Top Ten Strategies for Long Term Ministry

TOP TEN STRATEGIES
FOR LONG TERM MINISTRY

A few months ago I was thinking about the future of pastoral ministry. I am aware of all the current difficulties in modern ministry. But as I continued to think about the future the question slowly formed in my mind, “What are the best strategies for maintaining a healthy ministry for the long haul?” To help me with this question I emailed a group of friends all of whom are either counselors to pastors or provide ongoing care to pastors and missionaries. I asked them “What would you consider to be the top ten strategies a pastor could use to stay healthy in the next five to ten years?” After I received their responses I sorted and edited them into a Top Ten List of Strategies.

The list is as follows:

10. Be a servant leader of leaders in your church
9. Make People More Important than Programs
8. Have a Best Friend
7. Have a Hobby that you do on a regular basis
6. Have a Clear understanding that your Call into ministry is from God
5. Take Time in Spiritual Formation
4. Remember your self-image is who you are in Christ not what you do;
3. Take a Regular Day Off. A Sabbath Day
2. Maintain a Vibrant Marital Life
1. Maintain a Vibrant Healthy Relationship with God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit

These aren’t earth shaking new revelations. In fact they have been around for many years, and many pastors and missionaries have been doing them for a long time. But they are a clean list of things we as pastors and missionaries can do to remain emotionally, and spiritually healthy while leading a church or ministry. Some of them are self explanatory and others require a little thinking. They all require us to be intentional about doing them in a positive helpful way.

10. Be a servant leader of leaders in your church

This is the key to leadership in the church. As we have been taught this is the leadership model of Jesus. Some key points to this style of leadership that keeps us healthy is to be a team player with your lay leaders. The emphasis is on the fact that this is ‘our’ ministry not ‘my’ ministry. We also need to learn a healthy use of authority and not shift in to the model of ‘my way or the highway.’ It is too easy to shift into a hard line leadership model instead of encouraging team work and mutual accountability. The last key point in servant leadership is to lead with quietness and strength. The idea is to be a non-anxious leader, letting our authority come from our relationship with God and not out of our own need to be in control.

9. Make People More Important than Programs

A trap that we often get caught in, especially in our American churches is to focus our time and efforts on the programs that we offer and let the people we are serving fall through the cracks. Healthy leaders see that while a program may be beneficial we are really about the people both within and without the church. When we major on people, whether in the church, on staff, our board or the ‘lost’ we keep our focus the same as Jesus’ focus. Remember how he always had time to stop and interact with the people on the way.

8. Have A Best Friend

Ministry is lonely and even if we serve or lead on a big staff we can still be lonely. To whom do we go to share a difficulty, celebrate a joy? Who can hold us accountable for our spiritual, emotional and moral lives? We need to cultivate safe friendships with other pastors or laypeople who can be a true friend. As we develop a community of friends, especially other pastors, we can find ourselves in a natural place of accountability and encouragement. As our friendships develop we can have healthy safe people with whom we can be accountable in all areas of our lives. I am becoming increasingly convinced that all of us who are involved in ministry should have an older pastor as a mentor and we should be mentors to younger pastors around us. Bible colleges and Seminary training while important and valuable can not provide answers or information for all the intricacies of life in the post modern church. A healthy mentor can provide the insight and encouragement and additional training we need to flourish in pastoral ministry.

7. Have A Hobby that you do on a regular basis

While working hard at ministry is important we need to be able to step aside and play. A few years ago Dr. Mark R. McMinn, of Wheaton College published a study entitled “Care For Pastors: Learning From Clergy and Their Spouses” that highlighted various ways that pastors have found to remain emotionally and spiritually healthy. One of those was to have a hobby that they did on a regular basis. We need to step way from the issues of ministry and do something that is outside of our normal patterns. This can be gardening, photography, painting or various other arts, fishing, hiking, golf, stamp collecting or even genealogy, or any of a hundred other activities. Reading is probably not a good choice since pastors read a lot for the profession. But the hobby is less important than doing it. Do you have a hobby? When was the last time you did it?

6. Have a Clear understanding that your Call into ministry is from God

For me one of the key strategies for long term pastoral or missionary ministry is having a clear understanding that I have a call from God. As Dave Hansen writes, “Other than my personal relationship to Jesus Christ, knowing and understanding my call is the next most important thing in my life.” To know that being a pastor or missionary is not a choice or accident but is where God wants me to be is the crux of my ministry health. I remember times in ministry when I was ready to jump ship. Am I really a pastor? Is this what God really wants me to be doing for Him? And then He would remind me of that night the summer before my freshman year in college. The night I first heard His voice through the pages of the Bible saying “Come, follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men.” That was the time, that was the place when I changed my life course and began the first steps of the journey to become a pastor of a local church. That story has never changed and the power of it to refocus my life and ministry is still as powerful today as that first night. It is the key in my life and I believe in the lives of pastors, that anchors us in being a pastor or missionary.

5. Take Time in Spiritual Formation

As crucial as call is this next step is what keeps our call fresh and keeps us filled with God’s power. It is easy in ministry to not be intentional about growing in our spiritual life. We need to take time to practice the spiritual disciplines, to take time to let God work His purpose in our life. We need more than a 10 minute commitment to read our Bibles. We need to soak in God’s word daily, we need time to not only talk with God but to listen as he speaks to us. We need to find fresh ways, probably outside of our own theological background to understand God’s Truth. We must cultivate a healthy desire to grow and not be content with our current knowledge and relationship to God.

4. Remember your self-image is who you are in Christ not what you do;

This is the balance to a deep understanding of our call. We are called to be a pastor, but being a pastor is not our core identity. We need to remember that we are children of God first. We, as pastors/missionaries, are the sheep of God’s hand. We need to separate our core identity, of who I am, from our particular work of being a pastor. We also need to know what our special spiritual giftedness is and how we use those gifts in our daily ministry. Good questions to ask yourself in this area are “When am I not a Pastor?” and, “In what areas or times of my life am I simply a child of God?”

All of these strategies are building to the last three which are the most crucial for a healthy ministry life. Without these there would be no opportunity to do the other seven.


3. Take A Regular Day Off. A Sabbath Day

Do you take a day off? Do you have a Sabbath Day? These are not necessarily the same. We need time off from work to do the normal things of life: taking care of our personal business, house or yard work, time with our spouse and time with our children. But we also need Sabbath time, that special time set apart for not doing creative work, for sitting at the feet of Jesus and just listening to him. We need time for prayer, reading, sleep, rest, feasting, time for our spouses or families, time to Sabbath or Stop what our normal days are and rest. In the church we have neglected Sabbath to our detriment, and we need to recover a healthy Sabbath practice.

2. Maintain A Vibrant Marital Life

Along with taking Sabbath time, which is more on the spiritual side of things, we need to make our spouse a priority in our lives. To often they get put aside so that we can care for our mistress, the church. We need to remember that our marriage comes before our ministry and in many ways is the bedrock of our life and ministry. We need to take time to share, talk with our spouse about the things of our heart: What excites us, what moves us, what are our dreams and visions. We also need to remember to make love with our spouse. This is more than having sex on a regular basis. This is taking time to be romantic, and encouraging to him or her. We must listen to their heart, their dreams, their visions and celebrate that with them. It is important to not talk church or ministry all the time, go out for fun, relax and leave the church at the office. All of this is true for our families, our children or grandchildren as well. Part of finishing well for me is that I have a strong, vibrant, healthy, exciting, growing relationship with my wife and also my children, as much as it depends on me. At the end of our lives we should be more in love with our spouse than the day we walked down the aisle to say our “I do’s.”

1. Maintain A Vibrant Healthy Relationship with God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit

Here is the absolute key strategy for long term ministry. Our relationship with God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the spark of our life and ministry. We need to be in prayer and dialog with him on a regular basis. We need to put time with him into our calendar as the most important part of any day or week. I believe that to finish well in ministry means to end our ministries, and end our life with a strong, vibrant, healthy, exciting, growing, relationship with God that is beyond our wildest imagination. He has promised to form Christ in us and to form us into his image and that should be our daily, weekly, yearly and life long goal. Nothing else compares to this. We should be willing to give up ministry if it interferes with our relationship with God.

There they are in a short fashion. Ten strategies that if practiced in our lives and ministry will help us to stay in ministry for the long haul. They will help us to stay healthy emotionally and spiritually. And if there comes dark times or difficult seasons, they can also help us go through that valley until we find ourselves on the other side lying down in green pastures.