A church planter’s reading of D. Michael Clary’s Loser Theology.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned to feel more spiritual when things are going badly.
I hear it in coaching calls. A pastor or church planter tells me attendance is flat, and the core group is tired. Then he says, “But I guess that’s where God wants me. Paul had it worse.” He means it as faith. It functions as permission to stop asking hard questions about the work.
D. Michael Clary calls that reflex Loser Theology.
Who Is Michael Clary?
Clary planted Christ the King Church in the inner city of Cincinnati, gathering a core group in 2008 and launching in 2010. The church later relocated across the river to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, where he still serves as lead pastor. He holds an M.Div. from Southern Seminary, hosts two podcasts, and wrote God’s Good Design, a guide to human sexuality. Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth is his second book, released in August 2026.
The Diagnosis
Clary’s target is not the suffering Christian. It is a way of thinking that treats suffering as the proof of faithfulness. Scripture tells us how to endure loss. It does not tell us to seek loss. When the comfort verses become a strategy, retreat starts to look like humility and passivity starts to look like trust. A shrinking church opens the Psalms and feels sanctified. A growing church feels guilty.
He aims this at some of the most influential voices in gospel-centered evangelicalism, including a former seminary professor of his who now writes for a national audience and a well-known urban church planter whose approach shaped a generation of planting networks. He argues that their teaching shrank the gospel to the interior life and taught conservative Christians, specifically, to lay down influence while the culture advanced. You can read the book and weigh the names for yourself. What I want to hand our planters is his remedy.
Twelve Ways Not to Be a Loser
The second half of the book builds what Clary calls high-agency Christianity, anchored in the parable of the minas. The third servant was not condemned for losing money. He was condemned for burying what he was given and trying nothing. Clary closes with twelve disciplines. I have grouped them the way I would walk a planter through them.
Start with the heart. Fear God, not man. Most passivity is fear with a theological vocabulary. Know thyself. A planter who cannot name his own patterns of avoidance will baptize them. Be meek, not weak. Meekness is strength under restraint. Moses was called the meekest man on earth, and no one mistook him for weak.
Own your field. Reject victimhood. Your city is hard. So was Corinth. Take responsibility. The numbers in your church are not someone else’s problem. Honor the ordinary. Clary writes that the man who masters the ordinary becomes useful in the extraordinary. Most of planting is ordinary.
Decide and move. Grow in wisdom. Stop over-spiritualizing big decisions. Waiting for a sign is often a way of not deciding. Do something you don’t have to do. This is the heart of the book. Faithfulness is found in the steps you take because you love God, not in the sins you avoid.
Finish strong. Pursue self-control. Do all things with excellence. Take Spirit-filled risks. Clary says there is abundant grace for Christians who take a Spirit-filled risk and fall flat. There is no such promise for the man who never stepped out.
Read the list again and ask which three you would skip if you could. That is probably where you may want to focus your work.
A Word to the Missionary With Little Fruit
On ABWE’s The Missions Show, Alex Kocman and Scott Dunford pressed Clary on the worker who has labored fifteen years in a Muslim context with two converts. His answer was pastoral. That man is being faithful, and God counts labor that never appears in a report. Then he added the warning: do not make failure the standard you live up to. Keep pursuing the converts. Keep trying things.
Fruitfulness and faithfulness are not the same word. A man can hide inside the second to avoid examining the first. Not everyone is called to the hardest place. Clary learned that when a bullet came through his daughter’s bedroom window in the neighborhood he chose because it was hard. But everyone who is sent is called to be in motion. In the Journey, we ask every pastor and every planter one question: what does God want? Not what looks most radical. Not what keeps the peace. What does he want you to do with the minas in your hand?
Go Listen
The Missions Show conversation that prompted this article is worth your thirty minutes. Alex and Scott ask the questions missionaries actually face, and Clary answers like a pastor. Find it at abwe.org: Should Christians Be Losers? Feat. D. Michael Clary.
The book is available on Amazon.
