While serving as a Region Minister in our judicatory one of the things that troubled me was the number of pastors in the churches I served who were simply waiting until they reached retirement age. The pressures of ministry had wore them out, and now they were just counting the days until they could retire. Essentially, they had given up on ministry. Some were still serving their congregations well, but others were just going through the motions. Some were obviously battling depression, but none of those pastors were willing to see a doctor and get some help. I felt sorry for the pastors and also for the churches they were serving. Those churches were not getting the kind of pastoral leadership they needed.
I can understand why some pastors feel beat down. They are serving in churches I often referred to as "widow makers." During my time as Region Minister I finally told two churches I would work with them to get healthier, but I would not recommend another pastor to them until they worked through their health issues. Not surprisingly, they were not interested in working on health issues so I never worked with them on finding a new pastor.
Fortunately, most churches are not like that. Often, in those churches, when a pastor feels overwhelmed it is self-inflicted. Most people enter the ministry wanting to impact people's live. Many of us struggle to say no to almost any request. It doesn't take long before our schedules are so full of meeting the needs of others that we have no time for self-care or for meeting the needs of our families. We begin to feel like we are in a vise. The pressure can continue to build until we feel overwhelmed.
So how do we deal with this pressure? What can we do to recapture the joy we first felt when we entered the ministry? We can start by learning to say no to some things. We do not have to touch everything in the church. We do not have to attend every meeting. We do not have to run over to someone's house when their cat stubs it's toe. We can learn that it's OK to let a phone call go to voice mail. We can learn that not everything is an emergency.
We can learn to own our calendars. I suggest setting aside time each week for personal time. Put it on your calendar. Add some time on your calendar to spend time with your family. Have a date night with your spouse, and put it on your calendar. If someone asks to meet with you during those times just tell them you already have an appointment at that time.
Build margin in your life. If your calendar is packed full you have no time for true emergencies. That adds stress to your life. You can't control when you will need to do a funeral or deal with a crisis in your family or in someone else's family. If you have no margin, you'll be trying to do too many things at the same time. Talk about stressful!
Determine your priorities and work with those as much as possible. If you are responsible for preaching remember that Sunday comes every seven days. You must make that message a priority, and that doesn't happen if you start working on that message on Saturday night. If your church is having a special event that you are required to participate in, start early preparing for that. The week before is not the time to start. I had an instructor in Bible college who had plans drawn up four years in advance for events he was responsible for leading. I'm not suggesting anything that extreme, but I also never saw him stressed about anything. Start early planning those special events and you'll have much less stress.
There's more you can do, but if you'll start with these simple steps, you'll find ministry to be much less stressful.
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