Stop the Drift: Why Leaders Lose Their Way
Jul 13, 2026
The Beach Moved
It's really easy to drift.
Picture yourself swimming in the ocean on a perfect day. The sun is out, the water's just right, and you're having the time of your life. Then you turn to look back at the shore — and the beach has moved. You didn't feel it happen. You weren't doing anything wrong. But the current carried you somewhere you never intended to be.
That's leadership. If you've led people for any length of time, especially inside an organization, you already know how quietly it happens. You look up one day and realize the church, the team, the ministry has drifted from where you meant to take it. And here's what I've learned: the drift is rarely the result of one bad decision. It's the result of three forces that work on all of us, all the time.
Success Creates Complexity
Most of us started out with a raft.
A few friends, a shared dream, and the simple thrill of doing work we love with people we love. You're a pastor, a church leader, and the whole thing feels like getting in a raft with your buddies and pushing off into something good. How good is life?
Then it grows. You add a few people and upgrade to a bigger boat. Momentum builds, so you add a few more, and the boat gets bigger still. Before long you're the captain of a cruise ship — and you never even see your friends anymore. The vessel is so complex you don't actually know how it works. You just have specialists who each understand their own section, and you spend your days trying to hold it all together. If something truly broke, you're not even sure you could fix it.
That's the irony of success. We get what we wanted, and then we get what we didn't want — complexity. And when things get complex, it gets harder to stay connected and harder to keep track. That's when the drift begins.
Urgency Replaces Purpose
Now imagine the cruise ship springs a leak.
Suddenly it's pandemonium. Everyone's running, nobody's sure what to do, people are literally putting their thumb over the hole trying to save the ship. Finally someone who knows what they're doing gets it patched — but now you're behind. So you speed up. Everyone's focused on going faster, making up for lost time, and in the rush nobody's watching the instrument panel that tells you which direction you're pointed.
You get off course by a couple of degrees. It doesn't feel like much. And you're making great time — you're just going the wrong way.
This is exactly what happened in Acts 6. The early church got so busy meeting the real, pressing needs of the people around them that they lost track of the most important work: prayer and the ministry of the word. It took a crisis — complaints and conflict bubbling up — to make them pause, ask hard questions, and redirect. What had really happened is that other people's priorities had taken the front seat. I call it OPA: Other People's Agenda. The point isn't to be insensitive to real needs. The point is that a leader has to keep asking: who should be doing what, and where should I be spending my time and energy?
The Target Gets Moved
Here's where it gets subtle, and a little uncomfortable.
You've sprung the leak, fixed it, sped up, and now you're slightly off course but making excellent time. And it is so tempting to just move the target to wherever you happen to be pointing. To draw a circle on the wall around the spot you already hit and call it a bullseye. We do it because we all want to win.
But I've come to believe that one of the most courageous things a leader ever does is recalibrate. Course-correcting a church, a ministry, an organization takes real guts — because by now people have wrapped their expectations around the way things are. And when people attach spiritual value to an activity, redirecting it feels like moving something sacred. The questions come. The pushback comes. It's genuinely hard.
So what do we do? We go back. Back to Scripture, back to the calling, back to the specific thing God actually put in front of us. And then — sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once — we make the changes that get us back on course.
Four Questions to Stop the Drift
Staying on course isn't a one-time fix; it's a constant discipline. When something new lands on your plate or your calendar, run it through four quick questions:
- Does this align with our mission?
- Does this align with our vision?
- Does this align with our goals?
- Does this align with our priorities — for this season, this quarter, right now?
If the answer is no, it's pulling you off course, and part of your job as a leader is to fix it. That work never really ends, because every team, every organization, every living thing full of people on a mission is going to drift. It's human nature.
Locked In
But here's the good news, and it's worth holding onto: when you catch the drift and correct it, when the course comes back into view and you're pointed the right way again — that is one of the best feelings in leadership. It's exciting work.
So this week, as you go to work on your team, your mission, your organization, my prayer is that you'd get to feel that. That you'd eliminate the drift. Stop the drift. Get back on course.
And lock back in.
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