We’re tired. Zoom fatigue, confinement, and heightened awareness of death, on top of personal needs, have wearied us.
Christian leaders have faced additional challenges. Lockdown forced an urgent development of new forms of church gatherings and pastoral connections. Emerging from lockdown with social distancing means another rethink, while no one knows yet what the ‘new normal’ for church will be. This is a time of rebuilding.
Rebuilding is tough. In the early noughties, as a diversion from my work as a junior doctor, I spent a week in eastern Europe with a team converting an attic into an office for a mission agency. Having zero building skills, I was the ‘gopher’ – the skilled builders said, ‘Go for a plank’, and I got it (and hand blisters too!), while they planned, cut, laid and planned again. Pastors remodelling their churches face both the spiritual equivalent of my donkey work and the mental labour of those builders. This is nothing new – pastors have always been called to work hard in the Lord – but there are special dangers in times of rapid change.
One danger is misplaced priorities. We can focus on structures, whether physical (buildings) or organisational (programmes), rather than the mission they exist to support. One of the most pestilent viruses infecting Evangelicalism is pragmatic activism: the impulse to do ‘whatever works’ without maintaining biblical faithfulness.
Help is here
A second danger is trying to rebuild on empty, which just leads to exhaustion and burnout. Seeing a great need for refreshment among leaders and their spouses, Living Leadership has been building our network of associates, experienced pastors of pastors and trainers of leaders, to work alongside our staff team. We’ve also launched Refresh Network Online for Christian leaders and spouses, meeting for an hour a couple of times per month, which one participant described perfectly: ‘Being in ministry is like being an endurance runner in a hot climate and you can easily become dehydrated; these sessions are a place to get fresh water.’
The network meets on the first and third Wednesdays of the month at 10am. Dates for the Autumn/Winter season in 2020 are: 16 September, 7 and 21 October, 4 and 18 November, 2 December.
In closing, if you’re a leader, let me ask you, what is the church saying to you? In times of change, diverse opinions, and the ways they’re expressed, can be challenging, but I’m not thinking of what people in your congregation are saying. Revelation 22:17 tells us what the church in its redeemed beauty says: ‘The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ … Let anyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who desires drink freely from the water of life.’
I don’t know how often your people tell you to down tools and drink from those life-giving waters of God’s grace. If they’re in tune with the Spirit, it should be frequently, but experience says it seldom is. So, hear it now. In your hard work, you’ll generate a mighty spiritual thirst, so heed the Spirit and the bride and pause often to drink deeply.
