Month: May 2014

Pastor, do you need a place to heal?

I did.

And when I was at my lowest place in pastoral ministry, my church did a very good thing. They sent my wife and me to Marble Retreat.

Marble Retreat is an eight-day intensive program for hurting church leaders located 8,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. My wife and I went there in December, 2000. The program takes just four ministry couples at a time. Each couple gets a room in this amazing, beautiful lodge. Each day’s schedule includes free time, group therapy, and individual therapy led by professional Christian counselors. My wife and I were blessed to be there when Dr. and Mrs. Louis McBurney led the therapy sessions. Louis and Melissa founded Marble Retreat in 1974. Dr. McBurney is now at home with the Lord.

imagesThe three goals of Marble Retreat are:

  • To allow each participant to safely unburden the hurts and pressures of life and ministry.
  • To assist each person to understand him/herself more completely as their life patterns have developed.
  • To encourage and enable development of new levels of self-acceptance as well as more effective relational skills.

I went to Marble wondering how in the world I would survive in ministry. I was confused, angry, and humiliated. I felt like a failure. But Marble Retreat gave me renewed hope that my life of ministry was not over. I returned to my church with a much better grip on my identity in Christ, my giftedness for ministry, and my next steps. It was due to my experience at Marble Retreat that I took a new direction as a pastor. Here I am fourteen years later, still reaping the benefits of the decisions my wife and I made at Marble. Oh, and our marriage was restored as well.

Another benefit of Marble Retreat is the friendships you make. I still keep in touch with two of the three couples we met at Marble. One couple had just lost their son in a tragic car accident. One of the other pastors had just been booted out of his church because of pornography addiction. The other couple was in a similar crisis. As for me, I was just ready to quit.

All eight of us were broken when we arrived. We were still broken at the end of the program, but the pieces were beginning to be put back together again.

Please. If you’re a hurting church leader, check out Marble Retreat. Scholarship aid is available. Go.

 

 

A new way of seeing your ministry

It was timeimages to go to the optometrist again. My glasses were scratched and I wanted some new frames. So I made an appointment, took my seat in the exam room, and looked into that periscope gizmo. Uh oh. “You need a new prescription,” the doctor said. My “far” vision was still pretty good, but my “near” vision was worse than ever.

Which reminds me: Things can look really blurry when they’re up close.

That’s why church leaders often need to get away from the day-to-day grind of church ministry. We need to step back, relax, get a new way of seeing, and listen to God. Jesus did it. Who are we to think we don’t need to “withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16)?

Wayne Cordeiro wrote a helpful book called Leading on Empty. The subtitle is “Refilling Your Tank and Renewing Your Passion.” Cordeiro is the pastor of a big church in Hawaii. The book tells about his experience with burnout and recovery. It’s also a clarion call to make sure we finish well. In order to do that, we need a new way of seeing ministry.

Here’s a good sound bite from the book: “Do the things only you can do.”

Cordeiro says that 85% of what we do, anyone can do. With a little training, most people could do another 10% of what we do. But unfortunately, because we are insecure or refuse to delegate or are just undisciplined, many of us give our time and attention to that 95%, and neglect the 5% that only we can do. It’s that “crucial 5%” that God will one day hold us accountable for.

Think about your ministry and ponder these questions:

  • What is it that only you can do?
  • What is your unique contribution to the spiritual growth of others?
  • What do you love to do?
  • What makes you angry?
  • What brings you joy in ministry?
  • If you weren’t around, what would people miss out on?
  • What are you best at?
  • What do people say they appreciate the most about you?

Questions like these can help you identify the things that only you can do. Devote yourself to those things.

The apostle Paul knew his unique calling. “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” he said (1 Cor. 9:16). Paul told Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God” that was in him (2 Tim. 1:6). “Do not neglect the gift you have,” he said (1 Tim. 4:14). In other words, do the things only you can do, young Timothy.

How would you complete this sentence? “Woe to me if I do not ________!”

Obviously, we all have to do things that lie outside our job description from time to time. But Wayne Cordeiro is right. Most of us church leaders and pastors need a new way of seeing. We can’t–we shouldn’t–do it all. If we try to do it all, we’ll wind up leading on empty.

What has helped you focus your time and energy on things only you can do?

I’m writing a book, and you can help

So what’s my book about?

Here’s the way I’ve pitched it to an agent: Being a pastor is sort of like living on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi or Louisiana. There’s always the danger of a ministry-killing catastrophe. Churches are often unsafe places for ministers. Churches are filled with sinners, and I’m one of them. Many pastors walk into a church with a naïveté about the danger of what they do every day. They are vulnerable to difficult people, unresolved conflict, incompatible visions, hidden agendas, and sin–their own and that of others.

I endured five years of conflict and crisis in a church (see My Story). I went into that church unprepared. I should have asked harder questions. I should have taken more time to build trust. I should have been more careful and compassionate about introducing change. Fellow leaders should have been more cooperative and forgiving. It was a perfect storm, a Category 5 hurricane in the making. When the storm came, I should have been more prayerful, less accommodating to the wishes of others, more loving, patient, and honest. The conflict eventually exploded in a “splant” (that’s a cross between a split and a church plant) that hurt my family and me and many other people. It threatened to end my career as a pastor and seriously damage my marriage.

But through that catastrophe, I learned valuable lessons. I moved on, recovered a love for the church, and eventually returned to the role of lead pastor elsewhere. In my book I will reflect on my experience and share the lessons learned. I hope to redeem the experience by helping other pastors recognize, negotiate, and redeem their own ministry hurricanes. I will also share anecdotes I collect from other pastors. Unfortunately, there are many stories out there to share.

In fact, that’s where you come in. You may have experienced or witnessed a ministry hurricane yourself. If so, may I interview you? Or can you put your story in writing and send it to me? I plan to keep all stories anonymous and will change the names of people and places.

Obviously, my book will be aimed at pastors, but people in a variety of ministry settings will be able to relate to it. My goal is to help people in ministry recognize the signs of an impending catastrophe, limit its damage, learn its lessons, and live with gospel optimism for the future.

Leading with a Limp

Get hold of Dan Allender‘s book, Leading with a Limp. It’s unlike most other books on leadership. Allender’s thesis right there on page 2 is “to the degree you face and name and deal with your failures as a leader, to that same extent you will create an environment conducive to growing and retaining productive and committed colleagues.”

Wait a minute… I thought leadership was about know-how, competence, expertise, control!

No, says Dan Allender. In this book he calls us as leaders to be willing to expose and dismantle our sins and shortcomings out in the open, where our colleagues and employees can see us for who we really are. Put another way, we leaders are supposed to be the chief repenters.

Allender spells out five challenges every leader faces: crisis, complexity, betrayal, loneliness, and weariness. He explains that there are both ineffective and effective responses to each of those challenges. Drawing from both personal experiences and Biblical stories, Allender calls on leaders to move into the chaos of each challenge with courage. But the kind of courage we must exercise is paradoxically the kind that admits weakness. “You are the strongest when you are weak, and you are the most courageous when you are broken.”

If you’re looking for a book that will tell you the five secrets to success or the seven steps to taking your organization to the next level, Leading with a Limp is not it. But if you’re a discouraged leader who wonders whether God can use you, a mother or father who thinks you’re the only parent in the world who doesn’t know what to do next, or a church leader who wants to see your church grow as a gospel community, this would be a great read. It certainly encouraged me.

What books have you found helpful for surviving in ministry?

The ordinary

We used to have a little dog named Dabo. We named him after Dabo Swinney, the head coach of the Clemson Tigers football team. Dabo (the dog) was a Bichon Frise. Not a yapper, thankfully, and lots of fun. He never met a stranger, and he especially adored kids. We ended up “adopting” him out to our daughter’s family in Mississippi. They’re fans of Florida State so, as you may guess, they renamed our dog Jimbo (after Jimbo Fisher). Yes, Jimbo’s the head coach of the FSU football team. At least our dog is still in the ACC.

Dabo regularly taught me lessons. One was not to be in a hurry. Whenever I took him outside to go to the bathroom, he would just kind of wander aimlessly around the yard, taking his fool time, smelling everything, chasing lizards, looking around, and sniffing the air. Finally he would get down to business.

From Dabo I learned enjoyment of the ordinary. On sunny afternoons I would go outside with Dabo and he would find a spot in the backyard and just…sit. I’d say, “Let’s go over here, Dabo.” And he’d glance at me, turn away, and…lie down in the grass. It’s like he was saying, “Umm, I don’t think so. Why are you in a hurry? Don’t you want to just stay here a few minutes and feel the sunshine?” I couldn’t resist. So I’d walk over, plop myself down next to Dabo, stroke his back, and enjoy the ordinary.

I hate to confess this, but I apparently needed a dog to teach me this lesson. Otherwise I don’t know if I’d ever stop and feel the sunshine on my face.

I’m reading Zack Eswine’s book for pastors, titled Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry As a Human Being. It’s a wonderful but convicting book about enjoying the ordinary. He says we ministers are, generally speaking, driven people. We are always hankering after some “significant” work, chasing some “God-sized” dream, trying to change the world, thinking that we have to move on to some exotic place where we can “make a difference.” Problem is, we are not God, though we secretly fancy ourselves to be. We are not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. We are actually pretty much…a mess. And anyway, God usually chooses to work through ordinary people in ordinary places.

He who called you to where you are declares that you needn’t repent of being in one place at one time. You needn’t repent of doing only a long, small work in an extraordinary but unknown place. Standing long in one place allows the roots to deepen.

I wish I’d read Eswine’s book years ago when, as a young pastor, I felt “called” away from my small, rural church to a city I knew nothing about but where, I thought, I would really make a difference for the kingdom. I don’t know, maybe I was called there. But looking back from Dabo’s perspective, maybe I was in too much of a hurry.

The prophet Jeremiah told his friend and secretary Baruch, “Should you then seek great things for yourself? Seek them not” (Jeremiah 45:5).

That’s what I heard Dabo saying to me in the backyard on sunny afternoons. Standing long in one place allows the roots to deepen.