When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.

My 30th birthday is coming up in the next few months and it’s caused me to reflect on something I think is pretty prevalent among pastors my age (and perhaps just people in general, but I’m seeing it more and more in pastors). Because of our uber-connected digital world, we have the privilege of hearing more and more stories of people leading churches or planting churches and their successes and failures.

Mostly, however, we gravitate towards the success stories. This seems pretty natural, right?

Now I’ve noticed there is something strange that happens with some of these stories. There are a few “success” stories that most people seem to know and a certain mythos develops around them. They become ingrained in our brain in very subtle ways and I think we consciously and unconsciously reference them. Rob Bell starts Mars Hill and 1500 people show up the first week with no advertising. Mark Driscoll starts a Mars Hill of his own and finds wild success. Bill Hybels has 5 couples all throw their credit cards on a table and max them out to start Willow Creek. Andy Stanley. Steven Furtick. Perry Noble.

Now what I’ve been thinking about is how these stories, which most pastors within evangelical culture have heard, are shaping the way we are thinking and behaving.

Here’s what I mean: Most of these pastors saw very quick, massive and unprecedented (and I’d suggest unreproducible) growth at the outset (in the sense that it was the right message, the right atmosphere, the right spiritual climate, the right voice, at the right time. Go anywhere else at a different time and it wouldn’t happened again). And within three years, these guys were overnight successes.

And for the most part…they were all around the age of 30. Some a little younger, some a little older, all having conquered the their respective worlds.

Just like Alexander the Great.

(hence why I’ve started to refer to this as the Alexander Syndrome)

My contention is that because these kinds of stories have become cultural norms in our pastoral, evangelical sub-culture, we’ve placed certain expectations on ourselves, our churches and our people to get our churches to have these kinds of stories by the time we’ve reached a certain age. And if we’ve passed that age…we feel like we’re “behind.”

In fact, I’ve got several friends who are all around the age of 30 or a little older who are just getting started leading something substantial within a church, it’s still “small” (whatever that means), and have said, “I don’t know…I just feel…behind…like everyone’s ahead of me.” For me, I know I’ve fought this in the last 5 years. I don’t know that I ever said it out loud or even consciously thought it, but one day, I caught myself feeling like I was on some sort of invisible timetable and it all linked back to these stories.

I think it’s about the Alexander Sydrome.

I think we’ve come to believe that if our churches or whatever we’re leading don’t ‘POP’ like these kinds of stories, somehow we are failing, we’re behind and we’ve got work harder, press harder, make up lost ground.

More pressure. More frenetic living. More stress.

(***I’m choosing not to even touch the fact that our soul responsibility is to be obedient and to leave outcomes in God’s hands.)

Over and over I’m starting to see this in younger pastors. This, “I’ve got to make my mark and conquer the church world by the time I’m 30″ kind of thinking. And I think we’re foolish if we don’t think this is forming us spiritually and shaping the way we lead and behave. If I’m right, it has to be shaping us like that.

How about you? Are you seeing this? Am I sitting alone on this one?