Pastors and Addictions

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About a month ago, I got a call from a friend. We had actually overlapped in one church where I served in a transitional role. He was a youth pastor when I got there, but within about two or three months, he went off to plant a church. Unknown to me at the time, he was struggling and had been struggling with some addiction issues. Following his leaving of the church where I was serving there, he planted a church and then the addiction issues raised their head and he lost his job.

He eventually recovered to some level and got back into pastoring at another church, but once again, addiction issues surfaced. He then went on to secular work and addiction was still an issue, so he finally had to confront the issues head on.

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Video Sermons: How to Prepare, Record and Produce Your Sermons

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Since I’m currently involved in two different churches, delivering seven video sermons per month between the two, recording and producing them completely on my own, I’m making twice as many mistakes as most pastors when it comes to virtual preaching.

But I’m also learning twice as fast (I hope!)

By the grace of God, I had a few things in place before virtual church services and sermons became necessary:

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Church Growth, Health…or Survival?

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I came across a quote by a long-time pastor that was in a newspaper and it said this: “In the first five years of ministry I had a sign on my desk that read Win the world for Christ. My second five years of ministry I put up a new sign that said Win one or two for Christ. And then now, later in my ministry I have a sign on my desk that says Try not to lose too many.”

I thought that was kind of funny, but I think a lot of people are facing that reality right now. On the church level, I’ve seen the church go from the Church Growth movement of the ‘90s into Church Health, which I think was actually a step in the right direction. But in a lot of ways, we find ourselves today in Church Survival mode. 

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Self-Care Tips for Stressful Times

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What do you do to protect yourself to function at a sustainable level of time and energy when things are unsettled and stressful?

This is a season of unsettledness in the world and in the churches I’m serving in as well. There’s a lot of unsettledness in search process and other churchy kind of things that lead to instability. There are a few things I’ve found that are important to do to maintain my own capacity to function in the midst of the instability, and not be overwhelmed or overtaken by it, and really become a contributor to the instability. 

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The Pivot No One Is Talking About

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If there’s one word that I find more irritating than covid right now, it’s the word pivot. Everybody’s pivoting. They’re pivoting from offline to online and physical to virtual, and all other kinds of pivots. It’s all the same thing, really. 

Before this whole crisis where pivot became the most popular word next to covid, I always just thought of pivot as a basketball move, but now it’s something that businesses and churches and people or are all doing. 

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