I'd rather be outside…
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I hate the use of the word hack for everything under the sun, but I’m going to use it here anyway: an afternoon energy hack. I’ve worked this issue over many different ways in my life. For instance, I know enough not to go to a Chinese buffet for lunch on a day when I need to work inside in the afternoon. That is just a recipe for napping on my seat or on my feet. It just does no good. What I eat at lunch makes a big, big difference.
Today I have some thoughts on how to plan your year, but with a little bit of a twist. If you follow my Priority Pastor podcast or my content at all you know I’m fairly big into planning and goal setting and quarterly planning, all that kind of stuff. But one of the most strategic things I do as a part of planning my year is to simply write out a prayer for your year. In this prayer, I write out all the things I’m asking the Lord to do in my life, my family, my ministry, in the high level areas that I concern myself with.
This can be done in the new year, at your birthday or in the middle of the year if you have not done it yet, so really whenever you plan your year. I typically do this near the beginning of the new year, and then tweak it a little bit and make sure it kind of covers everything I want it to cover. Then for the first few weeks of the new year, I will review it and pray it over and then I’ll forget about it. I have this actually in a file I do every year called seeking and then the year number. So this year it’s Seeking 2023, and it’s basically seeking God.
Today I want to share with you a teaching I did for 12Church ministry on the whole issue of pain while we’re engaged in ministry. How do we continue in ministry when we’re experiencing pain? How do we carry on in ministry when surrounded and immersed in pain, especially working with people in pain? How do we do that?
Here are some thoughts: Can we engage on mission with Jesus when we’re in deep pain?
Today I’m sharing with you content I made recently for 12Church, which is the new venture alternative church model we’re a part of. This training really is about the five commitments that are actually required to be an effective disciple maker. It’s based on the learnings from our past year of more focused disciple making, and some of these things will be principle based and fairly obvious. Others are gonna be a little bit more tactical, practical focused, and you might be surprised in particular at one of them which is a very specific methodology that is showing up around the world in disciple making movement.
This past year has been a huge learning curve in many ways, unlearning things I’ve learned after decades of ministry and decades of being a Christian and inputting some new information, ideas and convictions that will help us be makers of disciples. So today here are the five simple trajectory, changing commitments that are required if we’re going to be disciple makers.
I was just looking at some of the data from a couple different Barna surveys of pastors from last year and where they’re at in relation to their ministry. They asked the question, have you given real serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year in January of 2021 and 29% said yes. Then by October 38% were saying yes. And of those under the age of 45, 46% of them were saying yes.
The way the question is worded, it’s not saying have you felt like quitting some days, which I think all of us do no matter what our job is, but the question was real serious consideration to quitting being in full-time history. That’s really quite significant. They’re actually looking for a way to leave ministry.
The question is why is that? Why do you think it is? I know in my world, anecdotally, as we’re seeing pastors leaving churches, most of the pastors I’m seeing leaving a ministry are also leaving the ministry, at least the vocational pastoral ministry.