Leadership Journal

I've attended many pastors' conferences—and seen hundreds of advertisements promoting others. All of these events were geared around a definition of success that assumed that "bigger" and "more" were a pastor's goals. I pushed back from my desk after reading an ad for one such conference thinking, That's a lot of pressure for a pastor. Furthermore, I wondered if the ad's assumed definition of pastoral success was even accurate.

So I posted an idea on my blog: What if there was a pastors' conference devoted to ministry failure? What if we focused for a few days, not on ministry success, but on our failures?

Such a conference, I imagined, would have to be completely different. Instead of featuring senior pastors of well-known megachurches, it would include ordinary pastors of smaller congregations who were attempting to faithfully follow Jesus in seemingly obscure places.

What would it be like to share our failures, and then culminate the conference at the communion table? As we rallied around the broken body and spilled blood of Christ, remembering his "failures," might we see ours differently?

After the post went up, I started getting comments, emails, and phone calls within the hour. The overwhelming majority were positive: "If you do something like this, I'm in."

The idea struck a chord, which encouraged me—but at the same time, I felt unsettled. Why is a pastors' conference on failure compelling to so many Christian leaders?

I had no intention of actually doing a conference; it was just an idea. A few friends said that if I was serious about it, they would help plan the logistics. Several pastors (and former pastors) called to say they'd be willing to speak (at no cost) because they had been thinking about a similar idea for years.

We decided to go for it. We believed that the pursuit of success—or at least the fear of failure—drives many pastors. I know it does me. Success is our Golden Calf, and we needed to call it out.

So we hosted a two and a half day event, the "Epic Fail Pastors Conference," to talk about the raw, terrifying, and gripping topic of failure.

Our locale was fitting. Lansdale, Pennsylvania, is a gritty, blue-collar suburb north of Philadelphia. The space we rented was the upstairs portion of a dingy bar. The building itself had once been a church. The room—now a concert venue for weekend rock shows—was the old fellowship hall. We built a modest website to promote the event. Within a few weeks, 10,000 people visited the site. The idea was resonating with pastors.

We had no published speaker list of influential pastors. No merchandise table. We weren't using smoke machines, strobe lights, or Twitter hashtags. We had no honoraria to give to speakers (our "Experts on Failure"). We even had "required homework" for the attendees, asking them to read Henri Nouwen's classic book In the Name of Jesus and meditate on 2 Corinthians 4.

Instead of packing the schedule with back-to-back presentations, we decided to allow space for people to pause, process, and reflect on their failures and the meaning of pastoral identity.

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