The Heart Of The Matter

There and Back Again: A Pastor's Tale, Part Two

First, I felt that my presence in the community in some ways inhibited the development of other leaders for all kinds of reasons. For the community to mature in critical ways, I found that I needed to be intentionally absent or the institutional, relational, and emotional habits would either default back to me on the one hand or be seized by me, again for any number of good and bad reasons, on the other. And let me be really honest here - the feeling of being needed, even indispensable, is a currency that nearly all leaders like to regularly experience. Weaning oneself off this means of finding significance is not an easy thing to do. Second, over time fewer and fewer of my apostolic/entrepreneurial and academic/creative gifts and inclinations were engaged while the managerial and pastoral requirements of a growing church consistently demanded more and more of my attention. In the short-term, I was usually happy to give it, too. But that meant that the activities that gave energy to me were slowly marginalized by those that took energy from me. The third and final struggle was that the relational, emotional, and physical wear and tear of 12 years of church leadership, through multiple stages of community growth, slowly took their toll on my heart, mind, and body. I was thoroughly and deeply tired.