In this episode we sit down with Sharon and Ike Miller, co-pastors of Bright City Church in Raleigh-Durham, Carolina to talk about life, ministry, and what they’re learning about leading well together.
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I didn’t think I was going to be a pastor… but Ike kept saying to me, “I think God wants us to do something together…”
Leading together is a constant learning process… when we launched, we were so driven by adrenaline and were ultimately running at a pace that wasn’t sustainable…
We’re learning a lot by making mistakes, because there aren’t a lot of couples that are doing quite what we’re doing… and even where they have, if their personalities are different than ours, it won’t work the same way for us…
It was really important for us as copastors to figure out what our lanes are… we broke that down by giftings and passions…
Even though we’re in the Bible Belt, we’re in a very progressive area… it’s a weird demographic… lots of people have church baggage and are very cynical… we have realized that a big part of our call is to be a sensitive, safe, and healing place for people…
At the same time, we want to help restore people to the capital ‘C’ Church, not just Bright City Church… the Church is God’s Plan A for people…
Consumerism is also shaping us in profound ways… every week people are coming to church with their list of demands… consumerism is bad for the consumers, but it’s also chewing up and spitting out pastors… it’s commodifying the pastorate…
We’ve discovered that it’s critical for us as leaders to be vulnerable with our struggles… it communicates a sense that it’s okay for us to come in and not have it all together…
Listening well is critical as leaders… so much of the hurt that people carry into church was that they never had spaces where they could be heard…
You can be in control or you can be in community but you can’t be both… to be in the Body is to be interdependent with others… when a desire for absolute autonomy and control leads the way, it severs us from the Body…