Taking Care of Yourself So You Can Keep Taking Care of Others
by Brian Rutherford
It has been about four years since I left full-time pastoral ministry. The distance has given me perspective I could not get in the week-to-week of leading a church. I have been part of the Intentional Churches team for less than a year, and in that short time I have already started to see some of my years in pastoral ministry with fresh eyes.
Earlier this week, a few of us on the team were trading emails, and I made an observation I keep coming back to. Our process is good, helpful, and genuinely transformative.
It is also not easy.
It takes real work to have deep conversations, to define your terms so everyone is talking about the same thing, and to move the mission from something the church does to something every person who calls your church home owns in their daily life.
And it is not just a lot of work.
It is emotionally taxing work. I really underestimated that when I was in it.
Anytime I sensed that something needed to change, there was a feeling I could not quite name. Looking back, I think I know what it was. Some part of me recognized that change was going to cost me energy I was not sure I had.
So sometimes I defaulted to the status quo. Or I borrowed a strategy that was working somewhere else without sitting long enough with who God had called us to be. And this was not because the people around me were resistant.
The church I served was full of loving, generous, open-handed people. They used to joke that even our building seemed to rearrange itself on an annual basis. The conditions were good.
But here is what I did not understand at the time. Even in good seasons, leading change still costs something. A growing church and an engaged congregation did not automatically refill the tank. It was not them. It was me. I just did not have a name for what I was feeling or know that it was something I needed to manage.
So here are a few things I have been learning, still slowly, about taking better care of myself as a leader.
Learn to read your own gauge.
Most of us are not great at this. We do not always know how close to empty we are running until something gives. And I do not think the warning signs look the same for everyone, which makes it harder to borrow someone else's checklist.
Find what refuels you.
This is also unique to every leader. I am an introverted Enneagram 5. What restores me is genuinely different from what restores the person sitting next to me at a conference. It took me a long time to accept that.
Learning energizes me, so I listen to podcasts about history and technology and sports, things that have nothing to do with church leadership. I play basketball a couple of times a week. There are busy seasons when I have almost cancelled. I used to do that. Now I try not to, because I have learned that playing ball is one of the things that keeps me functional, even when it feels like I am stealing time to do it.
Pray about what worries you, not what you think you should be worried about.
I have had an anxious streak for as long as I can remember, and for a long time I tried to manage around it rather than acknowledge it. Even as I write this, there are a few things sitting in the back of my mind. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary weight of things unresolved. I am getting better at bringing those real worries to God rather than the tidier, more presentable version of my concerns.
Find fellow travelers.
This is one of the things I genuinely did not expect about joining the Intentional Churches team. I get to be around church leaders who are asking the same kinds of questions, people who have walked this road or are walking it right now. There is something sustaining about that kind of community, about being around people who take the mission seriously but do not take themselves too seriously.
I do not have all of this figured out. But I am paying more attention than I used to, and that feels like a start.
One of the best things about working with Intentional Churches is that we get to gather with leaders like this in person every year. The IC Conference is May 5 and 6 at Northside Christian Church in New Albany, Indiana. If that sounds like your kind of room, we hope to see you there. Learn more at intentionalchurchesconference.com.