Fifteen years ago, Josh Turner started losing friends in ministry. Some to affairs. Some to addiction. Some to burnout. Some to suicide. He was a young pastor at a megachurch, and one question wouldn’t leave him alone.
What are guys building in their twenties and thirties that is consuming them in their forties and fifties?
That question became a ministry.
Prehab, Not Rehab
Today, Josh leads the 10Ten Project, a year-long resilience program for pastors. The name comes from Ecclesiastes 10:10.
“If the axe is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed, but skill will bring success.”
The program is grounded in more than twenty years of research from Notre Dame, Biola, Harvard, and Baylor on how people flourish in their work and lives.
When Josh and his team looked at what was available to pastors, they found two options.
Three- to five-day adventure trips that gave guys a brief reprieve.
Or rehab facilities for pastors who had already gone off the rails.
Almost nothing proactive in between.
So Josh built it.
10 Ten runs for twelve months. Ten pastors per cohort. One trained coach is assigned to each group.
The year begins with a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, includes a soul-care intensive at the six-month mark with mental-health therapists embedded in the week, and ends with a culminating hog-hunting retreat in South Texas.
Between trips, pastors work through field guides, take assessments that measure resilience and hope, and learn ancient spiritual practices most pastors were never taught.
Josh calls it prehab. Help a pastor become healthy before a crisis hits, and you protect his family and the church he leads. The 105 pastors who have completed the program so far represent 1.5 million people in their churches.
How Generous Life Came In
Josh’s introduction to Generous Life came through an invitation he didn’t fully understand at the time. He was invited on a trip and shared the story of 10Ten and the urgent need behind it.
The men on that trip changed the trajectory of his ministry.
They challenged him to value himself and the work he had been called to do. They told him he was downplaying his gift. They pushed him to put together a real budget — one that would actually sustain 10Ten and the pastors it serves — and then to come back and give them the opportunity to invest in it.
Josh did. The program grew, the board strengthened, and Josh stepped into the work more fully than he ever had before.
What Josh Names First
When Josh talks about what Generous Life has meant to 10Ten, he points first to the men he has come to know. The financial partnership has mattered. The relationships have mattered more.
After meeting Josh on a Generous Life ski trip, one of the men paid for his brother to go through 10Ten and later spent a week setting up meetings for him in his hometown. Texts come in from Generous Life friends asking how Josh is doing, not how the program is doing.
“Most of the calls I get are crisis calls,” Josh said. “Pastors being removed. Pastors heading to rehab. And then there are guys from Generous Life who call just to check in.”
In a vocation where men are often measured by what they produce, Josh has found something rarer through this community. Friends who care about who he is, not what he runs.
What’s Ahead
10Ten is expanding. With Harvard and Baylor, Josh’s team is building a parallel year-long track for Christian business leaders. With Professional Athlete Outreach, they’re building a track for Christian professional athletes, many of whom retire in their thirties and lose the identity that has shaped them since childhood.
The model scales through coaches and curriculum, not through Josh himself. With the right financial support, the team can add more lodges and train more cohorts. The vision is to give more leaders the tools to deal with what is inside them before it deals with them.
“We give leaders a safe place to say dangerous things,” Josh said. “Most guys don’t have that anywhere.”
Generous Life is a community where that kind of safety has begun to take root, and where Josh’s story keeps reminding us what generosity makes possible when it shows up as friendship first.