From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Healthy Church Leadership Begins
In 2020 you had a watershed year. You’ve talked about it as kind of your “second salvation,” and a really significant thing happened in you. Walk me through that year.
In the leadership world, at least back then, they used to always say, “Don’t let your platform outpace your character.” But what happened to me was that my platform went ahead of my soul. My character, because I’ve always worked on it, felt like it was relatively strong, but the pace of life that I was living at left my soul in the back, and I left God in the back.
There’s burnout and then there’s breakdown. I had a full-blown breakdown. I come from a spiritual stream of missions and urgency, so every moment of my day was about stewarding myself to become the most effective tool in the hands of God. In the name of stewardship and faithfulness, unbeknownst to me, I think I had idolized ministry and being an effective vessel to the point where I had lost my soul.
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Becoming a youth pastor at 18 is just not healthy without the appropriate support, but God used it in his sovereignty. I’ve always had low-grade anxiety, starting from then. My life was a cycle of burnout-breakdown, burnout-breakdown, burnout-breakdown. But finally in 2020, I was completely depressed. I was done. I just couldn’t go on.
I did my first 40-day fast with no solid foods, just juice and water, just liquids. I was praying more than I’ve ever prayed, I was reading the Bible more than I’ve ever read the Bible, but God had never felt so distant in my life. What used to work was repentance, prayer, fasting and devotionals. It’s as if all those things just stopped working and my internal world as well as my external world just fell apart. I was bedridden with depression. I would have these dark moments of panic attacks.
Then there was this one particular day I was driving to a meeting with my wife. She was pregnant with our second child, and she tells me as I was driving I was murmuring, “I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.” And she forcefully makes me pull over.
She told me, “We can cancel this meeting.”
I was like, “We can’t cancel this meeting, because good pastors don’t cancel meetings.”
Then she gets out of the car, she calls off this meeting. I’m in the car crying my eyes out. Don’t even know why.
[During this time] I was pulling all-nighters because I couldn’t sleep. I was addicted to Unisom. And then one night I’m on the couch somewhere between 4 and 5 a.m. crying by myself because I couldn’t sleep and I was so depressed.
My wife wakes up, comes out and says, “I had a dream about you. We were at a leadership conference with our staff for The Meeting Place. And when you showed up, your car was cut in half. The windows were shattered and there was steam coming out of the [hood] of the car.”
She looks at me as I’m sitting on the couch crying, and says, “That’s your life, and we need to go on a sabbatical.”
When she said “sabbatical,” something in my heart was like … well, two things. I thought Sabbatical? I’m only 30 years old. Who goes on a sabbatical when they’re 30? And then I said, “It’s 2020. Everyone’s having a hard time.”
But then on the other side, on a soul level, when she said sabbatical, I felt like I took a breath. The idea of not leading and the thought of not having to preach or be in ministry felt like a dream. The one thing I lived for now I felt like was killing me.
And so that’s what we did. We grabbed the board of The Meeting Place. I told them in great detail what I was going through—they kind of already knew, but I really told them. I went on an unplanned four-month sabbatical, and that sabbatical saved my life. I went into that sabbatical not knowing, to be honest, if I was going to come back, because I just didn’t know how to live or operate in any other way.
What did you learn during that sabbatical? What would you tell other leaders?
One thing I have said over the years is before my sabbatical God was always first. But after my sabbatical God is my center. And the reason why I say that is when God is first, there is a dichotomy of what is [of] God and what is not of God. When God is first, praying is first, Scripture is first, serving is first, leading is first. But when God is center, I get to see God in everything. I get to see God not just in preaching, but I see God in playing. I get to see God not just in praying, but I experience God in just being with my kids. So God became the center of my life, and not just ministry and serving God as the end all.
Another thing is, to the best of my ability, I try to differentiate between what’s for me and what’s for my people, trying to live and lead from a place of overflow rather than giving people what’s in my own reservoir. In the past, I always thought the godliest thing to do was to empty myself out completely and give everything I had until I was sucked dry, and then to replenish myself [only to] empty myself again.
