Gareth Evans opens Soar Like the Eagle with a picture the prophet Isaiah loved: the everlasting God renewing the strength of those who wait on him, so that “they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31). His conviction is simple and searching — God means every one of his people to fly like that, high above the mundane, riding the wind of the Spirit. Yet most believers, Evans says, have never learned to leave the nest. This short, pastoral book diagnoses why, and then lays out six steps by which any Christian can reach the destiny God planned for them.

The eagle and the farmyard chicken

The book takes its title and its central image from Isaiah 40:28–31 and Psalm 103:1–5, where David blesses the Lord who satisfies his mouth with good things “so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” Evans, a Welshman who spent much of his ministry travelling, tells of standing on a hilltop on an island off the coast of Canada as six or seven eagles swooped past his outstretched hands. What struck him was the effortlessness of it — no busy flapping, just wings set to the rising air. That, he argues, is the life God intends: not strain, but soaring.

Against this he sets a blunt contrast. Our churches, he writes, are full of believers who are more like the farmyard chicken than the soaring eagle — content to cluck and peck for grains of blessing among the church’s programs, digesting the latest Sunday-morning pulpit meal and never once rising on the wind. Some have tried to fly, stepped out in faith, and come crashing back to earth in disappointment. The promise of the book is that this is not how it has to be.

It is God’s desire that His people become all they should be — as eagles soaring into heavenly places with Him.Gareth Evans

Evans lingers over one detail in the Hebrew. The phrase “wait upon the Lord,” he notes, carries the sense of being entwined with him — closer to “abide in” than to passive waiting. Soaring is not something we manufacture; it is what happens when a life is bound to God and lifted by his Spirit.

Why so many never leave the nest

Before offering the way up, Evans is honest about what keeps believers grounded. He names four reasons, and they are worth sitting with, because most of us will recognise ourselves somewhere in them.

First, many are born wounded. New birth makes our spirits alive to God at once, but the soul’s old wounds — rejection, fear, insecurity, abandonment — are healed gradually, through the ongoing work of sanctification. Until those wounds are faced, Evans says, our flying will be limited; Satan is quick to press on an old bruise whenever we attempt anything for God. (It is a theme he develops further in his companion book on inner healing.)

Second, some have made decisions against God’s pattern of life — being unequally yoked, carrying debt that quietly enslaves, nursing unforgiveness and offence. Some of these can be reversed and must be; others cannot, but God still meets us where we are. Evans cites the writer to the Hebrews: lay aside every weight, and the sin that so easily entangles, and run the race with patience.

Third, many have never understood that they should be flying at all. They have grown so used to a comfortable, undemanding faith that they no longer expect to hear the Shepherd’s voice or long for the abundant life Jesus promised. Evans remembers that Evan Roberts, the young man God used in the Welsh revival of 1904, learned to soar by praying, “Lord, bend me, bend me lower.”

Fourth — and this is the sharpest of his charges — some have simply had their wings clipped. Too many leaders, he writes, run churches like the organisations of the world, where power flows from the top down and the operative word is control. But a pastor’s calling, drawn straight from Ephesians 4, is to equip the saints for the work of ministry — to teach people to fly, not to keep them safe and quiet in the nest.

I am called to make disciples, not build bigger nests!Gareth Evans

Six steps to your destiny

The heart of the book is a path to the abundant life, and Evans hangs it on a single Old Testament story — the widow and the oil in 2 Kings 4:1–7. A prophet’s widow is about to lose her sons to her creditors. Elisha asks what she has in the house; “nothing,” she says, “except a small bottle of oil.” From that small bottle, poured out in obedience, God fills every borrowed vessel she can gather, enough to clear her debts and live on. In her story Evans finds six movements that carry any believer from despair into destiny:

  1. Vision. The widow could see only her circumstances. Two men look through the same prison bars, Evans writes; one sees the mud, the other sees the stars. He calls us to three looks — the inward look that knows who we are in Christ, the outward look that is not surprised by a broken world, and the upward look that, like Elisha’s servant at Dothan, sees the hills full of the horses and chariots of God (2 Kings 6:17).
  2. Burden. A burden that is truly from God will rob you of sleep and energise you into action — and, paradoxically, it will be light. Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden light (Matthew 11:28–30); Evans is convinced that the pastors who burn out are usually carrying a load God never gave them. Bear one another’s burdens of grief (Galatians 6:2), yes — but let each carry his own ministry burden (Galatians 6:5), rather than laying it on others.
  3. Gifting. “What is that in your hand?” God asked Moses, and a shepherd’s staff was enough (Exodus 4:2). God always puts in our hand what we need to carry his burden. You should define your own burden, Evans advises, but let others help you name your gift.
  4. Ministry. The widow was given a task that looked foolish — gather the empty pots. Jesus, knowing all things were in his hands, rose from supper and washed feet (John 13:3–4). Ministry is service, and Evans insists it is not the private property of the clergy: your burden you define, your gifts your friends confirm, but your ministry the church leadership should recognise and set free.
  5. Anointing. As the oil was poured, it multiplied. Anointing, for Evans, is God putting his seal on a work so that there is an eternal impact no human effort could engineer — “to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7).
  6. Flying. The widow paid her debts and lived free. That freedom — blessed, and a blessing to her neighbours — is what it means to soar.

Underneath all six runs the same principle Evans draws from the story of the ark in 1 Samuel: when you want to do God’s work, you must do it God’s way. God has set gifts and ministries in the church by his own appointment — “we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us” (Romans 12:6) — and he will not underwrite the plans we improvise in place of his.

Anointing, not charisma

One of the book’s recurring warnings is that the church too often mistakes talent for anointing. There are large ministries, Evans observes, built on a leader’s charisma or business sense rather than on the gift of the Spirit — men who would have been just as successful running a company. He points instead to the pattern of Jesus himself, who, though filled with the Spirit from birth, would not begin his ministry until the Spirit came upon him and he could say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4:18). Paul’s command is that we keep on being filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18); the anointing that empowers a ministry, Evans distinguishes, is a further grace that rests upon those serving where God has actually placed them.

His most memorable illustration is a parable of an old man at a church gathering. A famous actor recites the twenty-third psalm to warm applause; then a plain old believer repeats the same words, and the room falls silent, eyes wet. The actor asks his secret. “You know the psalm,” the old man replies, “but I know the Shepherd.” That, says Evans, is the whole secret of anointing — not technique, but being yoked to the Shepherd and carrying his burden with him.

Releasing and being released

The closing chapters turn the book into something unusually practical, and here its burden becomes plain: Evans wants pastors to release their people, and believers to seek release, into the ministries God has for them. He returns again and again to the mother eagle, who stirs the nest and nudges the eaglet off the edge, then swoops beneath it and bears it up — over and over — until the young bird feels the wind hold its own wings. That, he says, is a leader’s work: not to keep the young safe in the nest, but to launch them, catch them when they fall, and stay near until they can soar.

For leaders, he suggests every elders’ meeting should ask two questions — what is God saying, and who among us is ready to be released? He even sketches a written “ministry covenant” that names a person’s burden, the authority delegated to them, and the accountability that goes with it, so that releasing people is deliberate rather than accidental. For the believer who senses a burden and no way to carry it, he gives a plain sequence: clarify the burden, test yourself honestly, understand your church’s leadership, put your vision in writing, and work toward release with real accountability — willing to hear “no” as well as “yes.” Only if leaders refuse the whole task of equipping, he says, should you step out on your own — and even then, never as a lone ranger, but gathered around by wise, mature counsel.

All I had done was release an eagle to fly!Gareth Evans

How to read it

Come to Soar Like the Eagle as what it is: a warm, direct, story-filled book by a working pastor who has spent his life among young believers and hurting ministers on several continents. It is short, and its chapters build — the eagle picture, the four grounded reasons, the six steps, and then the practical work of releasing and being released. Read it with a pen. When Evans asks what your burden is, or what is in your hand, stop and answer him. The appendices on authority, accountability, and delegation reward a slow read for anyone who leads.

Read it, too, for its honesty about the wounds believers carry and the way churches can clip the very wings they were meant to strengthen. It is a book for the tired pastor as much as for the restless young disciple — a call to stop pecking in the farmyard and to trust the God who renews our strength like the eagle’s. You were made to soar; this book is a friendly, believing nudge toward the edge of the nest.