Tonight I (Jeff) talked to my friend. It’s been over twenty years since we’ve talked. Maybe twenty-five. Either way, it’s been so long we don’t even remember. Within sixty seconds we picked it right back up, laughing, joking, using the insider language that was a part of our dorm communication. We remembered the olive parties. It was priceless. My good friend is planning a pastor’s retreat. It will be an intimate gathering of pastors, only about twenty of us. It will be intense, concentrated into three days. It will be spiritual, honest, and fun. Some of us will know others; we will likely all make new friends. Most of us are pastors. Most of us are 200church pastors. A couple of us are lay leaders in our church.
Me and my friend had a great conversation. He is pastoring a church of 75 people. It is the church his family grew up in. It has changed hundreds of lives over the years, maybe thousands. He and his brother are both pastors today. We talked about the challenge of pastoring a 200church. We also talked about the importance of having smaller churches in communities and neighborhoods, churches that people can connect with easily and personally. Our churches are needed! Thinking about this pastor’s retreat made me think about the importance of community as pastors, community with other pastors who can both know us and understand us. It takes one to know one, right? I wondered tonight after we talked – “How many of our 200churches friends have other pastors in their lives that they can confide in, talk to, get help from, or just spend meaningful time with?” I think about the women pastors who listen to the podcast or read the blog. I wonder – “Is it harder for female pastors to find other pastors to confide in, talk to, or get help from, since most pastors are men?” I know way too little about the struggles of women pastors. I plead ignorance! Have mercy on me ladies. The truth is, I have not gotten together with a group of pastors quite like this in about seven years. It’s been too long. We need the connections we can make with other pastors who can be our friends. We need the challenge, the confidentiality, and the chance to be ourselves around other pastors who want to be themselves. If you’ve listened to our podcast from this week, Episode 61, you know that I have Steve here in my church. I can be me around Steve. The truth is, I can be me around a lot of people in my church, on my board, and in my small group. We are intentionally trying to build a church characterized by this statement: Authentic Relationships With God & Others 24/7. But I’m aware that not all of you have those kinds of relationships. If my church people read this post, they might think “Why doesn’t Jeff feel like he can just be himself around us?!” Well, I do. Mostly. But you pastors know what I mean. We need to spend some time, at some point, with our own. With other pastors. You and I know this: We are strange life forms! Normal humanoid carbon units are not always able to understand us. :) How about you? Where can you go to find fellowship, help, authentic community, a listening ear, or wise counsel? Not many of us are blessed to have these relationships already baked into our lives. We have to be intentional and deliberate about finding them. If you need help, encouragement, or counsel – look around. Who is there in your region that you could approach? Perhaps another pastor in your community needs that friendship and support even more than you do but you just don’t know it. Maybe he or she doesn’t know it either. Take a chance. Step into a risk. Make a call or visit. Be real, talk honestly, reach out. God wants you to be supported and encouraged. He is community, right, so he wants us to be in community both with our Triune God and with each other as shepherds and elders. Have you done this? Where do you find your support? Leave a comment on this post below and tell us how you find help, support, fellowship, and encouragement. Talk to us, and let’s talk to each other. Jonny and I were talking this week about how different mentorship is today from thirty years ago. I had listened to a podcast episode on Entrepreneur On Fire, episode 467. John Lee Dumas talks with Norm Bour about how the generations interact. It’s a fascinating conversation that you could listen to here. As I listened to it, I thought of Jonny and me. I am a baby boomer, and he is a millennial. We have forged a wonderful partnership. We both have strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully we complement each other, at least generationally. He has an understanding of his culture and a desire to change the world. I have experience and wisdom, and a desire to change the oil every 3K miles. Okay, and the world!
But seriously now folks… there are some very obvious differences between mentorship today and mentorship thirty years ago. Here are three: The first of the obvious differences in mentorship between today and thirty years ago is the ability for mentoring to go both ways. When I was twenty, my mentor would tell me what was up. He would tell me how things were, what I should think, do, say, and how I should act. He told me what to believe and, if I was lucky, why. I was the mentee, the newbie, the greenhorn, the Mr. Wet-Behind-The-Ears. I was just supposed to listen, and learn. Today, millennials can mentor up. We allow that. We let them. The boomers know that they don’t know everything, and they allow the millennials to mentor them in areas where they themselves are sharp. This humility on the part of the mentor is a very good thing. It allows both parties to go, as Andy Stanley says, further faster. A second difference is that we don’t expect millennials to be perfect. We want them to make mistakes. Doggone it, we expect them to! We know they will, and when they do, it’s okay. And they don’t expect us as mentors to be perfect either. It’s all good here – we learn from each other’s successes and failures. It’s okay, we don’t even have to take a chill pill! Thirty years ago weakness and failure was a bad thing. You wanted, and needed, to get it right. That kind of pressure is much less today. A third difference is that the Internet has leveled the playing field. We both have enormous access to unlimited information. We don’t have all the special tapes, workbooks, and handouts in our office waiting to let them out piecemeal to our mentees. Nope. They have it all already. It’s all online. So the playing field is quite level in terms of information access and appropriation. So, mentoring goes both ways, neither of us has to be perfect, and we both have unlimited access to information and growth. How about your mentoring relationships? Maybe you don’t even use the “mentor” vocabulary, and that’s okay. How are you doing training and raising up the next generation of leaders? Can I encourage you to engage the millennials? Get to know them, work with them, and learn from them. It’s truly a great partnership – one that will keep your 200church from stagnancy and complacency, and if you're like Jonny and me, it will provide a few fireworks as well!
Merry Christmas from Jonny and Jeff to YOU and YOUR FAMILY! We are finishing up our first year of the 200churches Podcast and we could not be more happy and fulfilled! We've been able to share our hearts with you and encourage you as another small church pastor - and we hope that our blog and podcast has been exactly that - ENCOURAGING!
Today is Christmas Day, and we give you the final installment of our very long conversation with Dan "The Man" Reiland, aka, The Pastor's Coach. We used Dan's book, Amplified Leadership, as the basis for five podcast episodes, and if you haven't read it yet, click here and buy it for Kindle on Amazon. It would make a great pastoral ministry project for you for 2014 - to read and implement its principles into your 200church ministry. Read it with your ministerial group or pastor's fellowship and grow together!
We reference a short video by Michael Hyatt in this episode, where he explains the power of S.M.A.R.T. goals. You can find that by clicking here or on the picture below. We said on last week's episode that everyone knows what S.M.A.R.T. goals are, so we did not want to spend time talking about them. Then this week we received Michael Hyatt's video and we knew we needed to share it with you! PLEASE NOTE, this link is to Michael's landing page for his course called "5 Days To Your Best Year Ever." He offers three free videos and the second video is a great description of S.M.A.R.T. goals. To get the free videos, you just have to enter your email address. Michael absolutely promotes his course on the first and last videos, and while we think it would be a great course for a leader to take, we are not promoting it, nor is this an affiliate link for Michael... just a good suggestion!
On January 3 we start back up with our regular blog posts, sharing with you through blogging in a way that will be a step up from this past year. We hope you engage us and that we can make each other better as 200church pastors. We have finished our fall semester courses and are enjoying a two-week rest from academia!
Enjoy Episode 50 with Dan Reiland. We know you will! Next week, we will have Karl Vaters join us for the first episode of the New Year... can't wait! |
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