The conversations that will define your partnership are the ones nobody's forced you to have.
Three days at the lake. A handful of LP/XP pairs. Space to have them on purpose — while it's still your choice, not a crisis.
3 days · Lakehouse setting · A few pairs · June 2026
You can't read your way into a better working relationship.
Most leaders go to the same conferences. Read the same books. Come home with the same frameworks. And then step into the most consequential working relationship of their ministry — and figure it out on the fly.
You don't avoid the hard conversations because you're unhealthy. You avoid them because there's no space for them, no structure for them, and no reason to force them — yet.
So things stay mostly fine. Until they're not. And by then, the patterns are already set.
The relationship didn't break. It just never got built on purpose.
This is the most consequential partnership in your church — not because of the org chart, but because of the ripple effect. Every gap between you gets felt by your team, compensated for by your staff, and quietly baked into your culture.
Most of the time, the issue isn't disagreement. It's assumption.
Not a conference. Not a curriculum.
A room where the right questions get asked — and you don't leave until they're answered. No stage, no pretending everything's fine, no experts telling you how to run your church.
A conference with sessions you'll forget by Thursday
A playbook for how every church should work
A crisis intervention
For people who are already in trouble
Intentional space to define the partnership before it defines you
The conversations that don't happen on their own
Premarital counseling for a working partnership
For people who want to start — or restart — well
The measure of a good session isn't that you learned something. It's that you said something to each other you'd never said before.
Five conversations. In a specific order. For a reason.
The retreat moves from identity → function → system → risk → sustainability. That's not a workshop. That's a real progression.
Why you're different — and why that's the point
You didn't end up different by accident. The relationship only works because you are. This is where you stop managing the tension and start using it. Not personality labels — real clarity on where you each push, where you resist, and whether you're appreciating that or fighting it.
Who actually decides what
Most friction isn't personality. It's unclear authority. You'll name it out loud — where you each have full autonomy, where you defer, and what you do when you're stuck. The question isn't theoretical. It's yours.
The system around you
Your relationship doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your team structure, your board dynamics, and who's actually in the room shapes everything you do together. This is where you get honest about what's working and what isn't — and identify one thing you can change in the next 30 days.
What could break you
This is the heart of the retreat. Blind spots. Failure modes. What it looks like when one of you is "off" — and whether the other one actually has permission to say something. Loyalty gets redefined here: not as agreement, but as being genuinely for each other's best version.
How you sustain it
Clarity fades without structure. You'll leave with defined rhythms, clear communication lanes, and a shared answer to the question most pairs never ask out loud: how much do we actually need from each other?
Built for the first two years.
The longer you wait, the more the relationship defines itself rather than you defining it. If you're in the first two years together, this is for you. If you're still in the first six months — even better.
If you're a year in and realizing you never had the right conversations, it's not too late. It's just more urgent.
- A new XP stepping into a long-tenured lead pastor's world
- A succession where one leader inherited dynamics the other team built
- Churches crossing the 800–2,000 mark, scaling for the first time
- A long-tenured pair who knows they missed the foundation — and is ready to go back and get it
Especially in churches where growth is creating complexity, roles are getting blurry, and the stakes are rising.
A note on the ripple effect. When an LP and XP invest intentionally in their own working relationship, they don't just improve things between them — they set the standard for every relationship on the team below them. The next hire gets a better onboarding conversation. The executive team starts having the conversations that were never formally structured. The retreat doesn't just build one relationship. It builds a culture of relational intentionality that propagates through the rest of the staff.
Led by Tim Harlow.
Tim spent more than 40 years in ministry, most of them building Parkview Christian Church in the Chicago suburbs into one of the largest churches in the Midwest — through explosive growth, a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit cities in the country, building campaigns in the tens of millions, and the kind of staff complexity that comes with hiring and leading more than a hundred people over time. Thousands of baptisms. More hard conversations than he can count. More stories than he has time to tell.
He's now in the season of handing that hard-won wisdom to the leaders coming up behind him — passing the wisdom rather than the wounds.
He's not bringing you a theory. He's building a space he wishes someone had built for him.
Tim leads the room alongside Tommy Carreras, who designed the retreat's facilitation arc and guides the conversations in it. Tommy coaches discipleship, adult ministry, and connections pastors on building systems and culture inside fast-growing churches, and brings a facilitator's training as an Intentional Churches Activator, grief educator, and relapse prevention coach. His job in the room is to draw the right things out at the right moments — so the days stay rooted in conversation, not lecture.
Every other investment your church makes depends on getting this relationship right.
Staff hires, building campaigns, growth initiatives — all of it runs through this partnership. This is the investment that protects everything else.
The full 3-day residential retreat. All facilitated sessions and materials included.
A small group by design — just a few pairs. When it's full, it's full.
Most partnerships don't fail because they lack vision.
They fail because two leaders never stopped long enough to define how they'd lead it together.
3 days · Lakehouse setting · A few pairs · June 2026 · $1,500/pair
Reach out directly to express interest or ask questions.