A Quest, 25 and the Search for Clarity

Last Monday, if you’d been walking through St Ives, you might’ve seen our staff team doing some pretty strange things. They were chasing clues, hunting for historical plaques, and obsessing over the number 25. I’d told them that "25" was the key to the day and despite chasing down lots of clues, no one actually cracked the quest code. It’s a clear sign my brain is weirdly wired.  

So what was it all about? Well, the 25th letter of the alphabet is Y. Also, the YMCA is commonly known as the Y. And a tree with two forks looks like a Y. And it was all pointing at the fact that the goal of our day wasn't to win a quest, but the goal was to give priority to the "Why."

In ministry, it is so easy to get buried under the What. What’s on the runsheet this week? What’s the state of the budget? What’s the next event? Of course it’s, not just churches but any organisation can get stuck in the what and forget its why. Simon Sinek famously says that if you lose your "Why," you lose everything. He talks about how important it is to keep coming back to the why. To keep coming back to the bigger and great purpose. To keep coming back to what we can all belong to. Of course, to refocus on the why, we don’t come back to a thing. We come back to the King.

Our "Why" isn’t just an object or a purpose; it’s a person. So as a team we went back to the foundations: Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1. Why are we here? For the praise of His glory. Why do we work so hard? Because Jesus is supreme. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the firstborn over all creation. Everything, literally everything, was created by Him and for Him.

If we lose that, we’re just another community club. But if we front-load that "Why", if we keep the supremacy of Christ at the very center, our foundation is sure. Then we can be creative for the glory of God. We can reimagine what we are doing, knowing that the “what” does not need to stay the same, but we do all things for the praise of God’s glory. We can build a community where people actually belong because they belong to Jesus who is supreme.

So I said to the staff team, we have lots of goals for 2026, but what I want us to focus on is the "Why." We want to build 3000 wholehearted disciples because God is worthy of all praise. We want to see people come to know Jesus because Jesus is supreme and worthy of wholehearted devotion.

My prayer for our staff is simple: I want us to pray thankfully for, live by, focus on and share the glory of God more than we talk about our tasks. I want people to walk into our offices and say, "I don't know what it is, but Jesus is clearly supreme here." I want us to love each other, support each other, and pray for each other with the kind of grace that only comes from looking at him. If that happens, we win. If we lift our eyes to the glory of God, we will have the clarity we need to do His great work. For God’s glory. Because Jesus is supreme.

I’d love you to join us in this. Let’s keep the why at the centre. Let’s pray with the why in mind. Let’s live with the why in mind. Let’s do church and be a church and gather people to our church because of the why. For God’s glory. Because Jesus is supreme.