What Spiritual Direction Looks Like When You’re a Ministry Leader
“I feel like the whole world want me to pray for ’em / But who’s prayin’ for me?” —Kendrick Lamar
“The best direction aims at enabling or empowering the directee to graduate to the more refined and delicate guidance of the Spirit in all matters. The director becomes a fellow traveler and friend on the journey, and the directee and director speak the truth to each other in love. Speaking just the truth can be too harsh. Speaking the truth in love is mutually sustaining.” —Thomas Keating
Spiritual direction can be an extraordinary gift to givers. When your work or vocation is in pouring yourself out for others, how do you go about filling yourself back up? There’s a repeated refrain throughout Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN: “Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me.” When you spend yourself encouraging others, counseling others, praying for others, who prays for you and keeps you centered?
When you sit in spiritual direction, you sit in the quiet, in the presence of the Holy Spirit who is at work in you and around you. We do this work of attending to the Holy Spirit’s work in us so that we can better attend to the Holy Spirit’s work around us in our churches and communities. While spiritual direction covers the whole gamut of life stuff, here are just a few themes that I frequently encounter in my conversations with ministry leaders.
Sabbath, retreat, and vacation
I had just given a talk about Sabbath to a group of youth pastors. One followed up with me the next week. “I put in 80 hours a week at the church,” he told me. “Because I love it. I don’t know how to turn it off. But based on what you said, I feel like I need to.” Another pastor once told me he felt the pressure to be a workaholic because that was the culture of the community he led. Put in 50 hours a week and more because anything less would be lazy in the eyes of the congregation.
More is caught than taught is a truism in ministry. People are watching you. It’s essential that we discover healthy rhythms of work and rest, not only for our own health, but so that our communities can see what Sabbath looks like. I often ask leaders when is their next retreat or what vacation they’re looking forward to.
How is your rhythm of letting go of work and resting in God?
Family relationships
One lie we absorb from our culture is that we are what we do. This is part of why we struggle with Sabbath. Another is that our decisions only affect us individually. God has made us for community. We exist in the context of families, households, neighborhoods, communities. We are not alone, and our decisions impact those immediately closest to us. If we’re not careful, ministry can alienate us from our families.
With the exception of our spouse, we choose none of our family relationships. My kids, my parents, my siblings, my extended family—I did not choose them. They are God’s gift to me and means of God’s sanctification in me. As Paul’s words in 1 Timothy and Titus indicate, there’s a direct parallel between a person’s ability to facilitate community in God’s kingdom and their ability to cultivate healthy relationships in their own family, to the very best of their ability.
How are you creating space to be present to your children, your partner, and your parents?
Comparison
Another lie from culture? If I’m not winning, I’m losing. From our earliest days, we are steeped in competition and comparison. Video games, youth sports, and school all shape us to pay attention to our neighbor to see how we measure up. Are we as smart? As fast? As cool?
It creeps insidiously into ministry work. Are as many people coming to my thing as theirs? Do people listen to me like they listen to them? Do I have more social media followers? Comparison is like battery acid in our spiritual life because it distracts us from our own calling and vocation. There’s a popular saying, “Never compare your backstage to someone else’s on-stage.” John’s Gospel closes with a curious encounter between Peter and Jesus, where Peter points to one of the other disciples and says, “What about him?” To which Jesus responds, “What about him? You follow me.”
To what has God called you? How are you being most faithful to that calling this week?
Sleep, food, exercise
“You’re so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good,” so goes the old song. Ministry workers more often than not forget to take care of their bodies. They are at a higher risk of obesity and stress-related coronary issues than the rest of the population. Why is that?
The doctrine of the Incarnation teaches us that our bodies matter. Physical stuff matters. And yet our youth pastors can go weeks subsisting on junk food and we don’t blink an eye. When I worked in student ministry, I ate terribly and suffered for it. We’ve been given one body, and we cannot be our most present selves to others when we are tired and sick.
How are you sleeping? How are you paying attention to what you eat? What habits of exercise do you have?
Disappointment and doubt
My kids recently discovered The LEGO Movie, and now every time they watch it, the song “Everything is Awesome” gets stuck in my head. In leadership, we often feel the pressure that everything has to be awesome all the time. Regardless of how the week went, you still feel obligated to stand at the door Sunday morning with a smile on your face. And when that’s not genuine it’s exhausting.
Ministry is relationships. And relationships are work. And often that work may not go the way we planned. Many an idealist is drawn to ministry work with a vision of how the world should be, how church should be. And then reality comes crashing down. Sheep bite. Colleagues act in un-Christian ways. Depression and anxiety rear their ugly heads and you just don’t know what to do with that. When doubt is the big elephant in the room, spiritual direction is a safe place to call it out.
Where is God present to you in the midst of disappointment and doubt?
Emotional health
Leaders are people, too. We’re not immune to negative emotions. Anger, shame, and fear are particular emotions that are always hiding just below the surface. All it takes is one stray comment to spiral you into your very deepest insecurities.
Pete Scazzero says, “Jesus may be in your heart, but Grandpa is in your bones.” Are we given to violent outbursts? Fits of brooding shame? Paralyzing anxiety? These are often coping mechanisms we’ve picked up through life. Our spiritual formation practices of prayer, Scripture reading, and reconciliation are essential in untangling ourselves from these knee-jerk emotional reactions to our situations. Just because you’re in charge, doesn’t mean these aren’t present in you.
If your emotions are an orienting map, where are you today?
Prayer practices
Most of us know that we should pray. But I an encounter a great many people who have spent their lives in church but have never been taught how to pray. Even leaders. While there’s nothing wrong with spontaneous “popcorn” prayer, many of us have a deep need for a more intentional practice of prayer.
Two such practices that I frequently discuss with ministry leaders are the daily office and centering prayer. Like a great improvisational jazz musician who practices scales, or an athlete who practices fundamentals, these are core practices that teach us how to talk to and about God. Prayer is more than emoting off the top of our head. These particular practices teach us “muscle memory” when it comes to prayer.
What are your conversations with God sounding like?
Knowing your why
Simon Sinek talks about the Golden Circle of What, How, and Why. Many of us are great about talking about what we do and how we do it, whether individually are about our organization. Many of us struggle with our Why. It’s not easy to articulate our Why, and yet it’s so necessary. Without it, we can flounder and feel like our work is purposeless. We get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent and waste away in busyness.
Why are you working 60+ hours a week in ministry? Why are you allergic to the word “no”? Why are you triggered by particular people or situations? One tool for excavating through questions like these is the Enneagram. You are wired uniquely. You connect with God uniquely. When you find yourself in an especially dry season, coming back to your why can get you through it.
Who are you? Why are you here? What are you looking for, not just in ministry, but in your life?
Spiritual direction is about real life. And that’s expansive. These are just a few of the themes that I’ve found in the many conversations I’ve had with ministry leaders, but there are scores more. If one particularly struck a nerve for you, and you don’t already have someone to talk to, you can look for a director in your area or fill out this form and we can begin a conversation.