Praying Over Your Year

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.

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In Pain But On Mission

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?

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Pastors Are Quitting

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.

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Profit First For Churches

The book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz has been revolutionizing the way small business owners manage their finances. In this episode, Daren speaks with bookkeeper Graham Utz about church financial management and how Profit First can be applied to the way churches manage their finances. 

Spiritual Direction – Kenda Reimer

Today I’ve got an excerpt of an interview I did with Kenda Reimer on the Disciple Making podcast. Kenda is a spiritual director in Squamish, British Columbia and the excerpt I’m playing here is one that is tied to spiritual direction and Christian leadership. I think you’ll find it interesting and might get you digging into this topic a little bit further.

If you want to know more about Kenda you can find her at explorewatersedge.ca and also soulformation.org will tell you more about spiritual direction. So we’re going to jump into the middle of the conversation with Kenda Riemer on spiritual direction.

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