Peter Drucker, one of the world’s greatest leadership experts, once identified the four most challenging jobs in the world: the president of the United States, a university president, a hospital CEO, and a pastor. While I have not held the first three positions, I have served as a pastor for over 35 years. This role is demanding, and it is essential for leaders to prioritize their spiritual well-being. Consider these eight ways to refresh your tired soul.
1. Engage in activities outside of ministry. Pastors often spend their free time preoccupied with ministry-related thoughts and pursuits. To counter this, find a hobby entirely removed from your professional life. For example, I found taking improv classes to be incredibly rejuvenating. When a world-weary leadership refresh is needed, stepping away entirely can be your most productive move.
2. Prioritize self-care without guilt. Pete Scazzero, an expert in emotionally healthy spirituality, learned the importance of self-maintenance through experience. He emphasizes that pastoral rest as leadership renewal is not a luxury, but a necessity for long-term effectiveness and ministry health.
“The degree to which you love yourself corresponds to the degree to which you love others. Caring for ourselves was difficult for us to do without feeling guilty. We unwittingly thought that dying to ourselves for the sake of the gospel meant dying to marital intimacy and joy in life. We had died to something God had never intended we die to.”
3. Keep healthy boundaries with others. A boundary is a line that helps define those things for which we are responsible. They define who we are and who we are not; when properly managed they can bring us great freedom with others in our churches. I recommend Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s bestseller Boundaries for better understanding.
4. Lighten up and laugh more often (not at others’ expense, though). Current research on how humor affects leadership has discovered that the most effective leaders use humor more often than less effective ones. (Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, Primal Leadership, 34).
5. Build relationships with no ministry purpose in mind. Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message Bible paraphrase said:
“Pastors can lose touch with relational vitality when their relationships are driven by programmatic necessity. When this happens, pastors can lose the context for love, hope, faith, touch and a kind of mutual vulnerability. In the midst of the congregation, pastors become lonely and feel isolated—and that isolation can be deadly to pastoral life. Those are the conditions in which inappropriate intimacies flourish.”
6. Take care of your body through exercise, healthy eating and adequate sleep.
7. Master technology, don’t let it master you. I’m a techno geek. I was one of the original Mac owners and I use an iPhone and an iPad. I love electronic gadgets. I’m on Facebook. I tweet, text, email and blog. I’ve found, however, that technology can easily enslave me. It’s a battle yet when I control my technology, I’m more at peace. Interestingly, research has shown that the average worker is interrupted every eleven minutes and takes 25 minutes to refocus back on his job. I found that to be generally true in my life when I compulsively check email.
8. Periodically take a solo retreat. Occasionally I’ve taken a night and a day at a local retreat center. I’m usually the only one there. When I go, I think, pray, plan, write and study. Those periodic getaways refresh my soul and help break me from the rigors of ministry, resetting my focus to respond appropriately to the stresses ministry brings.
What has helped add life to your soul as a pastor?
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This article originally appeared on CharlesStone.com and is reposted here by permission.
