Thirteen years in New York City.

We arrived in Brooklyn in February of 2013 with a six-month-old baby, two suitcases, and a vision that had been sitting on Georgie and me for three years. Snow on the ground. A borrowed apartment. Five people at our first Dinner Party. Most of what we’ve learned since then, we’ve learned the slow way.

Ministry in New York doesn’t happen on a schedule. It happens at dinner, in hallways, after the last train home, in group chats at 11:47pm, in the kind of conversations you didn’t plan to have and won’t remember planning. The city doesn’t love back easily. That’s part of what you sign up for. But when it does, when it lets you in, it does something to your faith that no conference ever could.

Here are a few things I’ve actually learned. Not the quotable kind. The kind that only shows up after you’ve been doing something long enough for the shortcuts to fail.

1. Plant slow, pastor slower.

Church planting culture praises speed. Bigger faster sooner. But the churches that last in New York are the ones where someone stayed long enough to become an actual neighbor. People don’t trust a pastor they’ve known for six months. They trust a pastor they’ve watched through ten of their own hardest seasons.

2. The table is the pulpit.

FOUNT started at a Dinner Party and it has never stopped being one. Everything real about our church, the theology, the belonging, the honesty, has happened at a table first and a stage second. If you want to know what a church believes, don’t ask what they preach. Watch where they eat, and with whom.

3. The city is the discipler.

New York will sand your pretension down to the floorboards. It will ask you questions your seminary didn’t. It will introduce you to the people your theology had opinions about before you had a face to put on them. If you let it, the city itself becomes one of the truest teachers of how to actually love people.

4. Success isn’t what you thought it was.

I used to measure a Sunday by attendance. Then I measured it by engagement. Then by return rate. Then by something I still don’t have a word for , something more like: did anyone leave more free than they walked in? Did a real conversation happen about a real thing? Did someone we’ve been praying for take a step? Numbers still matter. But they’re trailing indicators, not leading ones.

5. You cannot outrun your character.

The most sobering thing I’ve learned in thirteen years is that you cannot build a healthy church on top of an unhealthy interior life. What happens inside the pastor eventually happens inside the church. It may take ten years, but it comes. Georgie and I have had to fight for our own souls more times than I can count, and I’m grateful for every pastor and friend who’s been honest with us when we needed it.

6. Jesus is still the Fount.

Thirteen years in, I’m more convinced of this than when we started. The church is not the Fount. The pastor is not the Fount. The building is not the Fount. The movement, the method, the message, none of those are the Fount. Jesus is. Everything else is just a place where, by grace, people can come and drink. That’s the whole job.

We’ll keep doing it here as long as He lets us.