In this episode we sit down to talk about some of the things that make pastors want to quit the ministry, and what we can do about it.
One of the things I’ve seen is that pastors are discouraged… social media gives people the ability to give immediate feedback, and hardly ever is it positive…
Another reason I hear more and more is that pastors are under financial pressure… they’re asked to do an enormous task, and many of them are underpaid…
The onus is really on the board or eldership to figure out what is fair compensation for your pastor, because you want to keep them around…
There’s a great amount of comparison that happens with pastors… “Why aren’t you more like the famous pastor [I just watched on the internet]?”
The competitive spirit is ruining a lot of pastor’s souls… if you’re not careful to manage that in your heart, if it is the dominant voice you hear in the morning, you will drive yourself off a cliff…
The amount of family pressure pastors feel is another factor… oftentimes the church does not allow the pastor a place to openly confess brokenness… so pastors begin to go underground, to alcohol or drugs to medicate the pain…
It takes something like 200 leisure hours to form a close friendship… a lot of time as pastors what we have are ministry friends… and that’s good… but what we need are friendships that exist beyond the church…
We need to have robust interests in other things… I have a group of guys I go away with each summer for a week, where we play golf, eat, and catch up with one another… talking about things that detox all of our souls…
It’s important not to over-invest meaning into this calling… if something overly encourages or overly discourages us about the church, it is an indication we are getting too much of our identity from it…