“We are living in a moment of deep discouragement among pastors,” says Glenn Packiam, lead pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California.
Packiam, who has his doctorate in theology and ministry from Durham University, is a senior fellow at Barna Group and co-hosts The Resilient Pastor podcast. He is a songwriter and worship leader, and the author of several books, including The Resilient Pastor, Blessed Broken Given and The Intentional Year (co-authored with his wife, Holly).
As a local church pastor himself, Packiam knows the obstacles pastors currently face in their roles. These challenges include navigating a digital age, limitations on time and budgets, the expectation that pastors should be experts in multiple fields, and low credibility in the eyes of both the culture and many churchgoing Christians.
How are pastors to be resilient in such circumstances? “When I look for wisdom for the challenges of our current moment, I tend to look backward into the history and the story of the church,” Packiam explains. This tendency is evident in his latest book What’s a Christian, Anyway? which focuses on the Nicene Creed, as well as in his other work emphasizing the importance of spiritual rhythms and habits.
Packiam sat down with Outreach to discuss how being a songwriter and worship leader continues to shape his approach to pastoral ministry, why he finds inspiration in the Nicene Creed and other ancient Christian practices, and the keys to resilience in a culture that expects less and demands more from pastors every day.
How did you become a Christian, and how did you get started in ministry?
I grew up in a Christian home. I got to experience, even from a young age, the richness of many different church traditions. My parents at [one] time were part of an Anglican church in Malaysia, but they were being discipled by a Baptist pastor, so they would go to this Bible study midweek. And then they were introduced to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so they were singing some contemporary worship songs and learning to pray, and move in the gifts of the Spirit.
The call toward vocational ministry, I think, happened in several phases. Maybe the first conscious moment came when I was about 8 years old. I was at a children’s camp in Malaysia, and we had this guest speaker. She was a missionary from America, a single woman who had given her life to be a missionary to children all around the world, [an] incredible woman named Jeanette McKee.
She told these stories of David Livingstone and other missionaries, and she gave this altar call to say, “Children, do any of you feel like God is asking you to be a missionary and to glorify God with your life?” And I just have this vivid memory of going up to the front, just crying and saying, Lord, I want to live for your glory. I’ll be a missionary wherever you send me.
When I was 10, we moved to Portland, Oregon. My parents went to Bible college there. They would talk about what they were learning about the Old Testament, and we had the best conversations. I was fascinated by it. Then during my high school years, we moved back to Malaysia.
I started to get involved with worship ministry at the church [in] our youth group. I loved that. And it was during my high school years that I thought I would love to be a traveling music ministry kind of person. I ended up going [to Oral Roberts University, where I] studied theological historical studies and then was involved in the chapel worship team.
In those years, I would have said, “I want to give my life to answer the Father’s search for worshipers who worship him in spirit and in truth”—at that point, I had not yet even considered being embedded in a local church. After I graduated, I had some friends who were connected with New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the worship pastor at the time was a guy named Ross Parsley. He said, “Would you consider coming here and doing a one-year apprenticeship with me?”
At that time, I was 22. I had one or two job offers on the table. I was too big for my britches. I kind of thought, Hey, I could get a real job; why do I need an apprenticeship? But I felt called to that particular local church, and there was something I couldn’t shake about that. The wise counsel from my parents and from others was to choose a community, even if it’s not the dream job.
“When you’re living in a moment of high spiritual curiosity but low institutional trust, you have to meet people where they are, voice things from their perspective, and then speak the truth of Scripture back to those questions.”
Halfway through that year of apprenticeship, it turned into a full-time job. A year later we launched the New Life School of Worship, and I directed that for seven or eight years, which was an amazing chance to lead worship on the weekends, pastor college students, and then invest and teach in this nine-month program that was built to raise up worship leaders.
[Then] a major [metaphorical] earthquake event happened [in 2006], right around when I was 28. This was the scandal with Ted Haggard, founding pastor of New Life Church. And for me, that became a catalyst to a season of reflection, of saying, OK, God, what does it actually mean to be a local church? What does that actually mean to be a pastor?
I started reading some of Eugene Peterson’s books about pastoral ministry: Under the Unpredictable Plant, The Contemplative Pastor, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, Working the Angles. He has this whole set of books about the pastoral vocation, and my wife and I just felt so drawn to that. This in some ways felt like the antithesis of the world that we had been in, in terms of big platform, outward travel, all that stuff. It felt like the medicine we not just needed but the medicine we wanted. [Peterson] talked about pastoral ministry [being] personal and local, and we just were deeply conflicted about that.
[Through] a process of discernment with some friends, with some exercises that I worked through, it helped us make the decision that I wanted to do less and less music and more and more teaching and pastoral work. I was given the opportunity to start a Sunday night service at New Life. In 2012, [after] about two-and-a-half years of leading that Sunday night service, I was given the opportunity to launch New Life’s first offsite campus, which became New Life Downtown, and [my wife and I] had the great privilege of leading that for 10 years.
Somewhere [during] the last three to five years of that time, I was overseeing all the other lead pastors for the other congregations, along with doing staff development with the broader New Life staff. Those were great years, and in hindsight, [they] were great preparation years for the season that I’ve been in now, not only of serving as a lead pastor but also in serving other lead pastors through the Resilient Pastor initiatives.
Is there any way that being a songwriter and worship leader has affected how you do ministry as a lead pastor?
One of the ways it’s affected me is, playing in a band, I’m very comfortable with the give-and-take of collaborative leadership, of team-oriented leadership. Part of the fun process of songwriting is you’re creating something together with other people. But also, some of my favorite moments were bringing a song to the band and going, “How should we arrange this?”
Another way it shows up is, good worship leaders are always, in the moment, discerning what God is doing in the room, while at the same time trying to adapt and adjust and flow with it. You have a plan, but then you discern real time what’s happening in the room. I have found that to be such an important muscle to try to engage even in preaching. There’s an outline, there’s a plan, but there are a lot of things I don’t write down in my notes because, in the moment, in a particular service, in a particular setting, the Holy Spirit might be saying something and doing something, and you want to lean in in a particular way. Active discernment is a skill that I learned as a worship leader that gets tested and stretched and honed and refined as a pastor.
As we’re looking back on your ministry journey, if you were to take a mentorship role now toward your younger self, what advice would you give yourself?
I would say, “You need to get serious about some rhythms of intentionality.” It wasn’t until our mid-30s that my wife and I started going away on retreats once or twice a year to take an inventory of our habits and our rhythms. In The Intentional Year, we write about five key spheres of life: prayer, rest, renewal, relationships and work. To my younger self, I would say, “Take relationships seriously. Don’t just fill up your time responsively.”
You know, there’s something beautiful about pastoral care. Pastoral work is responsive to the people around you. At the same time, you need to proactively cultivate relationships of mutuality—I would say that to my younger self. I wish I had taken seriously rhythms of rest and renewal, [which are] two different things. Rest is about not working. Renewal is about the life-giving things that you do to replenish. I would have said, “Start thinking about that and taking that more seriously in your 20s and not just waiting till you’ve slid into some unhealthy habits in your 30s and then need to correct.”
Spiritual disciplines and rhythms of Christian life seem to be a prominent focus of your ministry. Why do you think that is?
When I look for wisdom for the challenges of our current moment, I tend to look backward into the history and the story of the church. And I’m drawn to this for a couple of reasons. C.S. Lewis said we can be guilty of something he called “chronological snobbery,” where we think the longer we’ve lived, history automatically moves in a line of progress. And he’s like, that’s not true. We’ve forgotten things that we once knew. He also said that we have to compare our present moment against something, and we can’t compare it against the future because we don’t know the future. So the only way to test our present moment against something is to measure it against the past.
I have found that resourcing from the heritage of the church is a beautiful way to grow individually and to grow as a community, as a church. Discovering these ancient practices—whether it’s communion or the creed or confessions—those have been anchors to our faith. I’ve been in an evangelical, nondenominational world for 25 years—and what a gift. These nondenominational, evangelical spaces are great. But sometimes we feel like we have to keep reinventing the wheel, like we have to carry the weight of everything. And there’s a great gift in saying, “Hold on. Look at this great family that we’re part of. And they’ve actually walked through some difficult stuff before us. And here [are] some practices that have helped them.”
Speaking of looking to the past, your new book, What’s a Christian, Anyway?, focuses on the Nicene Creed. Given that there are other creeds, why did you choose that one?
People often think of the Apostles Creed, and some traditions say that’s the earliest one because it’s shorter, so it’s an outline, and then the Nicene is the expanded version of that. I chose the Nicene because it says a bit more, and what it says a bit more about is Jesus. So both the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed are structured around the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But the Nicene Creed expands what it says about Jesus in a really profound way. It outlines it more or less as the eternal Son of God, the incarnate Son of God, and then the ascended and returning Son of God. What I really love about that is we’ve got to get our vision of Jesus right. If we get Jesus wrong, we get everything wrong.
Why the Nicene Creed at all? I referenced the scandal that happened at New Life back in 2006. Sadly, scandals are not just a thing of the past. They are ongoing in churches all across the country and, sadly, around the world. I do think they don’t make up the majority of churches and church leaders. There are so many faithful pastors. But because of these high-profile failings, Christians are easily getting disillusioned. One of the stats we discovered with Barna is that 45% of churchgoing Christians consider a pastor a trustworthy source of wisdom on spiritual things. This is crazy because we’re living in a moment of really high spiritual openness and spiritual curiosity post-pandemic. Very high. More than two-thirds of people, if not more, say, “Yeah, I’m spiritually open.”
But the place they go for their questions of spiritual curiosity is not necessarily a pastor or the church. There’s low institutional trust. And I think I understand that. I understand it, not only in terms of how pastors and church leaders have failed, but I understand it in terms of how the name of Christianity has been co-opted by political causes, by social causes. So people go, Ah, what’s a Christian, anyway? And the creed is an attempt to say, “Let’s go back to one of the earliest, fullest articulations of the Christian faith. Let’s go back to how it’s centered on the persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—God himself. Then let’s expand outward from there.”
“Start thinking and taking more seriously rhythms of rest and renewal. Don’t just wait until you’ve slid into some unhealthy habits and then need to correct.”
The early Christians themselves at the Council of Nicaea in the 300s were going through a moment where Christianity was spreading and popularity was replacing credibility. And they wanted to preserve the faith of the first followers of Jesus. Well, I think there is some Holy Spirit guidance there, because here we are in our age, 2025, [and] popularity has once again replaced credibility. We have [influencers who can use their platforms] for ill or for harm. So the creed is a way to kind of hang on to something and help us find our way home.
I think it does three very specific things. One, the creed is like a purifier. It helps us go, You know what? This is not everything there is to say, but it is the irreducible minimum of Christianity. This is the purifier. It cannot be less than this. It helps us cut away [lesser] things that we’ve given ultimate importance to.
It’s also a unifier. It helps us remember, especially us nondenominational folks, that we didn’t invent this, that we don’t stand alone, that we belong to a large global and historical family. But then thirdly, my favorite thing about the creed is it’s a magnifier. It puts the spotlight where it should be—not on a celebrity pastor, not on a famous individual—it puts the spotlight again on the glory and the beauty of the Father who is the Creator, the Son who is the Redeemer, and the Spirit who is the Life-Giver. That’s where the focus of our faith should be.
You mentioned the church’s credibility problem. How do you, as a local church pastor, incorporate the Nicene Creed in your church to help address that problem?
Well, I felt it a bit in Colorado, and we first did a series on the creed in 2014. In that setting and, in that context, it was like, Oh wow, a connection to the historic church. That’s helpful to know if I can trust this teaching. So that’s good.
I did the series again when I moved out to California, and here’s one of the things I realized: In Orange County, there are cultural Christians, of course—there are people who say that they’re Christians, but the discipleship runs thin—but there’s not a lot of Christian culture, meaning the kind of raw familiarity or basic familiarity with the Bible or Bible stories. That’s just not out there in the general culture. Instead, there are a whole lot of other spiritualities. People might come to church after an ayahuasca retreat, or we had someone who got baptized and they’re like, “I love the Holy Spirit. And I have a magic candle that speaks to me.” So the question was less about trust and more about truth.
When we did the series on the Nicene Creed at Rockharbor, people were like, Oh, so this is what’s true, then, about God, and these other things are not true. So doing that series here really helped me, and it was after that that I realized that needs to be my next writing project, because almost 10 years apart I’d done this series in two different contexts, two different churches. And I’m seeing this need for [the creed] and how it addresses the credibility issue, not by saying, Trust me, but by saying, Here is the truth of a story that’s bigger than us, of a family that’s bigger than us, of a God that is bigger than us.
But there’s one other way that this has been helpful here at Rockharbor. Earlier this year, we did a series called “Objections.” We set up each week to address [topics] that the creed addresses, but not directly. For example, Week 1: How can Jesus be the only way?
So how does the creed open? “We believe in one God.” And then the next week: Why did Jesus actually have to die? Well, that’s something the creed addresses. Then we went on and actually addressed some other things that the creed doesn’t address, [such as], “Doesn’t Christianity want to control our bodies?” or “Isn’t Christianity afraid of sex?” Specifically with regard to credibility, I think it was incredibly disarming [for us] to go, Hey, let us voice your objections for you. Things you never thought you could say in church, we’ll go ahead and say it for you.
Instead of me standing behind my preaching table, we had a little elevated block on the platform with two chairs, and there was a host and a guest. Sometimes I was in the guest chair, sometimes I was more in the host chair and someone else was in the guest chair. And we would start with about 15 to 20 minutes of prepared objection questions, and we’d unpack [them]. Then we would take live, text-it-in questions from the room related to that topic. I mean, we got hundreds of questions submitted.
“Resilience is not that you never get dysregulated or you never get disoriented or you never get discouraged. Resilience means that even when you get disrupted or discouraged, there is an ability, by God’s grace, to recover.”
What was consistent in the feedback throughout the series was people were like, “That allowed me to actually engage the questions that I have. I didn’t know where to ask them. I didn’t know how to ask them, even on a Sunday morning.” And as a result, we saw 45 people give their lives to Jesus during that series.
When you’re living in a moment of high spiritual curiosity but low institutional trust, you have to meet people where they are. You don’t come in big with extra authority and extra strength. You come in small; you come in curious. You come in willing to voice things from their perspective and then speak the truth of Scripture back to those questions. I think people will listen better when they know that you’ve actually heard and understood their questions and can voice [their questions] for them.
I love that. Let’s come back to the topic of pastoral health. What is your assessment of the health of pastors currently?
I’ve had the privilege for the last five years to partner with Barna on this work. One of the themes that emerges as I’m talking with pastors is they all resonate deeply with this sense of discouragement. So I don’t think we have a resignation crisis, but I do think we have a discouragement … I don’t want to call it a “crisis.”
We are living in a moment of deep discouragement among pastors. And I think there is some uptick from that that’s good; even the Barna stats reflect that [in the answers to the question]: Have you given serious consideration to quitting vocational ministry in the past year? And the peak of that was [2022]. It was 42%, and then it started to come back down. So we’re now in the mid-30% kind of range, roughly a third. But when I say to pastors, “The issue isn’t that you’re quitting your jobs en masse. The issue is that you’re not quitting your jobs, but you’re discouraged,” and there’s this recognition [among the pastors] of Yes, [that is the case].
Part of the reason for that is because of these sort of stacking expectations of a pastor. One of the profound complications of living in a digital age is we’re all peering over each other’s fences into each other’s backyards, so to speak, looking at each other’s church foyers, lobbies and sanctuaries. Everybody’s compared to everybody. So now you’ve got to be an amazing communicator. You’ve got to be a brilliant theologian. You’ve got to be a trauma-informed counselor. You’ve got to be a visionary CEO leader. You’ve got to be an incredible fundraiser. You’ve got to be a social activist and a political commentator. And if you don’t say anything about the headline of the thing that happened yesterday, then, you know—what’s wrong with you? People are telling your congregants to go find another church.
It’s not as if we have to choose one or two of those. It’s that sometimes it feels like the fractional groups in our church each sort of put together these lenses, and the composite of expectations just kind of stack. And that’s what pastors resonate with. That’s what they feel. And they go, “Man, I don’t know how to deal with that.”
Do you differentiate between health and resilience? Are they two different concepts?
One of my favorite stories [is from] the former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He tells the story of going in for a physical and the doctor putting him on a treadmill and putting these sensors on him and getting him to run. And he’s like, “Are you testing how fast I can run?”
“No, just keep running.”
“Are you testing how far I can run?”
“No, no, no, just keep running.”
Sacks gets done. He sits down, catches his breath. The doctor removes all the sensors and [Sacks] goes, “What were you testing?”
“I was testing how quickly you return to your resting heart rate.”
Sacks, reflecting on this, [says], “It was then that it occurred to me—something so basic I should have known it—that one of the markers of health is rates of recovery.”
“God sees you. God knows your name. Your work matters. And sometimes what we need is just a longer timeline to see it.”
I say to pastors, “Resilience is not that you never get dysregulated or you never get disoriented or you never get discouraged. That’s not what resilience means. Resilience means that even when you get disrupted or discouraged, there is an ability, by God’s grace, to recover.”
One key lens for resilience is recovery. Don’t think of health as, If I were healthy, I would never be discouraged. That’s not a realistic expectation. That’s like saying, If I were healthy, I’d never catch a cold. No, the issue is what happens when you catch a cold? Does it knock you out for two months, or do you have a baseline of health so that you can recover? In a similar way, Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.”
Being healthy doesn’t mean you’ll never be discouraged. But being healthy means that your rate of recovery, your resilience, begins to improve. You’re able to recover. That’s the first lens for resilience. There’s another lens for resilience that I teach, and that is that it is also about recalibration. And that has to do with the spiritual rhythms and practices. A lot of times, pastors feel like, “Well, I just can’t change anything. You don’t know my elders, and you don’t know my budget. You don’t know my time.” And it’s true. I don’t know that.
I understand that every situation is very different and very difficult, but in every situation, there are a few things you can do that you have agency over. Find those small places you can tweak and begin to recalibrate the machine. When Holly and I started realizing we need to be intentional about our rhythms, it was a way of saying that God has given us more agency than we’ve acknowledged, and we need to use that agency to calibrate. When is Sabbath? When is our dinner with friends? When is our time with our kids? When is our time with one another? If you don’t do that, nobody’s going to do that for you. So resilience is one part recovery, one part recalibration.
We’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about the challenges pastors face. What words of encouragement could offer your fellow pastors?
God sees you. God knows your name. Your work matters. And sometimes what we need is just a longer timeline [to see it]. I mentioned recovery and recalibration, but there’s a third “r” that is only true for Christians, and that is “resurrection.” In the light of our own future resurrection, we can actually know that our labor will not be in vain. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says, “Look, if Jesus is not risen from the dead, our preaching is in vain.” So that’s what I’d say.
You’re sitting with the family in a hospital room. You’re taking that phone call late at night. Your staff meeting, planning … all of that’s in vain if Jesus Christ is not risen from the dead. But he is risen from the dead. The end of 1 Corinthians 15 says, “Be steadfast and immovable, brothers and sisters, knowing that your labor in the Lord will not be in vain.”
I have a feeling Paul needed to go back to his own words because in 2 Corinthians 1, he talks about being so discouraged, so deeply discouraged, that he said, “We despaired even of life.” N.T. Wright says this is Paul possibly in a kind of depression. Then [Paul] goes on and says [that they] learned to count on the God who raises the dead.
And that’s my encouragement to you, pastors: Learn to count on the God who raises the dead. Because Jesus is risen from the dead, your labor is not in vain.