by C. Lee
Photo by Victor Sobrado on Unsplash
Two-thirds of my core team left within the same season.
People I had journeyed with, prayed with, built with — gone, not because anything went wrong, but because the Lord moved them on. And my honest response was: I feel like I'm back at square one. Team building again. Which, if I'm being real, is not a feeling I would choose.
In the past, this kind of thing would have pulled me under.
Two-thirds Gone
The old instinct — the one I recognise from earlier seasons of leadership — was to go inward when things came apart.
What's happening? What's going on? You start asking those questions and the ground gets uncertain fast. I'd feel the discouragement coming in like a tide, and I'd just sort of... let it. Because what else do you do when something you spent years building suddenly has a hole in the middle of it? I'm not someone who bounces back easily. I get excited when things go well, and when they stop going well, I feel it.
This time, something in me reached for a different question.
The Conviction That Changed The Frame
The thing DMM had been working into me — slowly, over years — is this: this is the Lord's work.
If it's the Lord's work, then he's got it. It's not dependent on me. I'm a vessel, but the outcome isn't mine to hold. This cell, this team — it's his. If he's allowed two-thirds of my core team to go, then he's going to provide. That sounds simple when I write it out, but it took real time for it to move from something I said to something I actually believed in my body when the ground went quiet.
I'd been learning this in layers for a while — including in my own home. I don't think I've ever fought with my husband so much as in those early years of DMM, because he's very much a church organisation person, and suddenly I was challenging the ways things were done and wanting to do things differently. That created real tension. We had to wrestle through it, talk through it, pray through it. And in the process I also had to learn something about myself: that within a church context, there are things I need to submit to. I don't have absolute freedom to go and do whatever I want, and that's actually okay. Learning to work within that, and to trust that the Lord was in that too, was part of the same lesson.
Releasing the outcome — of the team, of the cell, of my own plans — was what made room for what came next.
Toiling The Soil Again
The Lord brought a whole new mix of people. A completely different mix.
There's someone in the group now who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram. I remember hearing that and thinking: my goodness me. There's a missionary couple who do work in Batam, Indonesia. And then others, each with their own story, their own world, their own pace. We're going back through the beginning material together, and honestly — it's the people you take through it that makes you want to go through it again. Seeing someone encounter these things for the first time, watching the Lord stir something in them, you think: yes, this is worth doing again.
But I'd be dishonest if I said it didn't feel slow. We're halfway through the year and I'm still watching and waiting for the team to really form. People have a lot going on. The Lord works in his timing, and my job is to stay in step with that — trusting his timing over mine.
I keep coming back to this image of the farmer. After the harvest comes in, they don't immediately sow again — they have to toil the soil first, work it, get it ready. That's a season of its own, and it looks like nothing is happening. The farmer knows this season has its own work in it. You'd love it if it were always harvest time — just reaping, celebrating, seeing the fruit. But even farmers know that the cycle turns.
I'm learning to call this season by its right name.
Rejoice Always — Even Now
The word the Lord gave me for this year was renewal.
A renewing of my heart, my love for him, my vision for what I'm called to. And in that quieter season — with the team thinner, the pace slower, more time with the Lord than I'd had in a while — he started surfacing something I'd been carrying underneath all the busyness. My pattern: when things are going well, I get very excited. When they're not going well, I get easily discouraged. And the Lord was saying to me, gently, persistently: this cycle is something you're going to have to work through.
Then Philippians 4:4 arrived. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I say rejoice. I've sung that verse. I've heard it preached. I've heard it quoted in rooms full of people who were having a good year. But this time round it landed differently, in a different place. The question it was asking me was real: if I genuinely go back to square one, start all over again, rebuild from the beginning — can I rejoice in that? Can I say yes, Lord, and mean it?
I wouldn't say I'm 100% there yet. But definitely more than 50.
Getting practical
As you think about God's vision for your city and/or affinity group:
Read Philippians 4:4–7. Paul writes "rejoice always" from prison — not from a place of ease, but from a place of constraint and uncertainty. What does it mean to hold that command in a season that doesn't feel like rejoicing?
Where in your current ministry or team-building are you feeling the pull toward discouragement? What would it mean to name that honestly — and then release the outcome to the Lord?
Cze-Ee describes her pattern: excited when things go well, discouraged when they don't. What is your own pattern — and what does the Lord seem to be asking of you in the slower seasons?
C Lee is happily married with three sons. She leads a cell group based in a church setting and volunteers in a school community with a focus to support parents of children with educational needs. Her heart is for making disciples to reach the lost and broken.
© 2026 C Lee. All rights reserved.