Make It Costly

If you know me, you know I'm not a big fan of conferences. I've been to too many, and their value is often questionable.

This past week, I attended a conference in London and sat in on four breakout sessions led by Andy Crouch. After the first one, I messaged my wife to tell her it might be the best workshop I'd ever attended. By the fourth session, I had to revise that verdict: it was even better than the first one. In fact, all four were exceptional and will stay with me for a long time.

What made them so good was that they were the fruit of long, sustained thinking at a conceptual level, then carefully translated and applied to everyday life. There was little fluff. Each session was dense, substantive, and clearly the result of hard thinking and many hours of work. During the fourth breakout, Andy ran out of time and tried to wrap things up, but the four hundred or so people in the room wouldn't let him. They kept him going well past his allotted time just to hear the rest of what he had to say.

I kept thinking about that afterward. It's never been easier to do half a job and pass it off as acceptable. AI-generated content is everywhere, and most of us are talented enough to wing it, trusting that people won't notice. But when you encounter something that is the product of costly work, it's unmistakable. The best work takes time. It resists shortcuts. It emerges from sustained effort and practice, and that's what makes it so much more valuable than anything quick and convenient.

In the coming years, we're going to face a flood of cheap ministry. There are so many shortcuts to producing work that's almost good enough, but falls short of what it should be and what people deserve. As content gets cheaper and easier to make, we need to do the opposite: put in hard work and real thought.

This isn't only about workshops, writing, or sermons. It's everywhere. Zoom calls are easy and have their place. On the other hand, face-to-face meetings are inconvenient, time-consuming, and costly, and so much better. Caring for people at a surface level is quick and clean. Truly loving others, investing in them, praying for them is costly, inconvenient, sometimes frustrating, and so much better.

Of course, there’s a place for shortcuts and for using artificial intelligence. The less significant something is, the more these tools can help, and we should feel free to use them there. I'm genuinely grateful for technologies that make relatively unimportant things easier. But for the things that truly matter, pay the price. It's worth it.

You can get by with shortcuts. But you don't really want to. Costly work will increasingly stand out in a world drowning in cheap substitutes. So pay the price. Make it costly. Choose inconvenience on purpose. Do the hard work when it matters, even when it's slow and frustrating, and you will have something worth saying in a world full of noise.