The Ecclesia Network

a missional church network

Bob Hyatt

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What Do You REALLY Want?

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to church planting: I got offered a 70k a year job out of the blue.

In 2003, before we felt drawn (or pushed… pushed probably fits better!) to plant a new community in Portland, OR. I had been sending out a lot of resumes. I knew it was time to get out of the media job I had been doing at a large church and back into pastoral ministry, and to that end I was putting out the feelers far and wide. But… I kept being number 2. It came down time and again to me and someone else, and yet in the end- always someone else.

At about that time, God really grabbed my attention. I was told my media job would be ending, and I’d have 3 months to figure out what came next. We had just bought a house, gotten pregnant… mild panic began to set in. 

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Why the Disciplines Matter

While acknowledging no community is perfectly mature, I often think that the reason more communities are not more spiritually mature is because their leaders are not more spiritually mature.

Why aren’t they? As Dallas Willard points out in The Spirit of the Disciplines, while we want to react as Christ would react, behave as Christ would behave and lead as Christ would lead, we are unwilling to do the things and practice the disciplines that enabled him to react, behave and lead as he did.

Willard writes,

“We must learn to follow His preparations, the disciplines for life in God’s rule that enabled him to receive His Father’s constant and effective support while doing His will.”

Programs and teaching series will not do half as much good in a community as elders who transparently live their lives and their practices before a watching community.

Disciplines for God

Many times I have sat with both pastors and elders who spoke of being spiritually dry. What I hear over and over again is that it’s difficult to find or make the time for reading Scripture; it’s hard to pray in a disciplined and consistent manner; and it’s nearly impossible to set aside time simply to sit and be present to God in the midst of the busyness and rigors of life, work and ministry.

When I was a youth pastor, one day I sat at my desk, staring down at my open Bible and wondering, Would I do this if I thought no one would ever ask me if I had? At the time, my truthful answer was no. It was then I realized I needed a major paradigm shift in how I related to God.

Leadership demanded that I engage with the spiritual disciplines, but leadership was not sufficient to make those practices vital and real in my life. What I needed was to fall in love with God again—to see in him a loveliness and a value apart from how he contributed to my position in church leadership. Leadership will “call the question” in your life: do you love God for God, or God as a means to an end? To put it another way, are you in love with Him or are you seeing relationship with Him as a necessary means to maintaining leadership and your reputation?

Disciplines for others

One of the main reasons leaders find it so hard to be disciplined in spending time in God’s Word, solitude and stillness, prayer, meditation and fasting is that they feel they are so busy with life, so busy in doing good, so busy serving God and the community that they neglect the care of their own souls. As Richard Baxter, the 17th century Puritan wrote, they are busy preparing meals for others even while they themselves are starving. You simply can’t feed anyone without having been fed yourself. What you offer to others will be of little nutritional value to them unless it flows from a vital, connected, disciplined relationship with God.

This can be particularly difficult for leaders who are bi-vocational or not in paid ministry. There is a temptation to see serving the church in leadership, attending meetings and fulfilling all the obligations of an elder as, if not sufficient for our spiritual lives, all that we really have the bandwidth to do.

When talking with pastors and other ministry leaders, I urge them to see their own spiritual formation as a way of not simply growing in relationship with the God who loves them, but also of loving others around them. My wife, my children and the people in my church need me to be in prayer and in Scripture regularly, in solitude and silence often. They need me to be grounded spiritually and growing, because that’s the only way I’ll ever be able to discharge my responsibilities to them faithfully. Seeing what we do publicly as loving service to our community is only half the story. Seeing what we do privately as we care for our souls also as loving service to others is the rest.

Disciplines for ourselves

The late-night phone calls, the inevitable conflicts, the difficulty of seeing others make wrong choices—all of these have an impact. Practicing the disciplines helps shape that impact for our good.

Implementing the spiritual disciplines in our lives also helps us minimize our anxious reactivity and choose a more constructive response instead. For example, the practice of studying the Scriptures brings the cognitive perspective to an emotionally-laden situation. We are reminded by the words on the page to love our enemy when our natural reaction is to lash out in anger. As we pray for our enemy, we open ourselves up to consider compassion and mercy. As we confess our sins, we face our sinfulness and avoid over-focusing on the sinfulness of the other. Gradually, we experience transformation, becoming the kind of people who are actually capable of forgiving an enemy.

How do some handle the stress of leadership and life so they grow from it while others feel more and more like burned-out husks, stumbling through another meeting, dealing with another crisis? I would venture to say it comes down to how they view themselves and those stresses. Spending time with God reminds us of His presence, even in the most difficult parts of life and church leadership. It grounds us in the character of Christ and informs our reactions. It enables us to choose loving responses rather than react or be defensive. And it reminds us that even in the hardest parts of leading a church community, God wants to use what we go through and our responses to it to form and shape us and our communities.

This post is adapted from Eldership and the Mission of God- Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership, by J.R. Briggs and Bob Hyatt

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Dallas Willard and Jet-Lag

Dallas Willard isn’t an easy man to create small talk with.

What do you say to a distinguished professor of Philosophy at USC who has chosen in his spare time to write life-changing books like The Divine Conspiracy and speak to Christians regularly about spiritual practices and disciplines?

But as I got stuck sitting by him, against my will, at the Ecclesia National Gathering I felt like I should say something to him rather than endure the awkward silence that surrounded us. I didn’t realize our short conversation would leave me thinking for weeks.

I opened with, “So, did you get in from California yesterday?”

He said, “Yes.”

I waited for a few awkward seconds but that was clearly the only thing he intended to say. I followed up with: “Still on California time?” An innocent and somewhat silly question, but I was nervous and was feeling pretty wrecked myself after having just arriving from Portland the day before. His response was not what I expected.

“Let me tell you something” he said gently as I can imagine a grandfather saying to one he loves. “I used to travel a lot, and I particularly remember a 14 hour flight to South Africa where they practically had to scrape me off the plane. It was then that I heard the Lord tell me very clearly, “Dallas, when you travel I want you to do three things: fast, prayer, and memorize scripture. And if you do those things, I will sustain you.” He continued, “And so I started doing those three things anytime I flew longer than 2 or 3 hours and since then I’ve never felt the effects of jet-lag again. He has sustained me.”

At this point in the conversation I felt about a half-inch tall. Dallas wasn’t trying to make me feel small, it was simply that in his presence there was no way for me to not feel small, and petty, and trite. You can sense when you are in the presence of someone that is genuine and real, just as easily as you can sense when you are in the presence of a complete phony. And Dallas is the real deal.

People like Dallas Willard are special not just for what they say, but because they model what a faithful Christ-follower looks like. After you hear or interact with such people, you’re not just left with great ideas, but with a desire to be the quality of person that they themselves are. It’s easy to find pastors who are wise and give you great ministry advice, it’s a lot harder to find pastors who you see and think, “I want to be like that person because they are like Jesus.” I hope that when I’m 75 years old, people will say that about me. But I know for now I have quite a distance between where I am and what I aspire to be. I also know that Dallas Willard didn’t become the kind of person he is naturally or easily.

I don’t aspire to be a “famous” pastor. Nor do I aspire to write a great book, speak at conferences, be known by a lot of people who have tons of twitter followers, or make a name for myself. I simply want to be the kind of person who has the depth of friendship with God that people like Dallas Willard have cultivated over the years. If I can model for people what that looks like as I grow older, I will feel more than successful.

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One Simple Way to Reduce Ministry Stress- Be a Sheepdog, Not a Rabbit.

It’s often said that it’s not so much what happens to you in life, but how you react to it.

There’s a lot of wisdom in that thought. What if I told you that how you react could literally determine what chemicals your brain produces?

We’re all born with a hardwired stress response- when we get dumped into the middle of a stressful situation, our brains produce cortisol. A built in alarm system, cortisol is produced by our adrenal glands, and triggers the “fight or flight” mechanism.

So, if you are hiking, and slip off the side of a path and find yourself hanging by your fingertips on the front face of a cliff, your brain is going to start pumping cortisol.

But here’s the funny thing- find yourself in the exact same position, not because you slipped, but because you chose a rock-climbing adventure, and your brain reacts in a very different way.

When stressors are forced on us, our brains and bodies react like a prey animal. Like a rabbit. Your heart rate rises, the cortisol dump begins, your senses become hyper-aware to danger, and your body begins to prepare to either run away or go down fighting. But when we encounter the same stressors, not as a result of having them forced on us, but rather out of choice, there’s a whole different physiological response. Less like a prey animal, more like a predator. Our heart rate might rise, but there’s no dump of cortisol. We’re excited, our senses are heightened, but there are different parts of our brains that are being activated.

When stress is forced on us, we’re like a rabbit- when we chase the stressor, the danger or the challenge, we’re more like a sheep dog, running into the scary situation willingly, sometimes gladly.

It matters whether or not you frame the hard parts of your life and ministry as something you are choosing to face, or something you are being forced to face. Your brain and your body will react very differently. Your body knows the difference between being a rabbit and a sheep dog.

At a particularly tough time in ministry, I began to notice my bodily reactions to hard ministry situations. It felt very “fight or flight.” Most of the time, I wanted to run away. Some of the time, I wanted to fight. But nearly all of the time, my response was unhealthy, and unhelpful in a ministry situation.

Most of the time, I wanted to run away. Some of the time, I wanted to fight. But nearly all of the time, my response was unhealthy, and unhelpful in a ministry situation. Click To Tweet

I knew I needed to change how I was reacting to the criticism, the complaints and the “concerns” I was facing as a leader, because “fight or flight” was just making everything worse. But to change how I was reacting to those things, I had to change how I thought about them.

I began to say to myself “This is a challenge, not a threat.” I wanted to see the hard parts of ministry, not as a threat to my position, my authority or my person, but rather, as another way to level-up in ministry, to learn and grow- even if that learning came by handling the situation wrongly- at least I’d know what to do next time.

I know ministry is not a game, but when I began to think in game terms, seeing each new “issue” I was facing as puzzle to figure out, a challenge to be willingly faced, another lesson to be learned (and here is the magic part) as something I was willingly engaging with, the challenges didn’t get any easier, but… facing them sure did. And more, my adrenal glands really settled down. I was able to come a little bit closer to being a “non-anxious presence” in leadership.

This is something I’m still working on- in parenting, in marriage, in life– seeing whatever challenges come not as something that’s being forced on me, but as part and parcel of all the things I am proactively choosing. I chose to be a husband- so when marriage gets tough, I can tell myself I chose (and am still actively choosing) this! I don’t need to run from this, or fight for my life- but I can grow through this hard part. Same with parenting- I may not have actively chosen all the hard parts, but I chose to be a parent (and even if I hadn’t initially chosen, I’m choosing it NOW) and that means I’m choosing these challenges. No need to bury my head, ignore them and hope they will go away or any other rabbit-like behavior.

The same holds true in ministry. None of us entered the ministry dreaming of the hard personalities we’d have to deal with, the dire budget numbers, the seemingly complacent Christians who don’t seem interested in growing. But in choosing ministry, we chose those challenges. And the way that we face them will make all the difference for us.

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The Difference Between a Mentor and a Coach (and a Therapist and Spiritual Director) and Why You Need One

The Blue Brothers may not have said it first, but they certainly said it best: Everybody needs somebody. For the leader, this is especially true. The loneliness and difficulties inherent in ministry can lead us further and further into isolation. And for those of us in pastoral leadership, the anxiety, depression and poor decisions that can be brought on by isolation mean we should avoid isolation at all costs. 

So, you need someone, but who?

There are four main options for leaders seeking to connect with someone who can help them in leadership and ministry.

The first is a mentor. A mentor is one who gives you the benefit of his or her experience and learning. You ask them questions and they tell you theiranswers. Like a mother or father-figure, they invest in you by giving you their time and their stories. The expertise in the relationship lies with them as does, by and large, the agenda. They have some lessons they think you will benefit from learning. The problem is, mentors are few and far between- if you want one, you’ll need to pursue him or her. Find someone whose life and ministry you admire and want to emulate, and then ask them for some of their time. Don’t be surprised if they say no- if you see value in having some of their time, chances are others do too. You may have to ask more than once. 

The second is a coach. A coach is vastly different than a mentor. While a mentor tells you their stories and comes to the relationship with their own agenda, a coach flips that and works completely on your agenda. Their concern is in asking what your goals are, and then asking good, open-ended questions which will help you figure out how you are going to get there. Good coaches ask rather than tell. The expertise in the relationship lies with you, the client, and your agenda- you are the only one who knows where you want to go, and what you’ll have to do to get there. The coach is merely there to help you figure it out. The good news is there’s an abundance of coaches out there. But since most of them don’t work for free, you’ll have to invest if you want good coaching. And trust me, there’s a difference between good coaching (client-focused, question-based) and poor coaching (coach-focused, with more telling than asking). 

Beyond mentors and coaches, there are therapists and spiritual directors. 

A therapist is someone who listens to your stories and gives you the benefit of their learning. The vast majority of them, working with a cognitive-behavioral orientation, are focused on your current thinking and beliefs that lead to issues and problems in your life. The agenda is set by you, and the problems you’d like help untangling. They ask what you are thinking when you do such and such, or when such and such happens, and then help you adjust that thinking to achieve different outcomes. Good therapists ask good, open-ended questions and spend a lot of time listening, but ultimately the expertise in the relationship lies with them, as they diagnose the thinking errors they are hearing and help you come up with alternate ways of looking at things. While a mentor is (hopefully) a long-range or even life-long relationship, and a coach a mid-range one year to two year relationship, a relationship with a therapist can range from weeks to months to years, depending on the need. There are a lot of therapists out there, but finding one that “fits” can sometime take a couple of tries. 

Lastly, a spiritual director is something of a combination of all three of the above. Like a coach or therapist, the agenda is set by you and what you feel is important to talk about. But like a mentor, they may share the benefits of what they have learned, particularly as it relates to listening to God and living the spiritual life. Their concern is helping you to hear God and figure out what it looks like to respond appropriately. The agenda is ostensibly set by you, but really by God, as He is invited to be at the center of the conversation, directing, nudging, speaking. The expertise in the relationship is spread between you, as you relate what it is you are hearing from God, the spiritual director, as he or she expertly helps you listen and tune your ears to hear the voice of God, and God Himself, as He directs the conversation and relationship in a way which brings formation in your life. 

I was lucky that God brought me into just such a relationship at just the right time. I was about 6 years or so into a church plant and staring down the barrel of burnout. I hadn’t yet fallen off the cliff, but I could see it fast approaching and knew that if I didn’t get some help, I would surely tumble over. I knew of a man in town who had spent years in ministry and after getting his doctorate in spiritual formation had transitioned to being a coach and spiritual director to pastors. So, after seeking him out, I told him over coffee the state my soul was in. 

We talked for awhile that day and I immediately felt encouraged. I was encouraged to know I had an objective listener, one who was willing to listen to me complain about my situation and gently, so gently, push back on the pieces I was maybe fooling myself about. I came back the next month, and in fact nearly every month in the nine years since. It was bracing to find support, counsel, a listening ear, and a wise presence all in one place. He has helped me listen to God, and figure out what I should do in response. What my coach/spiritual director has provided for me has been invaluable, and so certainly worth the roughly $75 a month our church paid to support what he is doing. 

So- back to the beginning. Everybody needs somebody. Most of us need a mentor or a coach. Many of us could use a therapist. Nearly all of us need a spiritual director. 

If you are in the first few years of pastoring, you may think your top need is a mentor- someone to tell you what they did so you can do the same. That’s not going to be as helpful as you believe. Mentors are at their best when they are sharing life lessons with us, not ministry strategies that may or may not translate into our own context. Seek out a coach instead- maybe one who has done something similar to what you are doing, so there can be a bit of mentoring mixed in, but who will ask you the good questions that will help you define your priorities, goals and ways to get there. Church planters especially need coaches, as they often have vague-yet-exciting ideas about what they want to do and create. A coach can help you drill down to nuts and bolts, and see the best way to achieve what you want to achieve.

 Additionally, coaches can help those who have been pastoring for awhile but are beginning to realize that what got them where they are probably won’t take them any further. They know they are facing more complex ministry issues than they have had to in the past, and need someone to help them figure out how to make it all work. A good coach can you unlock your thinking, clarify what’s really important, and see the way forward.

If you are deep in the weeds of ministry, seek out a good mentor or a therapist. A mentor can provide a sympathetic ear (they’ve been there, after all) and let you know how they were able to endure what you going through and answer the questions you are currently facing. Or maybe a therapist if you sense that what you are experiencing is more than simply the rigors of ministry and may, in fact, be depression or higher-than-normal levels of anxiety. A therapist also provides a good listening ear, some concrete solutions and strategies, and truth be told, they’re a lot easier to find than a mentor. 

But wherever you are in ministry, you need a spiritual director- someone to help you hear the voice of God over the din of ministry. A spiritual director can come in many shapes- maybe another pastor who will be a sounding board and who will commit to helping you discern how God is speaking in your life. Or maybe someone who works formally as a director and has training. 

It’s possible to find someone who will combine the best aspects of mentoring, coaching and spiritual direction. Someone who’s been-there-and-done-that when it comes to your stage in life and stage in ministry, someone who’s trained as a coach and knows the coaching process, but also is keenly aware that they best thing they can do, even more than helping you figure out your own goals and how to reach them,  is help you listen for the voice of God and figure out how to respond appropriately. 

But whoever you find, I would urge you to find someone. Loneliness is rampant in ministry, and between the increasing number of people being trained as coaches and spiritual directors, in addition to technologies like Skype or FaceTime, there’s just no reason why everybody can’t have somebody. 

(Interested in finding out more about coaching? Click here.)

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What I Learned After Almost Pretending to Faint Just to Get Out of Preaching

I remember pretty vividly the morning when, as a 27 year old associate pastor getting ready to preach for the first time in my new church, I briefly contemplated pretending to faint.

Sitting in the front row of the church, I was feeling completely unprepared to speak the Gospel to a group of people I hardly knew, and to a larger crowd than I had ever spoken to before. Sure, I had dealt with nervousness before, but this was definitely a notch up from what I normally felt. Sick to my stomach, head in hands, I thought to myself “If I just fall over to the floor and don’t get up, what will they do? They can’t MAKE me preach… can they?”

Fortunately for everyone involved, that moment passed. I preached that morning and it was fine. Since then, I’ve felt twangs of stage fright occasionally, but thankfully, never to that extent. In fact, over the years, the nervousness has subsided, but it’s mostly what I’ve learned about preaching that has made me increasingly comfortable in the pulpit.

Here’s what I’ve realized.

First, preaching is a marathon, not a sprint. I think we overestimate what can happen to modern audiences in one morning, and completely underestimate what can happen in a community through years of faithful preaching. Ask a regular church goer what the best sermon they ever heard was. Now ask them for their second favorite. Then their third. This is about where things get fuzzy for most people, not because preaching doesn’t matter, but because it does its best work in the aggregate. It’s not what people hear on any given Sunday that is likely to change them, but what they hear in a year of Sundays that is likely to provide a catalyst for change.

It’s not what people hear on any given Sunday that is likely to change them, but what they hear in a year of Sundays that is likely to provide a catalyst for change. Click To Tweet

For the individual preacher on a particular Sunday, that means focusing on the long game. Today is important, just not as important as we are likely to believe. Few people will remember what we preach today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working- slowly but surely watering the seeds of change that the Holy Spirit is working in the lives of our hearers. This takes a lot of pressure off the time I spend in the pulpit, and puts it were it perhaps better belongs: planning, preparing and preaching. I now focus less on what I am going to say to my community this Sunday, and more on what I sense God wants us to say to the community this season, this year.

Second, I’ve realized it’s not about me. And if it seems like it’s becoming about me, I should change that. The real reason we become nervous is because we’ve become focused on ourselves. Our performance, our image, our job… We want to know we’re liked and are doing a good enough job that someone will keep paying us to do it. Fair enough.

But that’s not what preaching is about and we know it. We just need to remind ourselves that it’s not about us. Unfortunately, a generation of celebrity preachers- funny, charismatic, and engaging- have made us think that maybe it is about us, at least, a little bit. We love to listen to them. We want people to feel about us the way we and countless others feel about them, and hang on our words the way so many hang on theirs.

A generation of celebrity preachers- funny, charismatic, and engaging- have made us think that maybe it is about us, at least, a little bit. Click To Tweet

When I first realized this about myself, I knew I had to get off that particular hamster wheel of approval. I’m a decent preacher, but I’ll never be (fill in your favorite big name preacher here).

And neither will you. The vast majority of us are not called to speak before ever larger crowds, get book deals off our sermon series and get called on to speak at large conferences. We just aren’t. And the quicker we realize that, and let go of the fantasy version of our career trajectory, the quicker we’ll be able to get about being the man or woman God has called us to be in our own individual, mundane contexts, speaking to people who, though they number not in the thousands, still matter immensely to God. When I realize that this sermon I’m about to preach is more about Jesus and the people He loves than it is about what people think of me, about honing my skills, increasing my platform or anything other than cooperating with the Holy Spirit in moving the ball incrementally forward in the lives of the people sitting before me, the pressure falls away. And, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I don’t need to hit a home run every Sunday. Singles and doubles with the occasional triple are just fine. I just need to keep things moving. No pressure to knock it out of the park.

But even in that, I can feel some pressure, so it’s good that I realized it’s less about what I do or fail to do, and more about what the Spirit chooses to do.

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