March Madness—A Mirror for Ministry Leaders

Sunday afternoon, I watched Michigan lose to Purdue. I'm a Michigan man, so it was not a good afternoon. But after the game ended, my youngest son and I sat down together to watch the Selection Show and see where teams would be seeded so we could start filling out our brackets.

I'm a college basketball fan. But honestly, making a bracket is still guesswork for me—it's anyone's game once the tournament starts. I've never predicted the winner.

Somewhere in the middle of it—watching the field come together, listening to my son argue how his MSU Spartans would make it to the Elite Eight at least—I started thinking about what this tournament has actually become.

Sixty-eight teams. Single elimination. One bad day and you're done.

And surrounding it, an entire machine—television deals worth billions, NIL collectives, conference realignment that makes no geographic sense, a congressional hearing just this last week where senators asked out loud who exactly is in charge of this thing.

Nobody could answer. Because the honest answer is nobody. The system didn't get designed. It evolved. One television deal at a time. One policy change at a time. Each step logical. Each step defensible in the moment. And now even the people who benefited most from it will tell you privately: this isn't what it was supposed to be.

The American church did the same thing.

When the Metrics Became the Mission

Nobody in your denomination or association held a meeting and decided that attendance would become the measure of effective ministry. Nobody drew up a plan to make Sunday morning a performance you'd spend the whole week preparing for and the whole week recovering from.

Nobody formally agreed that the pastoral work that never makes it into a report—the 10 pm crisis call, the hospital visit nobody posts about, the hour with a struggling volunteer who doesn't feel valued—was somehow less real than the things that moved the attendance numbers.

It just drifted that way. One budget cycle at a time. One board meeting where someone asked, "But what does this do for growth?" And nobody had a good enough answer. So growth won. The "scoreboard" appeared. And then, quietly, everything organized around it.

After 35 years in ministry, I can't remember exactly when it happened to me. I grew up a pastor's kid, so I think I always knew numbers were king. I quietly justified the obsession. "Numbers are people," I'd tell myself. But people were exactly who I was spending the least time with. My week was consumed by preparing for the weekend.

It was only in the last 15 years that I decided to change my offense. Stop preparing perfect programs. Start paying attention to the people in front of me. Which meant something had to give. And what gave was my grip on the weekend performance.

Ironically, I just got off a coaching call where I had this exact conversation with a young pastor who said, "But what do I do when people show up expecting excellence?" And I get it—excellence is probably even one of your church's core values. It's one of ours, too. But have we been applying it to the wrong metric? What if excellence isn't about the weekend? What if it's about the quality of presence we bring to the people sitting in front of us on a Tuesday afternoon? The attention we give to the family in crisis. The care we invest in the volunteer nobody else is developing? That's excellence. We've just been measuring it in the wrong place.

And that's not a program strategy. That's a pastoral identity decision. After all, we're shepherds—not showmen or performers. There's a real difference between those two roles. And only one of them is biblical.

The 16-Seed Problem

Here's what I think March Madness makes impossible to ignore.

The 16-seed that plays a 1-seed isn't competing on a level field. The 1-seed has resources, recruiting pipelines, NIL collectives, and infrastructure the 16-seed will never touch. Yet they play. And the 16-seed coach who outworked everyone to get there, who built something real with limited resources, who cares deeply about their players, is held to the same standard as the coach with a nine-million-dollar salary and a recruiting budget the size of a small country's GDP.

Ministry leaders know exactly how that feels.

Whether you're a lead pastor, associate, children's director, worship leader, or church planter working out of a rented school cafeteria, every week you're lining up against the ministry down the road with the production team, the children's wing with the climbing wall, the worship experience that sounds like a Hillsong concert.

And when families leave—not because you hurt them, not because the theology was wrong, but because the other place has more to offer their kids—you absorb it as evidence of your own inadequacy.

In college basketball, it's called the transfer portal. Players don't leave because they hate their coach. They leave because another program offered them more. Coaches feel it as rejection. Most of the time, it isn't. It's just the system doing what the system does.

The congregation that formed people for years—that showed up at 1 am when the phone rang, that buried their parents and baptized their children—loses families to a campus with a Jumbotron, a parking lot team, and a Starbucks in the lobby. And the pastor who built something real sits alone on a Monday morning wondering what's wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're playing a different game with different resources and being measured by the same scoreboard. That's a system problem you inherited, not one you created.

Nobody Is Watching Out for You

The March Madness player practices year-round, plays through a full season, enters a tournament where one loss ends everything.

Ministry leaders don't have an off-season either.

You carry the pastoral weight. The weddings and funerals, the marriages slowly falling apart, the family that just lost a child. You carry the organizational weight. The budget, the staff tension, the building that needs a new roof, the board member who's unhappy again. You carry the weight of showing up for people week after week with something profound to say.

And then you go home. And Monday comes. And there is no structure—no peer relationship, no accountability that isn't also an evaluation—built specifically to ask how you are doing.

The board asks how the church is doing while your family watches quietly, worried, wondering when you'll be present again. But nobody built a system to ask the real question: How are you?

You got into ministry because you believed this work mattered. Because you thought the church was supposed to be the place where people were genuinely known. Where showing up for someone in the worst moment of their life wasn't a distraction from the mission.

It was the mission. And then the system handed you a scoreboard. And you've been trying to serve both ever since.

College athletics may not find its way back from the mess it has become. The money is too big now, the system too far from shore. But you still have a choice.

So here's the only question that matters this week.

When did you last do something that will never show up in any metric—but was exactly what you're supposed to be doing?

Take your time with that one. Because that's where it starts. Not with a new strategy or a better system. With a single moment where you stop running the plays that built the scoreboard and start doing the thing you actually got into this for.

The game hasn't changed. But you have a choice about how you play it.

One more thing—and yes, it involves basketball.

We're running the first-ever TAP March Madness Bracket Challenge. Fill out your bracket before Thursday's games begin. The winner earns a free seat in one of our 2026 Cohorts—a $4,200 value. Yours to keep or gift to someone who needs it more.

Enter the TAP Bracket Challenge →

About the Author

Tim Eldred has been serving in pastoral ministry for over three decades and has had the privilege of training and mentoring thousands of pastors in over 40 countries. He is the founder of The Authentic Pastor. Most importantly, he is a husband, father, and grandfather.