Mark Lee

1. You Will Face Your “Funeral Home” Moment

Mark’s church almost held its first services at the Norco funeral home before landing a junior high cafetorium instead. Every planter hits a season that feels like death before it feels like life. The promise Mark held onto — “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it” — is the anchor point, not the absence of hardship.

2. Generosity Received Should Become Generosity Given

Mark’s sending church handed his plant a $630,000 capital campaign check for a building they’d never personally use. That kind of sacrificial generosity became the template he now casts for his own congregation — asking people to give toward a future they may never personally benefit from. As Mark puts it, “anything begets anything” — arrogance breeds arrogance, but generosity breeds generosity too.

3. Focus on What You Have, Not What You’re Missing

Mark’s sharpest line of the episode: “No church planter closes because he runs out of money. Church planters close because they get crushed under the weight of their own disappointment.” Counting the empty seats instead of the full ones is a slow leak that drains planters long before the budget does.

4. Expect the “Dream, Do, Doldrums” Cycle

Borrowed from Pastor Steve Stroope, this framework names what most planters feel but rarely talk about: the dream phase is exciting, the “do” phase is a rush, but the doldrums — often hitting around year five — bring burnout, recycled sermons, and an identity crisis. Naming the cycle makes it survivable.

5. Sabbath Isn’t Optional, It’s Structural

Mark takes two weeks every summer to get alone with God and simply rest — not to solve every problem, but to let the ground “lie fallow” until the dream returns. He’s candid that a couple weeks off won’t fix everything (quoting Larry Osborne: “Don’t judge the watering schedule, judge the fruit on the tree”), but consistent rhythms of rest are what sustain a decades-long calling.

6. Reframe Pain as Growth, Not Failure

Drawing from both distance running and Scripture, Mark challenges the modern instinct to treat pain as proof something’s wrong. Sometimes pain is your soul telling you something needs to change — not a sign you’re outside God’s will, but a sign you’re being shaped by it.

7. Great Leaders Ask Questions, Not Just Answers

Mark’s litmus test for planters who go the distance: do they show up wanting to learn, or wanting to impress? He’s found that the planters who ask the most questions — and who show self-awareness enough to apologize when they’ve hurt someone — are the ones who last. Self-centeredness and pride, more than lack of skill, are what quietly take leaders out.

8. Trade Your Instagram Highlight Reel for the Book of Acts

Mark’s closing challenge: stop measuring your ministry against curated social media and start measuring it against Paul’s actual journey — beatings, riots, and a thorn he carried for over a decade before ever writing about grace. “Everything he writes is about grace, but everything he lives is about grit.”