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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
How to keep going when the knives are out at church? - with Brian Croft and Matthew Spander Davison
The call to ministry is a call to lay down your life for others, but how do we create a well-thought-out roadmap toward pastoral perseverance - when there are external and/or internal difficulties?
How do we approach congregational conflict, criticism, unrealistic expectations or personal health, financial and family stress?
Why is pastoral friendship not optional, but essential?
Today on The Pastor’s Heart, there’s advice for pastors who feel isolated and are feeling like quitting.
Brian Croft leads Practical Shepherding in Louisville Kentucky.
Matthew Spandler Davison also lives in Louisville, serves with Practical Shepherding, and as an executive director of 20 Schemes, Church in Hard Places in Scotland as well as the preaching pastor for Redeemer Fellowship in Bardstown, Kentucky.
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pastoral perseverance. How do we hold on when we feel like letting go? Brian croft and matthew spandler davison are our guests. It is the pastor's heart, it's dominic steel and we are talking about staying, enduring and thriving. The call to ministry, it's a call to lay down one's life for others. But how do we create a well-thought-out roadmap towards pastoral perseverance? Today we're facing the barriers to perseverance with two leaders in that field. Brian Croft leads Practical Shepherding in Louisville, kentucky, and Matthew Spandler-Davison he also lives in Louisville, he's with Practical Shepherding and also serves as Executive Director of 20 Schemes churches in hard places in Scotland. Between them there's a stack of books and articles. They're on a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand and this Saturday speaking in New Zealand on persevering in ministry, and we've got them here to talk to them about that. Brian, thanks for coming in and, if I could start with you, your pastor's heart for pastors who are struggling to persevere. It really has its origins in a moment when you were struggling to persevere.
Speaker 2:Very much Thanks for having me. And yeah, I was a pastor for 25 years and did eight years of associate pastor work in some really hard ministry contexts. Then I went to be the lead pastor of a Baptist church in Louisville, Kentucky, where I still live, and I was the pastor there for 17 years. But I went into a church that I was told would be difficult. But I didn't realize how difficult it would be the first five years.
Speaker 1:I was there. Why did you go to a church when they said I'm just imagining it? What's my pitch to get you, as a pastor, to come? This is going to be hard.
Speaker 2:Well, the committee trying to hire me didn't tell me that. It was people around who knew the reputation of the church. That came to me concerned. But it even became harder than we thought. So there were three different attempts to fire me. In the first five years at the church there were threats of violence against me by church members. The pastoral search team that hired me had all left the church within three years of me being at the church.
Speaker 2:I was in my early thirties after that five years and my health started to tank. I had health issues that showed up that doctors had trouble diagnosing until they had heard about all the stress that I had endured the first five years of the church there. So it was a very intense, difficult time and that's where I really learned how I didn't know how to care for myself. I didn't know how to care for my own heart and the effect that that had on. There was a cost to it.
Speaker 2:But it was out of those difficult years in the ministry that I really learned some of these principles that we talk about in our ministry that we're convinced every pastor needs to be able to not just survive but actually thrive and flourish. And our church in year six. After those five years God just turned the church and the church flourished really for the next decade. So a lot of the lessons I learned in those really hard years was able to not only apply for my own life I could hopefully thrive as a pastor but it's carried over and become the core really of practical shepherding.
Speaker 1:We'll push into those in a moment. I was just talking to you before and you were telling me we won't name this church but a church you have been engaged with here in Australia, and really what a horror story that pastor has been through.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it just reminded me Everywhere I travel all over the world, and this is my first time in Australia, and it doesn't matter the country, I mean, he was locked out of the building, you said for six months, and running services in the backyard.
Speaker 2:It was a wild story. I'd never heard such a wild story and I hear a lot of crazy stories like this just that pastors go in and try to in a sense, take on maybe a small group in the church that has held a stranglehold on a church for many decades. And oftentimes pastors go in and try to do faithful ministry, preach the gospel, try to shepherd and care for people, and the enemy just doesn't like that.
Speaker 2:And it's amazing how things happen and that pastors experience things in those very difficult, hard places that really no training prepares you for. So the need for us to know ourselves and know how to care for ourselves, to know how our heart is being affected, and it is crucial to be able to continue and persevere.
Speaker 1:Matthew, we've been Facebook friends for quite a long time and I've been watching you go through some, watching you from the other side of the world and praying for you from the other side of the world go through some extraordinary, difficult personal times. Do you want to just share some of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so my perseverance story is in many ways so different to Brian's because I've had a church that's a loving church, sweet church that has cared really well for me. So my challenge hasn't been persevering in a church that I love, it's more just persevering myself in terms of my own weakness and struggles with health battles. So I appreciate your prayers for certain the last three or four weeks, largely because of ministry, so sicknesses that I picked up along the way, whether it's preaching in slums outside of Cuba or picking up different parents' sites and so forth.
Speaker 3:I can't even remember the name of it, but wild and terrible sickness yeah so I was in Cuba and preaching outside in a slum in havana, cuba, a little over a year ago and came home very sick actually got diagnosed with dysentery. I didn't believe that was still a thing anymore, but apparently it is in cuba. Uh, so, dysentery and a few other bacterial infections, but the the result of that was uh, I mean I didn't know if you were going to leave.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, we didn't know, we didn't either yeah, so there was always in icu for many nights and, um yeah, just feeling my life slipping away and being able to hold on, to hope in in the midst of that to take us to what was going on in your head and your heart and as I mean, I guess you're coming in and out of consciousness and stuff like that yeah, I mean it was, and you probably spent some time processing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much. What was God?
Speaker 3:doing. Yeah, I mean, so you get taken from a hospital and you wake up in the emergency room and they're doing CPR on you. I mean it's a terrifying experience, and then you don't know if you're going to make it out and I was by myself. I was in another place, another country, another city, my wife had to fly in and, uh, just feeling very, very much alone in those moments. But but I think what, what struck me and what was comforting to me, that, even though this was terrifying and I felt alone, I did feel a sense of you know, lord, if this is it, I'm, I'm okay with that.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, you don't know how you're gonna deal with your last moments. You don't know how you're going to deal with your last moments. You don't know how you're going to respond in those seconds when it's touch and go. But the faith, that's really a good test of our faith and that was surprisingly reassuring to me, that the Lord in that moment not only was with me but was enough and that kind of allowed me to press on. So, as Paul says, to live is Christ, die is gain, and some of those moments, in a very tangible way, I felt a bit of that that allowed me to keep fighting but also to keep trusting the Lord. I think it's so much harder on my wife and my church and people that felt very uncertain about what might happen beyond that, I mean.
Speaker 1:I was kind of taken aback and shocked by some of these photos of you with tubes and all that kind of thing on Facebook and then, as life does, life moved on and you dropped out of my consciousness that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:But tell us about the journey back, and the journey back with god and I mean lamentations has been a big part of your, your life there yeah, so actually a couple years prior to that I lost my voice, so I was in a car accident and had to have a surgery on my spinal cord and it severed the nerve ending to my vocal cord, so my vocal cord is paralyzed. So just prior to that I was dealing with and you're a preacher- and I was a preacher.
Speaker 3:I was waking up from that surgery without a voice and wondering what use is a preacher or a pastor who can't speak or preach? And that experience really led me to, I think, a dark place of despair, discouragement, maybe depression through that, because my whole world felt like it was collapsing and I had no control and no ability to get myself back up again. And that's what led me to Lamentations, lamentations three. I was actually preaching through Lamentations during that season, but Lamentations three, you got actually preaching through Lamentations during that season. But Lamentations 3, you've got Jeremiah seeing his whole world collapsed, the city being ransacked, the nation being taken into exile, and him giving voice to the pain, the trauma, the anguish, the uncertainty. And then he says all hope is gone.
Speaker 3:But then, in the middle of Lamentations 3, but my hope is in the Lord, whose steadfast love endures forever and His mercies are new every morning. That he is my portion and to great is His faithfulness. And just being reminded of that as I'm going through what felt like the most horrific and uncertain of trials, just reminding myself that my hope isn't in the fact, my hope isn't in my healing, my hope isn't in my healing, my hope isn't in my voice, my hope isn't in my ministry. My hope isn't in my ability to preach. I get great joy out of all those things, but my hope is in the steadfast love of the Lord, which endures forever.
Speaker 3:And I needed to be reminded of that because even for those of us in ministry, we can forget where our hope, our true hope, really lies. We can make our ministry ministry. We can forget where our hope, our true hope, really lies. We can make our ministry into our life. It's, it becomes everything, and you take it away and you realize, you know the love, the love of the Lord endures forever and that's where our hope lies. And we're better. We're better ministers, pastors, preachers every time we get reminded of that. So so that kind of prepared me for what was the storm that was on the horizon, which was just lying in the ICU bed.
Speaker 3:And the death of your dad, kind of coming up Dad dying in the midst of that from COVID and just yeah. So I truly felt my whole world was crashing down around me. But the one thing that never changed, I never doubted, was both the love of the Lord, certainly the love of my family, but also the church. The way that church cared for me and my family through that was so sweet.
Speaker 1:Brian, you were watching because you're a mate of Matthew's. You were watching him walk through all of this and talking to him about it at the time.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm not sure if you're trying to make me cry, but every time I talk about this, though it's hard, it takes me back, me cry, but, um, uh, every time I talk about this, though it's it's hard, it takes me back.
Speaker 2:When I hear him talk about it, it kind of stirs those, uh, those affections and emotions again.
Speaker 2:To watch your friend walk through all this stuff which I was around for, uh, all of it and um, and it was incredibly difficult to watch. And yet, um, to watch somebody you love deeply go through so much just kind of suffering over and over again and the things that again, as he's talking about, I mean a preacher losing his voice, I mean that's. I don't think anybody can anticipate what that would be like until you face it. And then to watch him persevere in the midst of all of that and have a strong faith and yet be able to express honestly his questioning and just doesn't understand these things. To look back on those last couple of years and all that he's been through In fact I've shared with him on numerous occasions I think that God is uniquely using him now, simply because of the way he embraced his weakness and Christ rose up strong, and I think people experience that when he talks about these things now, certainly when he speaks and speaks to other pastors and challenges and encourages them to press on even in the midst of facing suffering.
Speaker 1:Let's press into that issue of being weak and being vulnerable in our preaching and teaching, and I'll just put a thought out and then get both of you to react to it. I think, as I've done the preaching and teaching, my hunch is that I've been more vulnerable in the pulpit than many of my peers many of my peers, and particularly recently, last five, eight, ten years but I've been able to do that from a position of, if you like, strength, in that I've got a leadership team that's united behind me here. I'm feeling safe, all of that kind of thing. There was a point I don't know, 2010, 11, that kind of time when our church was really going through a really divided season and I kind of knew that in order to be effective as a minister of Christ Jesus, I needed to be sharing what God was doing in my life. And yet I didn't want to be vulnerable in the pulpit when I felt like there were people who were out there critical of me. And so can you just talk about that? I'll maybe start with you, brian.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, yeah, I certainly felt that in the early years of my own ministry, when you have people who are literally trying to remove you as pastor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you don't want to say I'm weak in any area.
Speaker 2:You do not. I mean just be. It would fuel the fire it would give them. It's not a safe environment to be vulnerable. And so I remember being challenged in that, just struggling, feeling the tension you just articulated I and so I remember being challenged in that, just struggling, feeling the tension you just articulated. I need to be able to be myself and be vulnerable, and yet a fear of just anything I say being weaponized against me. What I eventually learned and certainly grew to be able to embrace this more.
Speaker 2:I think it's very important and helpful and an important part of our ministry to be open and honest and vulnerable to the degree that we feel comfortable doing. I'm convinced that because pastors so often put a facade that they don't struggle like everybody else, even unintentionally at times, I'm convinced that our congregations don't think that the pastor struggles like they do unless we remind them that we do so. I think the need to be vulnerable is really important. Otherwise the congregation thinks that we're separated from them in that way and I think it opens up all kinds of ministry. When we're vulnerable, you stand up and say that you battle anxiety issues as a pastor and somebody in the congregation had no idea they may show up at your office the next week going. I actually think I can talk to him about this in a way.
Speaker 1:I didn't, and I think it just blows wide open the doors of ministry that exists, that I don't think does exist, when we put on this facade like we have it all together and we don't struggle like they do. What about the problem of, I mean, I remember being vulnerable about a sin, about pride, and really somebody saying, I mean it was a long time ago, well, you should resign, do you? Know, that's the worst of all, do you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you have to be willing to take a risk.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's really not the ability.
Speaker 2:You can't be vulnerable without being willing to take a risk, and I think that's the tension you feel is matter of fact, I've heard pastors who will be open and vulnerable in a sermon, share maybe a personal story, and they'll actually have a church member say to them I feel like I know more about you more than I want to know about you, and there's that tension that some people don't want to know their pastor is like them.
Speaker 2:They almost want to put us on a pedestal, and so I think you have to realize the tension exists, but I would certainly argue the risk is worth it and I think also to do it in appropriate ways. I think pastors think it's got to be an all or nothing. I either have to lay out all my sins in front of you and tell everybody about it, or I don't tell you anything about them. And what I encourage pastors to do is look within your context, to whatever level you're comfortable. Then you can share vulnerable things to some degree that you're comfortable doing. That can be effective and helpful in your ministry without telling everybody everything that you're struggling with all the time and I think that balance is important, matthew.
Speaker 3:Yes, I do think obviously this could be a level of caution. We know of men who are very gifted pastors and faithful leaders who opened up about a particular challenge and it was weaponized against them by certain individuals or groups in the church and they ended up having to leave the church because of it. So you obviously have a level of discernment and caution about who you're vulnerable with. But I would say, if you're not at the stage yet in your ministry where you can be vulnerable, truly vulnerable from the pulpit, you've at least got to be vulnerable somewhere.
Speaker 3:The tendency, the danger, is that we hide. We hide what we're struggling with, we hide what we're wrestling with. We hide what we're struggling with. We hide what we're wrestling with, we hide what we're truly feeling and I think that actually makes you more vulnerable uh to uh, to, to falling away from, to to um, giving up, to failing to persevere because you're not getting the help and the support and the prayer, uh, that you're going to need to, to, to play the long game in ministry. So if you can't be vulnerable in your pulpit or to your own congregation, at least have some men or some people in your life that you can feel that you can be truly open with and seek good counsel and wisdom from you've talked about um three men carrie, ward and marshman.
Speaker 1:Tell us about them yeah, so, so.
Speaker 3:So when you talk about perseverance, there are really three things that I think people pastors particularly struggle with when it comes to perseverance. One is opposition that you guys have faced in in your ministry. Where can I persevere in the midst of this opposition, taking this weakness, which is what I've struggled with physical weakness, personal weakness, having to confront that and seek the support in doing so? I think the third one is loneliness, and often pastors are very lonely, insecure. Open that up for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think sometimes pastors struggle to make good friends, to know how to have good friends in their life, particularly when they Lots of co-collaborators.
Speaker 3:Yeah, lots of people in life. But it's a strange profession, if you want to call it a profession, where the people closest to you in your life are also the ones that you're accountable to. And they're accountable to you in terms of the people that you know to and they're accountable to you In terms of the people that you know they're going to be open to you about some of their biggest struggles and they expect you to speak into it. But if you're open to them about yours, then all of a sudden that becomes complicated. And so you know, if you have a day job in an office somewhere and the people working next to you aren't going to open up about all their life struggles immediately or think that you need to have an opinion about it, and neither could they fire you if you did have an opinion about it.
Speaker 3:And so something about ministry, where we are naturally on guard. But that could, if we're not careful, lead to a place where we isolate ourselves, become lonely, feeling insecure. The longer we're in ministry sometimes, the more insecure we can feel because of ministry. Tell me about that. The longer we're in ministry sometimes, the more insecure we can feel because of ministry.
Speaker 1:Tell me about that, the longer we're in ministry, the more insecure we can feel.
Speaker 3:Because you look behind and there's wreckage of lost friendships along the way. People that you open up to are opened up to you and they've left, they've walked away, they've moved away and you're still standing and you're still there and you look back and begin to wonder who are my true friends? Who are the people going to be with me for the long haul? Who are the ones going to fight for me and not turn against me? And I think a lot of pastors really struggle to develop close, meaningful, long-lasting friendships. So the the William Carey story is you know, he goes, goes on the mission field, but he goes and he takes with him two brothers, two good friends of his. One is a school teacher, one is a printer. And the three of them have this covenant together where they are basically going to sacrifice everything for each other, are going to fight for each other, are going to be loyal to each other. So when opposition comes against them which it did on the mission field, often from other missionaries these three men stood firm together, encourage each other, pray for each other and they're able to persevere and do great ministry side by side.
Speaker 3:I think every pastor has to have. Who are those men in my life. They may not be yet men in your own church. Over time, you'd hope that they would be people in your own congregation who are going to be those who are, who're going to lovingly walk with you through through struggle, through trial, um, and celebrate with you the joys of life as well, um. But if you're not actively pursuing it and if you're not that yourself, others. So we have to be good friends to others as well and learn how to do that, uh and so, yeah. So the isolation and insecurity in ministry is often what leads many men to walk away from the church of a ministry altogether, just because it becomes really painful.
Speaker 1:Can I just get you to push into that wreckage of friendships line?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I agree. In fact it's ideal if you can find some of those friendships in your church. I'll push back and say I think it's harder, it's rare even. I think those kinds of friendships that Matthew's articulating really come from other pastors outside your own church and you form these friendships with other men that I think that's what helps the complexity Matthew's talking about gets eliminated a bit when you have a pastor who is your friend. You're not serving together in the same church. It's totally based on friendship and yet a pastor understands what a pastor goes through.
Speaker 2:So I believe pastoral friendship is really kind of the forgotten piece of a persevering ministry, of having a long ministry. I know very few pastors that are able to do ministry a long time without some kind of close, personal, safe friendship that knows what it's like to be you and go through what you go through and to foster that ministry relationship, especially among men and fellow elders and pastors in the church, can be very transactional. We can do a ton of ministry together and yet the relationship remains transactional. We have a relationship because of all this ministry we do in our church remains transaction. We, we, we have a relationship because of all this ministry we do in our church and so I'll get you know.
Speaker 2:I'll get asked to come into meet with a group of elders and just kind of team building type conversations and things, and they're kind of shocked by what I start with that they're usually expect me to come in and say okay, so how how many hours do you pray or how you know, how much are you reading the Bible together?
Speaker 2:And those and of course those are important things. I'll usually start by saying are you all friends? Do you all like each other? Do you spend time with each other outside of doing ministry and just fostering that relationship of trust? Because I'm convinced, when hard things come, when disagreements come among leaders, and in the same church particularly, and in the same church particularly, the thing that's going to help you get through that is the fact that you have a friendship, an organic trust of each other and a love for each other. That gives you, each other, the benefit of the doubt in hard conversations and that's really where the leaders of a church come together. And likewise, when you have pastor friends outside your own church, that becomes a very, I think, safe place to be open and vulnerable and help and also someone outside the church to come in and be able to care for you if need be.
Speaker 1:Do you find people say I'm just spending, as a pastor, all my relational time with the people that I'm shepherding, and now I'm full. I just want to go off and be an introvert.
Speaker 2:I don't want to so true.
Speaker 1:Okay, doctor, what's your prescription?
Speaker 2:Well, I can really relate to what you're saying because I'm an extrovert so I loved being with people and had a high capacity for that for a lot of years. So my heart goes out to the introverts, who you know, who who continue trying to love their folks but maybe don't have as much capacity to be able to do that. And one of the things that hit me is several years ago, all of a sudden I found myself having limited capacity. I could I could only do that so much, even as an extrovert getting older and just all the years of ministry. And what I think the solution is is to real.
Speaker 2:A part of caring for our own heart is to recognize our humanity, our limitations those are okay, that's how God made us and to do what we can to be with people to the level we can't push ourselves to do that, but how we care for our own soul, that go to that quiet still.
Speaker 2:I think silence and stillness is one of the most important disciplines in a pastor's life and doing the things that actually fills up the cup of our soul. So we actually have something to pour out for people. Most pastors are functioning on empty and they're trying to pour out from a place where there's nothing and they're trying to pour out from a place where there's nothing, so caring for our own soul and our own heart doing those things, and a lot of times it's going off and being alone and by ourselves, away from people, just alone with the Lord. There's so many beautiful examples in the Gospels of how the Gospel writers highlight how Jesus in a moment dismissed the crowds, sent his disciples ahead and went to the mountain to be alone and pray and was there for an extended amount of time. I find it interesting how the gospel writers actually highlight that he's been, he's there for a limp, for a certain amount of time. It's not quick, it's, it's slow and and I think it's it's a model for us, that on how we care for ourselves as well.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to reflectively listen to your prescription. I think you're saying less time in ministry, more time alone with God and more time developing friendships with other pastors.
Speaker 2:And a balance of all of those things. I think that's the key is when we want to work hard in the ministry, we want to be with our people, like that's the heart of what we do. We got to find a way to balance out these other things friendship and alone time with the Lord and having those things as part of it as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's go to a word to younger Matthew from Matthew. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It was just even just talking about friendship. I think sometimes, as pastors make the mistake of making every interaction into a meeting, like I'm going to meet with this friend so we can talk about this Like um. I think we just lose sight of that friends, so we can talk about this like um. I think we just lose side effect. The normal friendship is just sitting and just having a chat and just having, with no agenda, no, no meeting. No, uh, just hanging out. You know, I think we're uh, sometimes you feel guilty just for having fun, you know, just doing things that are fun and, uh, entertaining and enjoyable.
Speaker 3:I think that could be life-giving, uh in in many ways. And and finding what? What is that in be life-giving in many ways? And finding what is that in your life? And I think I struggled with that early on in ministry. I was so busy and so driven that everything had to have a purpose in life and ministry and I realized I don't know if I am a good friend and I don't know if I know even how to have fun anymore and just have to peel back some of those layers and just feel okay about just switching off and enjoying time with other people.
Speaker 1:I think the congregation wants you to be a fun person who has friends do you know?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Rather than the person you just described, and I think perhaps all of us struggle to be that person because in the end, we're so driven.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think perhaps all of us struggle to be that person because in the end we're so driven. Yeah, I think there's perhaps even a low-key sense of guilt about it.
Speaker 1:I want people to see me to be working all the time see me to be and you think that because you do, there's a tension of if I come across as a slacker, there's a tension of if I come across as a slacker, then people won't want to put their shoulder to the wheel to help grow the kingdom here, and they won't want to give if they're thinking I'm slack. It's such a paradox, and so I do feel driven to work hard, and yet I end up doing things that make my life unsustainable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and often and we've talked about how some of the physical weaknesses we feel is often down to mental struggles that we're having in terms of stress and not being able to switch off and rest and relax, or feeling guilty about taking that day off and going for that walk and just having spending an enjoyable time with friends and actually there's something intentional about rest. So rest is simply being lazy and resting but being lazy is is just disengaging and switching off. Resting is actually engaging. As I am, I'm going to intentionally rest by doing this to, to restore my soul, to, to strengthen my hand, to strengthen the work.
Speaker 1:Just as we were sitting down for coffee before we came in here, you're both just saying your youngest child has graduated from high school, and I mean one of my observations is, it was the case when we had teenagers at home that rest time actually was pretty much investing in the kids. That's right, whereas now that they're off our hands, we've actually got to creatively think about what to do for rest time.
Speaker 2:You want to riff on that, brian? That's right. Sure, I agree, and that's been interesting too. I think that pastors, when they'll come to me and they're burnt out, they're depressed, and again they're depressed, and again they're expecting some hyper-spiritual conversation we're going to have. I usually ask them two things. Initially, I'll say how much sleep do you get at night and what do you do for fun? And they have no idea why. Those are the questions that I'm asking initially.
Speaker 2:But the sleep, obviously a big part of just our life, and the need to take care of ourselves. But having a hobby, having something that's fun outside of ministry having, I actually think this is not just okay. I think it's essential to have that for us to be equipped to do our ministry well, and so many pastors have nothing else outside of their own ministry. So we have this desire to work hard. The problem is we just work all the time and we don't have anything else in our life. And the human I just think the human soul, the way we were created, is to be able to have fun things and life-giving things and joyful things in our life. So one of the things I'm experiencing is taking up some new hobbies, as I have this.
Speaker 1:Yeah what you doing, what are your hobbies?
Speaker 2:I have all kinds of hobbies actually.
Speaker 1:I hope to see it.
Speaker 2:Well, big sports guy, so I love watching sports and playing sports and those kinds of things, but hiking, bike riding, those kinds of things. But here's one that I've gotten into. I'm 50 years old, turn 51, god willing, next month, and I've gotten into planting flowers. Never thought that would be something I would enjoy, but just I'm slowing down. Love to be outside in God's creation. I'm a creative person, so it's looking and seeing the beauty and all of a sudden I started finding myself going. I'm going to start planting some flowers in my house, and so who knew? But I get a lot of joy in that.
Speaker 1:I have got into cooking with Chet GPT. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2:But what I would. There's so many important things. I think that's good for my soul. That then rejuvenates me to go do what God's called me to. And I think the deception is pastors think I'll be most productive if I just do this all the time, and I just think it's a deception. I think what if you care for your, take time to care for yourself? I think that's what when I see Jesus go to the mountain to pray and be alone with the Father and rest. I think he knew something we didn't that. What if we're more useful to the Lord after we've actually done things like that Instead of thinking? Working all the time is how we serve the lord best.
Speaker 1:Matthew mental health.
Speaker 3:Um just take me there um, I'm not in the flower planting phase of my life yet, but just wait might get there eventually um, uh, yeah, it is.
Speaker 3:It means in ministry there's so many uh wounds that we can carry carry from either people who've wounded us along the way or struggles that we've had to endure along the way and and that can play play it all on on your own mental health in terms of sleeplessness. So I've struggled with insomnia myself, even following some of the the medical experience I've had. There's a level of trauma, you know, waking up and thinking am I still in that ICU unit? Do I still hear those beeps from that?
Speaker 3:They still come to you, you hear them yeah yeah, there's particularly some moments when I wake up in the middle of the night, almost like some night terrors, and that insomnia, that sleeplessness, begins to affect your ability to do the work that you're called to do. And so just taking that seriously and getting the help that you need and acknowledging that you know. So we're talking here about persevering as a pastor, but we also got to recognize that a pastor that's thriving is a benefit to the whole church. It's not just for our sake, right, it's not just for the sake of the ministry that we're called to do, and so if I care about my church, I should also care about my ability to persevere as their shepherd and as their pastor as well, and this isn't just self-serving or self-seeking.
Speaker 3:This is ultimately what we're called to do as under shepherds of the congregation the Lord has granted us. So yeah, mental health talking openly about the struggles we have, recognizing when we're not getting the rest that we need. If we are dealing with levels of insecurity or struggling with, maybe, anxiety, then just being open and honest about those struggles I have so many more questions, but we are out of time.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for coming and sharing with us today. My guests on the Pastor's Heart are Matthew Spandler-Davison, who lives in Louisville and he's with Practical Shepherding and serves as Executive Director of 20 Schemes Church in Hard Places in Scotland, and Brian Croft, who leads the Practical Shepherding Ministry in Kentucky. My name's Dominic Steele. This has been the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
