Loving Ministry When It Doesn’t Love You Back
One of the ongoing challenges of ministry, particularly occupational ministry, is taking up the work God gives us to do without allowing it to become the primary driver of our identity. We all know the temptation, and gravitational pull on our hearts, to feel less valuable when things are going…
Avoiding Burnout Through Strategic Rest
SAM, A PASTOR Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine. Let’s call him “Sam.” Sam, a pastor with 30 years of service said to me one day, “John, I’m so tired.” I understood him completely in that moment, and I knew he needed deep rest. My…
Four Key Practices For Developing Emotional Health
Pastors and ministry leaders serve in roles that require high levels of emotional intelligence (EQ) and interpersonal skills. As spiritual leaders, they must navigate complex emotional situations, provide emotional support to others, and manage their own emotional reactions to challenging circumstances. This is a time of abundant information (and misinformation),…
Is Missions The PR Department of The Church?
What is the mission of God? And how should that impact our vision of missions in the local church? Sometimes we talk about missions as a program or like it’s the PR department of the church. But what if the foundation of missions is the mission of God Himself? What…
Leading While Suffering
There are only a few moments in our lives when our understanding and role as leaders change dramatically. The first for me was being inducted into my first pastoral position at the young age of 23. The next came when I became a husband at the age of 25, followed…
Do You Compete or Complete?
Everything I touch dies. Not people of course! That would make for a tragic and inefficient ministry. But over the course of the past four years, I have watched every small green thing I have planted in our yard die. It wasn’t until I was praying with another local area…
What Our Soul Needs
As followers of Jesus Christ, we can find ourselves living life with great tension. Pressures that hit us from multiple directions. They seem to be tied to our past decisions, current conditions, and future concerns. They manifest in the weight of the bountiful blessings of God or the harvest of…
Stuck Happens
I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania and recently we buried my Pap at the tiny chapel on the edge of his farm where he lived until he was 93 years old. Making the drive home was nostalgic. Miles and miles of country road twisting and turning through the wild…
Scarcity Problems
About what part of your life are you most tempted to think, I don’t have enough? For me, that thought is almost always tied to time. Some days, I don’t have enough time constantly runs in the back of my mind. And that mantra never serves me well. It doesn’t…
Dear Pastor…Please Don’t Quit!
This is the blog that almost never was. This morning, I opened my laptop while on an airplane to email the district office with my apologies for not delivering on my promised post. But instead, I ended up writing the following. I hope it encourages you… Less than 24 hours…
Keeping Your Eyes on the Future During a Challenging Present
“I regret that I didn’t have time to write you a shorter letter.” I’ve seen that quote attributed to everyone from Blaise Pascal to Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin. Whoever said it, the moral is that brevity is best and succinctness is sublime. I’ll do my best to heed their…
The Tension In Working Out Our Salvation
I have this distinct picture of me in my earlier years of marriage, getting into a rhythm of going back upstairs to finish an argument. My wife and I would have argued about something. I would go downstairs to cool off (or to be dramatic). After not too many minutes…
