More from Croucher

As promised, here's another article from Rowland Croucher on the issues of stress and burnout amongst ministers. This one begins with a story about a man who had the ability to preach, but always lost his church job through conflict. In the end he was virtually down and out, his wife just managing to make ends meet.

Rowland goes on to look at what helps a pastor/minister last the distance.

Today it's both easier and harder to be a pastor. Easier, because we have more resources to help us - like the World Wide Web for sermon-material (ever used the search-engine Google as a concordance?), more support-groups to encourage and pray for us, better access to the world's practical theology experts, and a higher standard of living, on average, than pastors have ever enjoyed.

But it's also harder. Many of us can identify with the apostle Paul who said, 'Who is equal to such a task?', about his own call to pastoral ministry. These days the expectations of our people are higher - and more likely to be expressed vigorously. Up-front leaders and speakers compete with dynamic personalities on television. There are more 'religious' people not attending churches (in the West) than ever before in history. Our people are likely to be better-educated - and differently-educated than we are. 'One size fits all' doesn't work any more: people are more mobile, and brand-loyalty doesn't work for Generation X'ers (those born since 1965) - or even Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964).

He offers a number of suggestions over several articles (I've only listed the first few here, as the others run comfortably on from the one before.)

1. Jesus as the model for ministry
2. Spiritual formation -keeping on bel
3. Images of Ministry - what is yours?
4. Saint or Pharisee?
5. Keeping the Spiritual Disciplines - this point keeps turning up; is God saying something?!
6. What about the 'Call'?
the rest of the article appears in a second page:
7. Understanding yourself - how much does your family history affect your work?
8. Co-dependency - blaming others for your own faults
9. Mentors and Networks - absolutely essential!

Coming apart at the seams...

More than once, Dunedin City Baptist (the church I attend) has provided separate services for young adults (including students through to thirty-year-olds and older). Almost invariably, they've come apart at the seams. The latest edition is just about to come to an end, due to dwindling numbers.

Interestingly enough, Collin Hansen is writing about the same topic on the Out of Ur blog this week, and noting that churches that have set up separate Gen X services have generally come a cropper at some point. Part of the problem, of course, is that Gen X people eventually grow up.

But the bigger issue is that building a service around a separate 'culture' just makes it plain difficult to encourage these people into the main 'culture' whenever that time arrives. DCBC has been fortunate that many of the young people go to the main service in the morning anyway, so they're reasonably well engrafted into the church as a whole. But many other churches have never managed to integrate these younger people into their (whole) church, and at the end of the day, these people drift off, who knows where.

Here's one of the best quotes from the article, from Dan Kimball: "I feel that if we can see church as the people, and not just define church by the worship gathering, a lot would be solved in bridging generations," Kimball said. "We could focus more on the older mentoring the younger, the older opening their homes and being sages and guides to the younger. Instead we focus so much on getting the twenty-somethings into the main worship gathering. But just sitting in a room for an hour and half looking at the backs of everyone's heads does not make something intergenerational."

It takes no effort to agree with this. My boss has a saying: the whole church resourcing the whole church. This applies here, too: the whole church, young and old, serving/resourcing the whole church, young and old. The young have gifts, the old have gifts. Let's share them around, rather than separate them off.