every right to retaliate. Somebody lied about you. Somebody undermined you. Somebody took credit for the thing you actually did.

And meekness is the willingness to put down a sword you have every right to swing, because God said. It’s the end of self-assertion.

The leadership implication: kingdom leaders don’t grasp for power. They entrust outcomes to God. You cannot build a culture of humility if you’re always grasping for control.

Putting Triad 1 together

Three beatitudes. One progression. Listen to it as a single sentence:

• Empty hands — you release the illusion of your strength.

• Grieving heart — you face reality without denial.

• Surrendered power — you relinquish control of outcomes.

This is what I call the death of self-reliance. And it’s the foundation of any culture that’s going to last more than a season.

Through dying to yourself, you’ll find your way to God.

So before we get to the visible fruit — the righteousness, the mercy, the integrity, the peacemaking — we need to ask the harder question.

Who are the leaders who can actually build kingdom culture? It’s not the most gifted. It’s not the most strategic. It’s not the most charismatic. The leaders who build kingdom culture are the leaders who have been internally dismantled and reformed by God.

And FountainGate, hear me on this. You don’t need a more skilled staff to build the next chapter of this church. You need a staff that has reached the end of itself.

Triad 2 — Walls: The Formation of a Wholehearted Community

If the first three beatitudes are the slab — the foundation — the next three are the walls and the roof. They give the house its character.

They’re what kingdom culture actually feels like when it gets embodied in a real community of people.

And what does it feel like? Let me paint it before we read it. A kingdom community is a community where

people ache for what is right.

Where people treat others better than they deserve.

Where people stop pretending and start living whole.

Three movements: vertical — right with God. Horizontal — right with others. Internal — integrated within. Watch the structure.

Blessed are the hungry (Matthew 5:6)

Matthew 5, verse 6:

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew 5:6)

In my paraphrase, blessed are the hungry. And here’s the careful note: Jesus does not say “blessed are the righteous.” He says “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” That is a critical distinction.

Because hunger and thirst aren’t metaphors. They’re non-negotiable necessities. You don’t hunger for things you’re indifferent about. You hunger for things you cannot live without.

And the righteousness Jesus is describing isn’t Sunday-morning religion. It’s right relationship with God. It’s right ordering of life. It’s rightness in the world — holiness and justice held together. It’s what humans were made for.

And there are three postures you can have toward this kind of righteousness. You can have an interest in it. You can have an agreement with it. Or you can have an appetite for it. Jesus blesses the appetite.

Now apply that to a church staff. Here’s what I’ve seen happen on staffs over the years — my own and others’. We start with appetite.

The first year on staff, the prayer life is rich. The Bible reading is hungry.

The conversations after team meetings are long. The Holy Spirit feels close because we’re desperate for him.

And then — slowly, almost imperceptibly — the appetite gets replaced with adequacy.

We start running on the fumes of last year’s encounter.

We start preaching from notes we wrote when we were closer to God than we are now.

We become professional Christians, and the worst thing about being a professional Christian is that you can do all of the work without any of the hunger.

The FountainGate of the next ten years will not be built by people who are interested in righteousness.

It will not be built by people who agree with righteousness.

It will be built by people who hunger for it. People who are still hungry for the Holy Spirit to show up, still hungry for the Word of God to be preached.

People who, when there is a moral compromise on the platform or in the office, will not look the other way.

The leadership implication: the moment your team’s craving for results outweighs the craving for righteousness, you’ve lost your kingdom culture.

Blessed are the hungry. Woe to the haughty heart.

Blessed are the helpful (Matthew 5:7)

Verse 7: “Blessed are the Merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” (Matthew 5:7)

My paraphrase: blessed are the helpful. Because mercy in the Bible is not a feeling. It’s an action. It’s an active, costly posture toward people who don’t deserve it.

Mercy absorbs wrong instead of escalating it. Mercy moves toward the broken instead of away from them. Mercy is grace enacted in relationships.

And it has a price tag. The cross is the price tag. Mercy is so expensive that the only way we can give it is because Jesus first gave it to us.

Here’s where I want to get real practical with you about staff culture. Most church staffs that fall apart, fall apart on this one.

Not because they didn’t love each other. Not because they didn’t have a shared vision. They fell apart because somebody made a mistake — and the team weaponized the failure.

Look around this room. Every one of you, including the senior pastor, will at some point in this season fail at something.

You’ll drop a ball. You’ll say something dumb. You’ll handle a parent badly. You’ll forget to send the email. You’ll preach a bad sermon. You’ll lose your temper in the green room. You’ll send the spreadsheet to the wrong person.

And what your team does with that failure is the loudest sermon your team will ever preach.

Because if your team is a place where mistakes are weaponized, you will not produce kingdom leaders. You will produce frightened performers.

But if your team is a place where mistakes are restored — where there is real consequence and real grace, where there is honest naming of what went wrong and faithful walking together to make it right — you will produce kingdom leaders.

You will produce people who, in turn, do the same for the volunteer who let down the kids ministry, and the small group leader who said the wrong thing, and the worship pastor who lost the click track three minutes before service.

Mercy is not soft. Mercy is sharp. It cuts through fear-based leadership and replaces it with cross-shaped leadership.

Don’t weaponize failure. Don’t lead through fear. Restore. Forgive. Create safety for repentance.

Blessed are the whole (Matthew 5:8)

Verse 8 is one of the most beautiful sentences ever spoken:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” (Matthew 5:8)

My paraphrase: blessed are the whole. Because purity of heart in scripture is not primarily moral perfection. It’s undivided devotion.

No hypocrisy. No duplicity. No double life. No performance for the cameras and a different person at home.

Less about perfection. More about integrity.

This is the integration of the inner life. The collapse of the false self. The whole heart instead of the half-way heart. And the barriers to it are always the same three things: fear, insecurity, and image management.

Fear of being known. Insecurity about being enough. Image management that keeps everyone, including God, at arm’s length.

And here’s the promise. The pure in heart will see God.

They will not just talk about God. They will see him.

Experiential intimacy, not academic doctrine.

The Spirit-filled life that this church has been chasing for thirty-plus years — the radical change, the genuine love, the encounter with the presence of God — happens in wholehearted people.

On a staff team, here’s what wholeheartedness looks like.

It looks like leaders who are the same person publicly and privately.

It looks like a culture where confession replaces curation.

Where integrity replaces your public image.

Where you don’t have to perform Christianity in the staff meeting because you’re actually living it on Wednesday at 4:47 in the afternoon.

If your private life cannot bear the weight of your public ministry, the public ministry will eventually collapse under the weight of the private life.

Every fallen pastor in the headlines was a wholehearted person somewhere upstream and stopped being one. The only way through is to keep coming back to the heart.

Blessed are the wholehearted. Woe to the half-way heart.

Putting Triad 2 together

Listen to the structure once more:

• Hunger for righteousness — right relationship with God. (Vertical)

• Mercy toward others — right relationship with people. (Horizontal)

• Purity of heart — integrated inner life before God. (Internal)

Triad 1 was emptying. Triad 2 is filling.

• Empty hands — now hunger.

• Grieving heart — now extend mercy.

• Surrendered power — now live with integrity.

And here’s the warning that goes with that. You cannot have Triad 2 without Triad 1.

Without dependence, righteousness becomes performance.

Without lament, mercy disappears.

Without meekness, purity becomes hypocrisy.

So if your staff feels like it’s grinding through performance, mercy is hard to come by, and purity has slipped into pretense — don’t double down on Triad 2.

Go back to Triad 1. Empty hands. Grieving heart. Surrendered power. Re-lay the slab.

The walls will rise on their own.

Triad 3 — Purpose: The Cost of Kingdom Culture

Tonal shift: prophetic edge here. Slower. Heavier.

So we’ve laid the foundation. We’ve raised the walls. The third triad answers the last question: what is this house for?

And here’s where the beatitudes get really uncomfortable.

If you’ve been waiting for the part where Jesus tells you that the kind of culture we’ve been describing leads to applause, momentum, and a life of ease, this is where I have to disappoint you.

The third triad is not about results. It’s about cost.

Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9)

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:9)

Now hear me carefully. The peacemaker is not the peacekeeper.

The peacekeeper avoids tension. The conflict manager minimizes damage.

The peacemaker walks toward the wreckage.

Peacemaking is entering broken systems to bring reconciliation at personal cost. It is moving toward division.

Naming truth. Absorbing fallout. Working for restoration. Imagine the word “healer.” Blessed are the healers, for they will be called the children of God.

And there are three things peacemaking will require of you in church leadership.

First, peacemakers walk into conflicts that other leaders avoid.

The staff tension. The board disagreement.

The volunteer fracture. The family dynamic.

Kingdom leaders don’t outsource their conflicts.

They don’t delay hard conversations. They step into the middle.

Even when stepping into the middle is going to cost them.

Second, peacemakers refuse to mirror worldly methods.

No manipulation. No power plays. No passive aggression.

No pulpit shots disguised as exposition.

The meek person sees injustice but refuses to mirror its methods.

We fight for peace without becoming combative.

Third, peacemakers absorb the cost of reconciliation.

Misunderstanding. Misrepresentation. Emotional exhaustion.

Those who would make peace often pay a heavy price.

Senior leaders, you have to understand this: peace is never free. It’s often paid for by the one who stands for truth.

Application

FountainGate, this matters specifically for you. You are in a season of transition and expansion.

You’re going from one campus to two. You’re going from one senior pastor’s thirty-two-year voice to a new senior pastor’s emerging voice.

Anytime a culture shifts, three things happen at once:

long-standing norms get disrupted,

power structures shift, and

comfort gets challenged.

Which means — and I want you to hear this from a friend, not from a critic — you are guaranteed to face conflict in this season. Some of it from outside. Most of it from inside.

And the question for the staff is not whether you’ll face it. You will. The question is whether you will face it as peacemakers — or as peacekeepers.

Anybody can retaliate. Anybody can retreat. It takes a child of God to make peace where it is needed.

Blessed are the harassed and the hated (Matthew 5:10–12)

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven.” (Matthew 5:10–12)

My paraphrases: blessed are the harassed. Blessed are the hated.

And here’s the structural beauty of this beatitude. Did you notice it? The first beatitude says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The eighth beatitude says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The bookends are the same.

The kingdom belongs to the helpless and to the harassed.

Those who have nothing in their hands at the start. Those who lose what little they had at the end. The kingdom belongs to them both.

Now I want to say something carefully. American Christians have an embarrassing habit of crying persecution every time their preferences get disrespected.

That’s not what Jesus is talking about. He is talking about resistance, harassment, and slander that comes specifically because of righteousness. Because of him.

And here’s the thing you need to know about this beatitude in pastoral leadership.

The persecution Jesus is naming is rarely physical in our context. It is relational and reputational resistance to kingdom-aligned leadership. It shows up as:

• “You’re too soft” — because of mercy.

• “You’re too rigid” — because of righteousness.

• “You’ve changed” — because the culture is shifting.

If you stay in pastoral leadership long enough in a season of cultural change, every one of those sentences is going to land in your inbox.

Sometimes from the people who love you most. The personal cost is real: loss of popularity, loss of relationships, loss of perceived success.

Anyone who tells you ministry doesn’t hurt has either never done it or hasn’t done it long enough.

The Charge — What This Means for FountainGate

Let me put it all back together. Eight beatitudes. Three triads. One picture.

• Triad 1 — Requirements. The death of self-reliance. Empty hands. Grieving heart. Surrendered power.

• Triad 2 — Culture. The formation of a wholehearted community. Hunger. Mercy. Integrity.

• Triad 3 — Results. The cost of living it out. Peacemaking. Persecution.

Kingdom culture is formed in leaders who die to themselves, live for Christ, and make peace in this world at a cost to themselves.

Now I want to land this directly in this room.

FountainGate, you are standing at a moment that very few churches in America get to stand at. You’ve received a thirty-two-year inheritance from a faithful founding pastor.

You have a new senior pastor whom God called to this seat. You have a new sanctuary about to open in Clyde. You have a community waiting on a fountainhead of the Holy Spirit’s presence.

And the temptation in a moment like this — the temptation in every moment like this— is to think that the next chapter will be built by better systems, better signage, better stagecraft, better social media. It won’t be. The next chapter will be built by what kind of people you become.

So my charge to you, as a friend and a fellow pastor, is this. The church is going to grow and you will reach more people.

The only question that will ultimately matter is what kind of people meet them when they do.

Will they meet a staff that is internally dismantled and reformed by God? Or a staff still grasping for self-sufficiency?

Will they meet a staff that mourns its own sin and the brokenness of the world? Or a staff that has perfected the art of looking fine?

Will they meet a staff that has surrendered the steering wheel? Or a staff still grasping for control?

Will they meet a staff hungry for righteousness? Merciful in failure? Whole in heart?

Will they meet peacemakers — leaders willing to walk into the wreckage at personal cost?

Because here’s the only sentence I want you to remember when you walk out of this room:

If you become these kinds of people, you will build this kind of culture. And that culture will shape your congregation.

There’s a Kingdom Culture Scorecard on the back of your handout.

It’s a simple self-assessment built around these nine areas — three for our relationship with God, three for our relationship with the Church, three for our engagement with the World.

I’d encourage you to fill it out honestly. Don’t fill it out for the staff member next to you. Don’t fill it out for who you wish you were. Fill it out for who you actually are this morning.

Then identify one place where you are out of alignment, and one place where this team is out of alignment. Take that to the Lord this week. Take it to a brother or sister this week. And let it become the thing the Holy Spirit grows in you between now and the next Sunday morning.