When things in our organizations are going well, we want to steward the opportunity well. We want to make the most of the moment and make hay while the sun shines. But sometimes this comes at a risk. There are tradeoffs to growth at a fast pace, and sometimes those sacrifices cost more than we're willing to invest. When things are going well, it's also an opportunity to take a measured approach — to intentionally go slower in order to preserve the relationships or the well-being of those around us.
The mistake most Christian leaders make is seeing these paths as a fork in the road — a binary choice between growth and sustainability. We interviewed three leaders who faced the question of growth versus sustainability and came out the other side with a beautiful theology of pace.
The question that keeps leaders up at night: how much is enough?
We've all heard sermons about maximizing the talents God has given us. We've also heard sermons about the wisdom of restraint and living at a sustainable pace. Both teachings come from Scripture, and both are sound.
The Christian leader navigating a growth decision is thinking through it from both an operational and a theological perspective. Is growth a calling? Or is it an idol? And because the answer is "it depends" — based on context and motive — how do we actually tell the difference in our own circumstances?
Alex Judd: the retreat that didn't answer the question
Alex Judd knows this question well. He left his job to found Path for Growth in June 2020, and within the first six months, by every external measurement, he was succeeding. Coaching slots filled in two weeks. His first two hires came within a month.
It was in that season, surrounded by the evidence of his own success, that he declined an invitation to visit Richard Branson's luxury resort. Instead, Alex turned off his phone and computer and got quiet.
Jared Flinn: growth as a byproduct of value
Jared Flinn didn't start Bulk Loads to build an empire. He wanted to be home when his kids were young, so he started the business in his basement in 2011. The SaaS platform serving the trucking industry grew steadily for fifteen years because Jared thought of growth in terms of value rather than targets.
"I don't look at it through the lens of 'how do we grow?'" he said. "I look through the lens of 'how do we keep providing value?' Because if you provide value and keep increasing it, the stability will find its way."
On a mission trip to Uganda in 2020, Jared met a stranger who mentioned, almost in passing, that he had just hired his thousandth employee. Jared asked how. The man said he hired a coach. That one conversation set off a chain of events for Jared that produced 100% year-over-year growth at Bulk Loads — the highest in the company's history.
Whitney Putnam: "You're leading the wrong team"
As VP of Marketing and Communications at the Global Leadership Network, Whitney Putnam was given a mandate to aggressively grow a marketing team of two into a team capable of executing a global brand. Three months in, Whitney was on a call with a contractor handling logistics for an Oklahoma City event. The contractor was complaining about the constant emergencies the marketing team had normalized. Whitney said she didn't want to lead that way — she wanted a team where emergencies were few and far between, not a daily occurrence. The contractor said, "Well, you're leading the wrong team."
That conversation sparked a resolve in Whitney: she decided to build something different — that this kind of chaos was not the abundant life Jesus invites us into. So Whitney developed her own approach to leadership. She works to be the most non-anxious person in the room. She intentionally asks about each person before the start of the business portion of a meeting. And she insists that each employee take a "solitude day" each month as a form of rest and renewal. Whitney has very intentionally built a different culture, and it started with her.
For Alex, Jared, and Whitney — and for every Christian leader who has faced a growth decision — the core question is the same:
Their stories create a biblical framework for the next time you're sitting with a difficult decision about pace and growth. The solution isn't one-size-fits-all. But you'll have what you need to navigate it with wisdom and integrity.
Is "growing the business" the same thing as "honoring God"?
At the core of any growth conversation or decision, Christian leaders must reflect on a question they've rarely considered directly: Do I believe "growing the business" and "honoring God" are the same thing?
In faith-and-work circles, we often celebrate stories of leaders who held on, pressed through, and came out victorious on the other side. But the leader who paced themselves, throttled their ambition, said no to opportunities, or simply showed a slower trajectory rarely gets the spotlight. And when we can untangle our identity from growth — and be honest about submitting to God's direction — Christian leaders find peace in every season. So how do we do that?
The Beatitudes: who is growing?
Alex Judd shares this passage as one of the most convicting moments of his entrepreneurial life.
The Beatitudes are not commonly quoted in business contexts, but we can't ignore the direct word to leaders facing growth decisions. Alex said he had often quoted verse 16 of the same chapter — "Let your light shine before men" — and even made it the vision statement for his work. "The Beatitudes felt completely out of step with the way I was currently thinking about life and growth," he recalls. "That model for the good life was absurdly convicting."
While the passage doesn't tell leaders to grow slowly, nor does it address strategy or pace, it describes the character of the person behind the work. The word "meek" in verse 5 is a word used in classical Greek to describe a trained war horse: powerful, capable, and fast, but under control.
Meekness isn't weakness. It's power that has learned submission. Reframed through that lens, sustainable pace isn't timid — it's a disciplined refusal to let unbridled force make the decisions. The Beatitudes invite a core question before any growth decision can be made: what is the character of the person who will be growing? The leader's character has a massive influence on the organization's character.
The business model of humility
Alex told a story about his clumsy two-year-old daughter, who is constantly falling. She barely gets hurt because she doesn't have far to fall. It's a perfect illustration of humility.
The farther up you perceive yourself to be, the farther you have to fall. "I do not control outcomes," Alex says. "I influence them. But I do not control them. That is out of step with a lot of business and leadership conferences."
For the leader sitting with a growth decision, this passage addresses the most common cognitive distortion that drives unsustainable pace: an inflated sense of your ability to control outcomes. When leaders genuinely believe they are generating growth rather than participating in what God is doing, they make different decisions than those who understand they can influence growth but not cause it. Romans 12:3 is a call to see that distinction clearly and soberly.
Whitney shared about her leadership aim of being the most non-anxious person in the room. "If I think I'm the controller, I've lost sight of my place in this mission. So even on a full day of meetings, when my body is saying run as fast as you can, I deliberately slow myself down and talk about what's going on in each of my teammate's lives," she said. That intentional slowing down — being focused on the people more than their roles and the project at hand — requires humility.
The mechanism of sustainable growth
Jared Flinn found this verse after he had already built six business units, and saw his own instincts confirmed in the passage.
Jared's operating philosophy was shaped by his father-in-law's mentorship inside Walmart under Sam Walton. The philosophy is built around a single question: how do I keep increasing value for the people I serve? Not: how do I extract maximum margin from this opportunity? Jared's company offers unlimited PTO, subsidizes conferences, and prices its products with the customer's long-term benefit in mind.
"These truckers are made in God's image just like the rest of us," he says. "They deserve the same respect. And everybody else is chasing the big guys. We're sitting here saying: let's serve them." Proverbs 11:25 illuminates that the mechanism of durable growth is generosity and service — not accumulation and extraction.
The tensions we face
This topic of growth and rest, expansion and contentment, brings us to some uncomfortable tensions.
Stewardship vs. Sabbath. In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30, we see faithful stewardship calling leaders to maximize what God has entrusted to them. The master entrusts three servants with different amounts of money before leaving on a journey, giving each according to their ability. When he returns, the two who invested and doubled what they were given are rewarded with greater responsibility; the one who buried his out of fear is rebuked.
This illustrates that faithful stewardship means actively multiplying what you've been entrusted with, not just preserving it. But this active multiplication can feel at odds with the command we receive in Exodus 20:8–11, where God commands the Israelites to set aside the seventh day as a day of complete rest for themselves, their households, and even their animals and servants.
The Sabbath is an intentional rhythm of rest that mirrors God's own pattern, reminding his people that productivity and provision ultimately rest in him, not in their own unceasing labor.
Ambition vs. contentment. "Whatever you do, do it heartily" (Colossians 3:23, ESV). This Scripture redefines ambition by adjusting the driver behind it: work done "heartily" is driven by devotion to God as the ultimate audience. This frees the Christian leader from the exhausting performance of impressing people, while also guarding against passivity and half-hearted effort. Excellence becomes an act of worship rather than a means of self-promotion — an ambition that is both fully engaged and deeply at rest.
This challenges the assumption that gain comes from acquiring more, and reframes true wealth as a life lived in communion with God, content with what he's given. Contentment isn't a lack of ambition — it's an active, practiced, trained posture that refuses to let circumstances define "enough." Together, godliness and contentment form a freedom that money can't buy.
Care for the team vs. call them to boldness. Leaders are called to shepherd those in their care not as an obligation or a path to personal gain, but as an act of service.
This posture of humility stands in direct contrast to the driving, controlling, extracting posture worldly leadership often takes. Christian leaders are instead invited to bring presence, protection, and patient guidance — putting the team's health ahead of the leader's ambitions. And while we're called to humility, we're also called to boldness in mission.
Paul is warning against the kind of spiritual and vocational drift that looks like busyness but lacks genuine purpose. Zeal isn't manufactured urgency or performative hustle — it's an energetic commitment that goes beyond obligation or routine, staying alert to the significance of the work set before us. The boldness Paul calls for is the courage to show up fully, pursue the mission with intensity, and resist the slow erosion of passion.