One challenge facing a denominational or judicatory leader is navigating a complicated and regularly shifting environment of expectations, assumptions, desires, requests and demands.

How can a leader pursue that difficult, healthy and holy balance between meeting the needs of individual congregations and their leaders and, at the same time, serving the larger church and its mission priorities?

These pressures are increasing as denominations and judicatories continue to adjust to the realities of a changed and changing church -- of reduced budgets, smaller staffs and rising ecclesial anxiety. Many congregations and their leaders are experiencing similar realities in their own contexts as well, and so are increasingly asking their denominational leaders, "What have you done for me lately?"

Denominational leaders, in many places, must learn to do more, for more, with less.

In recent trips to three different regions of the country, I have heard creative and provocative responses to this contemporary pressure. In each place, I heard leaders articulate a greater clarity about what it means to be a denominational leader and equip the saints for ministry.

One senior denominational staff person told me, "We now only feed the birds that have their mouths open." His judicatory staff is focusing its time, effort and energy on congregations and congregational leaders that are seeking to be and to lead the faithful church of the future. Congregations held hostage by nostalgia, apathy or intractable conflict are simply no longer priorities for judicatory staff. Some other congregational matters, including clergy misconduct, will still demand denominational attention, but this leader's staff is trying to streamline processes to minimize the energy spent on these situations. The focus is on the future.