Carey Nieuwhof
Don’t settle for an impact smaller than you’re called to make. It's time to unlock your potential and lead confidently into a future filled with growth — for yourself, your church, and your mission. Get access to some of my best leadership content, only published in my newsletters.
What if you became spectacularly unavailable this summer?
Hi Reader, Summer's here. My fave season by far. But for a lot of us, the question becomes whether you will ever get any meaningful time off. If you're like a lot of leaders (and like me twenty years ago), you'll schedule a couple weeks off but you'll keep working quietly just a few hours in the morning or a few issues along the way that came up that you simply "have to deal with". Why does that happen? And why does it happen to leader after leader after leader? Well, here's an answer that I...
On The Rise: All About Burnout and Recovery. + Pastors are NOT Quitting. What?
Welcome to the On The Rise newsletter, where I feature fascinating, helpful, and sometimes curious content that caught my attention this week. Today’s kind of special. 20 years ago this month I fell deep into full-on burnout. It would be months before I got my energy, heart, and soul back. All I felt in the spring and summer of 2006 was numb, dead. I thought my life and ministry were over. This week I released two episodes on my podcast looking back on what I’ve learned in the last two...
Blank space in your calendar is a trap.
Hi Reader, Twenty years ago, I burned out. A few days ago, I told you the full story on my podcast—how it happened, why it happened, and what it felt like. Here's the link in case you missed it. Today, in a fresh episode, I give you the recovery playbook. It's everything I've learned in the last twenty years on getting out of burnout and staying out of it. In this episode, I walk you through seven strategies I've lived personally, that have kept me (and a lot of other leaders) out of burnout...
What the World Cup might mean for your church this summer
Hi Reader, Sometimes the world hands the Church a global moment with huge opportunity. One of those moments is coming. The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off on June 11th in North America. For weeks, a lot of people who don't usually talk to each other will be gathered around the same thing at the same time. What could that mean for the Church? Not in a complicated, launch-a-program way. More in a what if we just showed up way? What if we opened homes, had people over, and took conversations a...
The story I’ve never fully told. (Until now.)
Hi Reader, Twenty years ago this month, I burned out. I was 41 years old. I had just delivered the biggest talk of my life to 2,500 leaders in Atlanta—and when the plane landed in Toronto, I felt like I fell off a cliff into the abyss. For the next several months I went from numb to despairing to suicidal ideation. And here’s what made it harder: leaders with enough muscle memory can fake it even when they’re dead inside. I did that when I got back up to preach in August 2006. Nobody around...
Christians are contributing to the chaos. (Let's talk about it.)
Hi Reader, Let's be honest. If your social feed looks anything like mine, it's gotten more polarized, more angry, and frankly just more weird. The weirdest part is, Christians aren't exempt from that. If anything, we're contributing to it. I've been sitting with this for a while now, and I finally put it on camera: when Christians lose their minds, people lose their faith. I think about that a lot, because I don't think most of us realize what's actually at stake every time we post, share, or...
On The Rise: Why It’s Hard for People To Attend Church, Being Cheap and How to Not Be So Critical
Welcome to the On The Rise newsletter, where I feature fascinating, helpful, and sometimes curious content that caught my attention this week. Today, a perceptive article on why it’s hard for some families to attend church on Sundays, what being cheap really costs you, how to be less critical and how to finally stop procrastinating. Some Insights Into Why Weekends Don’t Work For Churches Some empathy for people who aren’t there every Sunday It’s easy to get pastors ranting about people who...
AI sermon prep checklist
Hi Reader, When it comes to AI in sermon prep, much should you use AI? Let it write a first draft? Let it guide you?Look, sermon writing is hard. I get it. Here's waht I believe (not think, believe): If you skip the struggle, you skip God. If you outsource the wrestling match to AI—the part where the text does its work on you first—you bypass the whole point. The question isn't whether to use it... that ship has sailed for most of us. The question is where it actually helps, and where it...
Why your church isn’t multiplying and how to fix it.
Hi Reader, What’s the single biggest reason most churches plateau or decline? According to Dave Ferguson, it comes down to one word: no. This challenged me, because I always advise leaders to say no more often. But are there cases where this blocks your church's growth and your growth as a leader? Well, yes. Dave Ferguson is the founding pastor of Community Christian Church in Chicago and president of Exponential, one of the world’s largest church-planting networks. Recorded backstage at...
The Good News? There's No Bad News.
Hi Reader, Ready for some good news today? There's no bad news. Only news. That's something Rich Birch told me years ago when we were launching Connexus Church together. It was an aside, but it's stuck with me ever since. Rich served as our Executive Pastor for a few years, and I imagine like most Lead Pastors I always wanted to hear the bad news first and then have him give me any good news when he was updating me. One day, he looked at me and said: "There's no bad news. Only news." “...
Don’t settle for an impact smaller than you’re called to make. It's time to unlock your potential and lead confidently into a future filled with growth — for yourself, your church, and your mission. Get access to some of my best leadership content, only published in my newsletters.