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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, follows up on why ministry is so challenging by laying out four big-picture practices for staying healthy under pressure. He urges leaders to see ministry as real work done among sinful but redeemable people, to refuse cynicism, to respond to rising demands with more Bible, prayer, and rest as they persevere in difficult seasons.
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Ready to hone your leadership skills and unlock your full potential? Tune in to the Lead On Podcast, where Jeff Iorg dives deep into Biblical leadership.
Hosted by SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg, this dynamic podcast provides insight for seasoned executives, aspiring leaders, or those in ministry who are simply passionate about personal growth. The Lead On Podcast offers actionable, practical tips to help you navigate the complexities of ministry leadership in today's ever-changing world.
From effective communication and team building to strategic decision-making and fostering innovation, each episode is packed with valuable lessons and inspiring stories to empower you on your leadership journey.
Put these principles into practice and Lead On!
Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, talking with you once again about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Now today, I wanna follow-up on last week's podcast where I talked about three reasons why ministry is challenging, sin, success, sanctification. And today, I want to talk about some general principles you can put into place that will help you to deal more effectively with the challenges of ministry. And I wanna be careful here.
Jeff Iorg:I'm not going to go into detail about how to deal with this particular problem or that particular problem. Instead, I wanna talk about more generally speaking, what are some perspectives or practices you can put into place that help you or equip you to deal with the ongoing challenges of ministry leadership. So the first thing I wanna challenge you to do is to have realistic expectations. And I want you to have realistic expectations about two things. First of all, realistic expectations about the ministry itself, and then secondly, realistic expectations about the people that you're working with in ministry.
Jeff Iorg:When I say have realistic expectations about the ministry, I mean to expect
Jeff Iorg:ministry to be what it really is. Some people enter ministry expecting it to be a perpetual spiritual retreat only to find out it's mostly a lot of work. Most ministry organizations are production facilities, not retreat centers.
Jeff Iorg:We have work to do, and it's the hard work of making disciples. And that work isn't simple or easy. It's demanding. It's people intensive, which makes it draining and sometimes exhilarating. But nevertheless, ministry is a grind.
Jeff Iorg:It's work.
Jeff Iorg:I know that when I was at the seminary, for example, and we would hire particularly very young employees, we would often, as part of their training, say to them,
Jeff Iorg:this is a job. It's a ministry job, but it's a job. You gotta be here on time. You gotta meet your quotas or responsibilities. You've gotta work full days.
Jeff Iorg:You've you've gotta recognize that this is not a place for counseling and prayer meetings and bible studies. Oh, those things all do happen here. That's not why you're coming. You're coming to work. When I say have realistic expectations about the ministry, that's what I'm trying to communicate, that you come into ministry really understanding what it is.
Jeff Iorg:And especially those of you who serve vocationally, it's a job, which means there'll be aspects of it that aren't necessarily all that
Jeff Iorg:enjoyable, that sometimes there's a grind, but nevertheless, has to be done.
Jeff Iorg:That's what I mean when I say have realistic expectations about the ministry itself. And then as a part of that, I want you to have realistic expectations about the people that you're working with in a ministry context. Now, as I said last week, your followers are sinners and sometimes you're also a sinner and sometimes not sometimes you're a sinner, you're always a sinner. Sometimes that sinfulness bleeds out of you. And so sin can mean that we might have very negative or very jaded expectations about people.
Jeff Iorg:I don't want you to be that kind of person.
Jeff Iorg:Look, it's true that people
Jeff Iorg:are sinful. In fact, as I've jokingly said over the years, I'm a one point radical Calvinist. I believe in the absolute total abject depravity of humankind. That's about the only absolute I'm sure of some days theologically. After all these years of ministry leadership, I I I've come to conclude people are sinners and they will act like it.
Jeff Iorg:Oftentimes, in ways you weren't expecting and could have never predicted. But having a realistic view of people, seeing them as saved sinners, but still infected with sinful tendencies, really just gives you an essential, honest,
Jeff Iorg:effective perspective, if you will, on leadership and the people you're trying to lead. Look, your most dedicated followers still have a
Jeff Iorg:propensity to sin, just like you as the most dedicated leader still have a propensity to sin.
Jeff Iorg:And these propensities will occasionally be acted upon. These sinful tendencies come out of us.
Jeff Iorg:That is an inevitable reality of leadership. That's having a realistic expectation. But in the context of that, I want you to take on the challenge of avoiding cynicism, which means I want you to be realistic about people without losing heart. You know, acknowledging the truth about people doesn't mean we think the worst of them, that we expect the worst from them, or that we believe the worst about them. Acknowledging the truth simply means that we're realistic, that we're measured in our appraisal of their character and their ability to make good choices.
Jeff Iorg:Look, we, as leaders, we are optimists. We want the best for people, and we want the best from people. We challenge them to rise above their baser instincts and live changed lives. That's what we do. But while we expect the best, we must not be surprised when we see the worst.
Jeff Iorg:When a colleague commits adultery, an employee steals money, a member becomes a gossip, or
Jeff Iorg:a teacher promotes some heresy, we shouldn't be shocked.
Jeff Iorg:We know these behaviors can, do, and will happen in the Christian community. We are braced for them and prepared to lead through them. Again, let me say it again. We expect the best,
Jeff Iorg:but we aren't surprised by the worst. Now, let that dichotomy settle down in your soul just a bit. We expect the best but we are not surprised by the worst. Balancing hopeful vision with honest reality is what it means to have realistic expectations about the ministry and the people you're working with.
Jeff Iorg:So I want to start by saying that a big first step in meeting the challenges of ministry leadership is having realistic expectations. First of all, realistic expectations about the ministry. It's not
Jeff Iorg:a perpetual spiritual retreat. You're not always on a mountaintop high. It's a job. It's a grind. It's work.
Jeff Iorg:And then it's having realistic expectations about the people,
Jeff Iorg:recognizing that you're a sinner, they're sinners, sinful things are going
Jeff Iorg:to happen. But we hope for the best. We call people to the best. We want people to live out their best. We expect that, but
Jeff Iorg:when it doesn't happen, we're not shocked by it or devastated by it. We recognize that that's part of the realism of ministry and accepting realistically how people are sometimes gonna behave. So first step. First step, have realistic expectations about the ministry and about the people you're working with in ministry. Now second big issue in managing the challenges of ministry is to learn to control your emotions.
Jeff Iorg:To manage your emotional responses in situations so that you're no longer guided or led or dictated by emotion, but it becomes a part of your life that's enriching and meaningful. You know, leaders are passionate people. We are we feel deeply about our work. Our work and our followers both matter a great deal to us. We're emotionally connected to people.
Jeff Iorg:We love people, not in some superficial weird way, but genuinely.
Jeff Iorg:Christian leadership means we sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of others, and we give ourselves away to them in free free expressions of this kind of deep love. We know that when when we accept our calling and that that we we are more than willing to then expend ourselves for the good of our followers, and we're committed to doing nothing more than advancing God's kingdom. But when you give yourself away like this,
Jeff Iorg:it can lead to emotional depletion,
Jeff Iorg:and it can lead to emotional unpredictability or emotional unsettleness. When you give yourself wholeheartedly and completely to ministry leadership, you may become tired. And I don't mean the kind of tired where you just sit down for a few minutes, get a cold drink, recover. I mean bone tired. I mean tired down in your soul.
Jeff Iorg:I mean tired that comes from having expended yourself, exhausting yourself, giving yourself entirely and completely to people over a period of time.
Jeff Iorg:These kind of experiences leave us emotionally depleted and susceptible to frustration and depression
Jeff Iorg:and to being controlled by other negative emotions. Perhaps the most troublesome of these negative emotions to manage is anger. You know, leaders become angry when they are threatened or experiencing some perceived threat. When we feel threatened in some way, and especially when we're threatened in the context of profound fatigue, we often, you know, lash out in anger. And sometimes, rather than lash out in anger, our our anger goes on what I call a slow burn and over time seeps out of us in very unhealthy ways.
Jeff Iorg:This happened to me a number of years ago while I was still a pastor. I was really angry with my church. They were not responding as I thought they should to my stellar leadership. They were not responding to my preaching, to my initiatives, to my dreams, and
Jeff Iorg:I was angry about it. They were threatening who I was and my reputation and my, notoriety and my recognition of among others. And if that all sounds sinful and stinky, it was. But nevertheless, it's the truth. And because of that, I was really angry.
Jeff Iorg:Now I was I thought masking my anger well and managing it with some sophistication, but a good brother who cared a lot about me came to me after a service one Sunday and said, man, Jeff, you seem really angry with us. And
Jeff Iorg:I said,
Jeff Iorg:what do you mean? He said, well, when you're preaching,
Jeff Iorg:it just seems like you're really angry with us.
Jeff Iorg:Your message comes across like a lecture, almost like an attack.
Jeff Iorg:It's hard to put into words, but I just feel like you're you're upset with us and you're you're not willing to say it, but you're kind of taking it out on us in the way that you're preaching to us. Well, my first response to that was not very positive. I remember thinking, how dare he say that about me?
Jeff Iorg:But I said to him, well, let
Jeff Iorg:me think about that a
Jeff Iorg:little bit. And I
Jeff Iorg:did. As I went home that night and reflected on what he said and thought back over the past few weeks of preaching and some of the tone that I'd taken, the subjects I'd chosen, the way I'd approached the messages, and then thought about the response I was not getting from people from my sermons,
Jeff Iorg:I thought maybe he's right about this. Maybe he's right.
Jeff Iorg:That was one of those sobering times in prayer when I had to come face to face with the reality that maybe I was wrong in how I was approaching people and that something deeper was going on that needed to be addressed that was motivating this anger in my life. And I remember thinking about then the verse from James one twenty, the anger of man does not accomplish God's righteousness. And I thought, Lord, if I'm getting angry with people, that that isn't going to accomplish anything good. It isn't going to move people toward you. It isn't going to cause Christians who already know you to want to know you more to grow in their relationship with you.
Jeff Iorg:It it's just not going to work as a motive for effective ministry. And so I remember having to turn from my anger and asking God to help me with it, and then giving some time to reflect on where it came from and why it was such a presenting or pressing problem in the moment. And I'm gonna get to
Jeff Iorg:that in just a minute, but stay with me. So far on the
Jeff Iorg:podcast, we've talked about what are some big strategies you can employ or some big issues you can address to help you to handle the challenges of ministry more effectively. And the first one I said was have realistic expectations. Have realistic expectations of both the ministry and of the people that you're working with. And then second, I've said, learn to manage or control your emotions. And the one that's most difficult, it seems, to get our hands on is anger.
Jeff Iorg:Certainly was a struggle for me in this story that I've just told you, but it can be a debilitating problem
Jeff Iorg:when the challenges of ministry cause us to respond with anger more than anything else. So now, third, let's talk proactively. One of
Jeff Iorg:the things that has helped me over the years when I face challenges in ministry is to reboot or double down or more intensely invest in my spiritual disciplines. And I wanna talk about three of those, and I wanna tie the third one back to anger. When I find myself facing particularly challenging ministry circumstances, I wanna spend more time in my core spiritual disciplines, not less. Now here's the challenge that you face. As as these core as the challenges arise and they intensify and demands become greater, we feel like we don't have time for prayer and bible reading.
Jeff Iorg:We don't have time to get along with God. We don't have time to practice the discipline of rest. These challenges are so overwhelming, we have to spend all of our energy trying to meet the challenges. And brothers and sisters, I have made that mistake, and I will tell you,
Jeff Iorg:it does not work. Here's what I've learned. When ministry challenges rise, I need to reboot, double down, intensify my commitment to my core spiritual disciplines, particularly Bible reading and prayer and rest. Now Bible reading. When I'm facing challenging circumstances, I wanna spend more time in the Bible, not less.
Jeff Iorg:Now I'm already doing my daily readings and all of that, but perhaps when challenging times come, I wanna say, I need to do some extra Bible study on this challenging issue. I need to do some extra study on the things that I believe are motivating the challenges I'm facing. I need to do some extra study on the solutions that I need to be implementing right now to these challenges, and I need to find out more what the Bible has to say about my challenges than anything else. And then secondarily, prayer. When the challenges go up, it naturally, the prayer goes down.
Jeff Iorg:I'm too busy to pray. I've got these challenges to meet. I've meetings to
Jeff Iorg:get to and problems to solve and people to deal with. Yeah. Right. I get all that. But I've learned that as the challenges go up, I have to make an intensified commitment to prayer so that I am praying more, not less, when the challenges hit me.
Jeff Iorg:And then the third one, which I'm gonna tie tie back into this issue of anger, and that is the discipline of rest. Now you may be thinking,
Jeff Iorg:yeah, right. When the challenges are going on, there is no time to rest.
Jeff Iorg:Well, I used to think that. But over the years, I've learned the importance of having rest as a disciplined part of my life. That means that once a week, and we've been doing this for, gosh, forty, forty five years. Once a week, we try to pull away from ministry and focus a day on rest and recovery and relationship with my wife and I.
Jeff Iorg:Rest, recovery, relationship with my wife and I and, of
Jeff Iorg:course, with God. Now that's what rest is about. It's about recovery and rejuvenation and refocusing. That's essential during challenging times. Now the temptation, of course, is to say, well, I I I'm really super busy right now.
Jeff Iorg:I've got all these additional challenges. I've got
Jeff Iorg:all these pressures. I've got
Jeff Iorg:all this stuff going on. There's no possible way I can rest. Well, if you don't, you've just agreed to participate in the recipe for burnout. As the demands go up and the rest goes down, the difference between those two is gonna lead you into that dreaded state called burnout.
Jeff Iorg:You're gonna find yourself emotionally depleted and like the proverbial snowball headed downhill, your your emotional difficulty and turmoil and struggle is going to get greater and greater and greater as the challenges of ministry mount up
Jeff Iorg:and your unwillingness to rest remain strong. Now the longer you stay on this treadmill, the deeper the fatigue settles into your soul. Tired leaders have no emotional or physical or spiritual reserves. And when they are faced with additional leadership difficulties, there's just nothing to draw on. There's nothing to sustain them through the challenge.
Jeff Iorg:Deep fatigue, I'm talking about being bone tired. Bone tired has two very difficult results for leaders. Number one, tired leaders make bad decisions. You're in the midst of a leadership challenge,
Jeff Iorg:and you are refusing to rest and take care of yourself. And in the context of that, you're more likely to make a bad decision. Few years ago, a leader that I knew was dismissed for falsifying his church expense reports. When asked why he did it, he said, well, the
Jeff Iorg:church demanded so much. I I thought they owed it to me. I later asked him about how
Jeff Iorg:much time he had taken off from his church, and he said he hadn't taken a full day off from his church in years, in years.
Jeff Iorg:So as a result of this fatigue that settled into his soul that caused him to make these very bad decisions, he was faking travel and building the church, and that pattern
Jeff Iorg:ultimately cost him his ministry role. Tired leaders, tired leaders, especially when you're tired and then an additional challenge comes on that becomes the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, when the additional challenge comes and you're already worn out completely, you are more likely to make bad decisions. And then a second reason that rest is so vital here is because when you don't do it, you're signing yourself up for depression and burnout. It's coming your way inevitably when you refuse to rest. Now, depression is when emotional fatigue is so profound that it impacts your capacity for meaningful relationships and appropriate performance of your job duties.
Jeff Iorg:It it debilitates you. This often results from overwork and overcommitment that leads to burnout and can spiral into depression. When we ignore the patterns that God has given us of rest, when we when we refuse to disengage and to re and to rejuvenate, we we make ourselves vulnerable. As you wear yourself down and then additional challenge comes your way, you have no reserves to draw on, and you find
Jeff Iorg:yourself depleted and unable to manage the challenges you're facing. Now, I know there are many other spiritual disciplines. This is not all of them by any means, but but I wanna tell you that when ministry challenges come, increase your capacity for Bible reading, prayer, and rest. Don't fall prey to the myth, the lie really, that challenges are
Jeff Iorg:a indication that you need to spend all your time focused on focusing on the challenges and no time really spent on prayer, bible reading, and rest. The opposite is actually true. Alright. So I want you to deal with challenges that come at you in ministry by having realistic expectations, managing your emotions, and refocusing on your disciplines. And then another thing
Jeff Iorg:that's really helped me over the years is to ask other people to pray for me, especially during challenging times. Now in 1995, I formed a prayer team. I did not go out and ask how many people that I
Jeff Iorg:can get signed up that will commit to praying for me.
Jeff Iorg:That was never my question. Instead, I asked this question. How many people are already praying for me? I put that out in a newsletter and put it out in some public venues and said, if you're already praying for me, would you identify yourself? And I'd like
Jeff Iorg:to add you to my prayer team. I'll communicate with you once a month, and you can pray for me more specifically about the ministry challenges that I'm facing. To my great surprise, the first time I put this out, about 30 people contacted me and said, that they were praying for me on a regular, if not daily basis, and wanted to be on my prayer team. So I started the list and and started this idea of having a a prayer team. Now that has been about 30 ago.
Jeff Iorg:And listen to this now. I have never missed a month in thirty years writing a personal letter to this prayer team, telling them my schedule, telling them some of the challenges I'm facing, and asking them to pray for me specifically to sustain me through the work that I'm doing. Brothers and sisters, there is no possible way that I would have made it in ministry leadership without this prayer team. They have sustained me in ways that will only be revealed in eternity by their prayers for me during challenging times.
Jeff Iorg:So a fourth strategy that I have used to address leadership challenges is to have a prayer team, to have a group of people who stand with me, who pray for me, who care for me, who are committed to spiritually upholding me in the work that I'm trying to do. You
Jeff Iorg:know, I always tell this same story. I know I've probably told it on the podcast before, but when I formed the prayer team, I put out newspaper at the time where I was writing a once a month column. And I said, if you're already praying for me, would you identify yourself? I'd like to put you on my prayer team and ask you to pray for me every day going forward. And as I said, about 30 people wrote me back or contacted me and about, I don't know, significant number of them, I had never even heard of them.
Jeff Iorg:I didn't know their names. One of them was a man named Cal Poncho senior. He he wrote me a handwritten letter with that scrawl kind of shaky writing that older people have to use. You know what I'm saying? He wrote me this this letter, and here's what it said.
Jeff Iorg:He said, I've never met you. I saw a picture of your young family in the newspaper when you were elected our leader. I knew the pressures you would face, and I've been praying for you every day since then. Please put me on your prayer team. Now I reached out and found out that mister Pancho was in his eighties at that time, and he had been praying for me ever since he saw a picture of my young family in the newspaper when I was elected as the executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention.
Jeff Iorg:One of the most precious moments in ministry for me was a few months later, I was preaching at a Baptist's associational meeting over in Central Oregon, kind of a rural area. And you know how it is when the service is over, you know, some people leave, but others kind of congregate around. And I could tell this one older gentleman wanted to talk to me. He was just standing kind of in the back with a with a cane, and I made my way back there to him and I said, sir, I just wanted to meet you. My name is Jeff Origen.
Jeff Iorg:He said, yes, sir. And he put out his hand with that little shake in it that older men often have, and he put out his hand and said, my name is Cal Poncho senior, and I pray for you every day. And here I am all these years later,
Jeff Iorg:and I still can't tell this story without tears in my eyes. This dear, sweet, wonderful man on
Jeff Iorg:the Warm Springs Reservation in Central Oregon put out his hand and said, I'm praying for you every day. And I have to tell you, I've had people like him
Jeff Iorg:praying for me, many of them every day for now decades. And I don't mind telling you, I I don't know how I would have made it in ministry through the challenges that I've had to deal with without their prayers,
Jeff Iorg:without knowing
Jeff Iorg:that there were dozens of people who said, I will pray for you and I will hold you up in prayer before God and ask him to sustain you, to use you, to empower you. Look, ministry's challenging.
Jeff Iorg:And one of the strategies that I've put into place that's helped me meet those challenges over the years is having people who pray for me.
Jeff Iorg:Now listen carefully. If you wanna start a prayer team, do not try to recruit a bunch of people to pray for you.
Jeff Iorg:Instead, ask people, if you're already praying for me, would you identify yourself? I'd like to know who you are, and I'd like to communicate with you from time to time the prayer needs in my life. I'm interested in the people who are already praying, who have the ministry of intercession and the burden of praying for me. I wanted to identify them. And once I did, I wanted to facilitate their praying for me more personally.
Jeff Iorg:I have never ever recruited a person to pray for me. I've only asked those who are praying to identify themselves and join the team. So ministry is challenging. Why? Well, I gave you those alliterated s's last week.
Jeff Iorg:We know it must be from God because it had alliteration. Sin, success, sanctification. God is going to use you in ministry and it will be challenging some days. Generally speaking, these big principles will help you to manage those challenges. Have realistic expectations about the ministry and about the people we're working with.
Jeff Iorg:Manage your emotions, especially anger, and learn to handle it well in ministry challenges. Double down on your spiritual disciplines. As the challenges increase, more time in Bible reading, more time in prayer, and more time to rest. Doing so will keep you from being emotionally depleted, spiritually empty, and more vulnerable to serious mistakes in the midst of these challenges. And then finally, get some people to pray for you who will identify themselves as prayer warriors who've already got you on their prayer list, and then let them know from time to time how they can pray with you more effectively.
Jeff Iorg:A prayer team will sustain you through ministry challenges. Ministry is challenging. We can meet those challenges, and I've given you some tools today to help you get that done. Put them into practice as you lead on.