Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine

Well, this past year has been another life shaking, earth shattering experience for me. For the past several years, this blog has served as a journal of my walking through the fog of my post ministry years. I have wanted to document my stumbling in this fog as an encouragement or guide to future ex-pastors […]

7 Years Later

It’s hard to believe that I’ve now, not been a pastor, longer than I was a pastor. I’ve been a Corrections Officer and now I’m working as a Police Officer. So much has changed. Marriage has been the single most challenging aspect of my life after leaving the ministry (it left me, actually). I now […]

Ministry is like D-Day

I was reminded today, that the ministry is like D-Day. Many will begin at their first church or pastoral position when they figuratively storm the beach with enthusiasm and zeal, but most of us will be shot down and taken out by different means. Some will be taken out by their own failures, some because […]

Sinking

It’s 2020, and I haven’t been a pastor in six years. In six years, I have learned a lot about myself and continue to do so. I haven’t read a lot of theology lately. I have not been up and up on the latest theological trends and I don’t know who’s who in my part […]

God’s Timing in Ministry

When I first took the pastorate at my former church, I did so amid strife and contention. I overstepped my bounds and made a power grab that later came back to bite me. I was so eager to lead this church out of Baptist fundamentalism, inspired by zeal that I had from my new found […]

On Giving and Tithing

This isn’t going to be a doctrinal treatise on tithing. I just read a good article on the Christian Post where Dave Ramsey encourages pastors to address people’s debt problems rather than just preach on tithing. As Pastors, we are often worried about the bottom line at the offering. Our salaries and the church’s operations […]

What I would tell my pre-pastor self…

What would I tell myself if I could send a message back to 2007 when I stepped into the interim pastor role and pursued full time ministry? That’s an interesting thought. This is what I’d say to myself..brace yourself…self. Don’t quit your job, you have medical! And you’ll stay in touch with the real world. […]

The Caged Church

I am always wary of books that talk about “rethinking church” because they are usually the crys of hippster, quasi-liberal, relevance-hungry, popularity-seeking compromisers who always have the same urgent plea to the church: “if you don’t change now, you won’t exist in 10 years”. I remember this being the case with the Purpose Driven Church […]

Bi-Vocational is the Future

The average size church is under 100 people and if you know that maybe 60% of them give regularly and fewer give anything close to 10%. Most of these churches have a hard time paying one pastor a full time salary that comes close to being anything like the income of the average church member […]

How Ministry is like Corrections

This will be fun….how is working in the ministry like working as a Correctional Officer? You give people instructions and they don’t listen You are paid to care for people more than they will care about themselves You can tell stories of such bizzare experiences where you will say: “you can’t even make this stuff […]