I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from David Murray’s latest book, Reset. It’s a phenomenal book on preventing burnout. Though not specifically about burnout, I want to share a paragraph I read that was incredibly helpful.
In the seventh chapter Murray encourages his readers to assess their calendars. He suggests making statements of purpose over four life areas: spiritual life, family life, vocational life, and Christian service. As he began the section on Christian service, Murray said this:
Remember, you are already serving God in your spiritual life, in your family life, and in your vocational life. That’s a lot. If your season of life permits, however, you may also want to add a Christian service purpose statement… (Murray, 130)
I absolutely love how Murray frames this, because we vocational ministers can sometimes count ministry wrongly. We say with our lips that your job matters, but do we really count it? We say that ministry in the home is vital, but when we are trying to track the spiritual development of our people do we have a way to assess how well families are being raised up?
Quite a few books that I’ve read do not really seem to “count” those first three segments as ministry. Some models track Christian maturity based upon the ministry that a person is involved in. If a person is serving in a ministry in the local church, then they have moved from the crowd to the committed.
One particular model uses a baseball diamond to track spiritual growth. You get to third base when you are actively involved in a local church ministry. But there isn’t much of a way to give credit to a guy who is sharing Jesus with his coworkers and discipling his family.
We should be careful to communicate similar to how David Murray has communicated this truth. Pastors can tend to focus on the ministry that they see happening in their local church but ignore the way God is using their flock to shape the community through their jobs and their parenting. If we don’t communicate effectively we’ll inadvertently minimize the real ministry that is taking place, and make people feel like they aren’t doing ministry just because we cannot track it on our local church calendar.
If we really believe that ministry on the job matters and that family discipleship matters we’ll track spiritual growth accordingly.
I am a layperson who enjoys this site and have been thinking along similar lines the last couple of weeks. My church has a “Missions Emphasis Sunday” every year where we hear about what God is doing around the world through members serving as missionaries, short term trips taken that year, local ministries we officially support, and dollar amounts given to missions. This is my favorite Sunday of the year. But I thought to myself, this really is only scratching the surface. What if our church asked individual members what they had done that year to further the Kingdom and glorify God outside the confines of our local church? For example, “Person A” gave $15,000 to Christian nonprofits and volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center. Person B witnessed to coworkers and opened their home to a woman who needed a place so she could get back on her feet. Person C spent X hours laboring in prayer for a cause dear to them and saw God move. Person D fostered a child and in doing so laid down their desire for a comfortable easy life to walk by faith.
Just think how amazing it would be to know what individual church members have been involved in on their own time and how it could spur each other on to more and more good deeds! Just a thought!
Models that try to prioritize all these commitments fall short, in my humble (but correct) opinion. We say, “Family comes first” but we can’t always do that. I have had to leave my family on Thanksgiving to help a family whose 18-year-old son died and I spent Christmas at the hospital with another family whose son actually had the same disease (meningitis – different kinds – I can never remember whether it’s viral or bacterial that is worse).
I like the wheel model a little better. Each priority is like a spoke on the wheel – needing to be balanced. My family, my church, my personal devotion – it all has to be balanced.
I know that isn’t exactly what this post is about, but it got me thinking.
I think viral is worse, until you get an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, then you’re up a creek severely. Both of those cases are much harder to treat. Of course, that portion of my medical knowledge comes from mortality studies when I was a funeral apprentice and we had to pay attention to PPE issues.
As to the rest: spokes, or chair legs, perhaps–you can get by with one out of whack for a while but it’s far better to get it as stabilized as possible. You do what needs doing, while also making sure that something that is low-priority (Deacon Smith’s ingrown toenail surgery or Child Bob’s 47th ball game of the season) does not supplant something that is high priority (Deacon Smith’s heart surgery or Child Bob’s first ever ball game) and that almost nothing replaces the very critical (birth of your children, your own wedding).
I think we do ourselves and the ministry of the Word and church a great deal of damage when we cannot prioritize within the categories. My family is absolutely critical and important, but there are things that are part of serving the church. (Thanksgiving week this year had a case in point with a death in the church family.) However, the seventh iteration of budget discussion, where the conflict between silk and fresh flowers just can’t be resolved, that should just be done away with. Much of the trouble of being present with our families is caused by our insistence as pastors (and the structures that we perpetuate) that we be hands-on with everything. After all, the flower conflict could escalate, I better be here to deal with it….
Nonsense. I left them two flintlock pistols and an open field, told them to resolve it like men. (No powder, quit panicking.) Let the people of God handle the matters of His church. And no, I’m not great at this–but I’m learning.
Anyway, I’m with Dave…thinking, generally, about the whole idea. The big thing is this: be as present with what you are doing as you can be: when you are with your family, don’t stress about the decorating committee meeting you said you wouldn’t attend. Let the committee do its job. They can handle it. None of the people involved in the business, ministry, and operation of the local church will be there in 100 years, so we had best be helping many learn to do it so that it can be passed on.