”As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a
net into the lake, for they were fishermen.  ’Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ’and I will
send you out to fish for people.’  At once they left their nets and followed him.” – Mark 1:16-18

Jesus saw people.  Individual people.  He observed what they were doing.  Two of them were fishing with a net.  Jesus sees them, notices their activity, and then he contextualizes his call to them.

“Come follow me and I will send you out to fish for people.”

Jesus could have offered a generic call.  Come follow me and learn my ways.  Come follow me and I will make you spiritual people.  Come follow me and I will make you holy.

Instead he contextualized the call to them.  He wanted his invitation to connect, to resonate.  And it did.

They left their nets and followed him, immediately.

It is interesting that this call to follow was not a call to pursue personal growth or spiritual development or holiness.  I think the disciples experienced all these things and more, but these were not the focus of Jesus’ call.

Jesus called them to participate in his mission.  He called them to follow him for the purpose of becoming fishers of people.

Is this the call of Jesus to everyone?  Does he invite all of us to participate in his mission or is that reserved only for the few select followers that Jesus chooses?  Does Jesus call some to be “normal” Christians and others to be missional disciples?  Or is this mission open to all and required for all, so that if you are a follower of Jesus you are to be moving toward and into mission?

I hold the latter view, but I do not think this is the standard perspective held by most Christ-followers today.

We tend to look at discipleship as the pathway to holiness, not mission.  We engage in spiritual formation to become holy people.  We then hope that these holy people, or at least some of them, will enter into mission.

The problem with making holiness the goal is that it often causes people to disconnect from the world in order to become holy.  Their faith then develops in what amounts to a self-centered vacuum separate from the real world and messiness of the mission field.  The produces religious people who are separate from culture and weak spiritually.  The church is accomplishing its mission of developing “holy” people, but as it does it creates an inability to fulfill the mission of Christ.  The church stops reaching people.  The platform for influence in a community is diminished.  And the church dies a slow, painful death.

Holy, but ineffective.

Perhaps this is what Jesus sought to avoid.  Rather than calling people to spiritual rituals that simply form the inner person, he called people to service and mission so the Good News could be proclaimed.

He knew that people called to look inward would only focus there.  But people called to mission would focus on the world that God loves.  As they labored in the mission field, they would naturally look inward so they could have the power necessary to keep going.

Jesus wants the church to be holy, but holiness without mission is a dead-end pursuit that does not accomplish the full will of God.  He calls us to mission and when we pursue that end we advance the Kingdom and our lives are changed in the process.

What Do You Think?

Should we be holy or missional?

Soon after my meltdown occurred, and I realized how serious my situation was, I launched a project to “rebuild my life.” I determined to take four steps to walk me through the process of recovery. And like taking four steps, they each had to happen one at a time; you can’t take four steps at once. In this series of posts, I want to share with four questions that framed the steps I took and am taking to rebuild my life.

Step One: What Am I Giving My Energy To?

Step Two: How Committed Am I to Connect with God?

I had a meltdown in large part because I was not committed to time with God at all.  I became so busy that I started to cut things out of my schedule to free up time for the things that “had” to be done.  The first three things on the chopping block?  Sleep, working out, and time with God.  It’s ironic that the things we need to stay alert, energetic, engaged and spiritually vibrant in life are the very things we eliminate first when life gets hectic.

As part of my project to rebuild my life, I determined that I had to re-position my time with God as a top priority.  My connection with God could not be something that I did IF I had time; it had to become a necessity in my list of things that “had” to be done.  I could not recover or survive over the long haul without it.

Beyond making time with God a priority, I did three things to make sure that priority translated into daily life.

Set a Time

I stepped back and looked at the big picture of my time management approach.  Michael Hyatt’s insights on creating an ideal week were a huge help to me.  I spent a couple of hours getting a game plan for my week.  As part of this, I established a block of time every morning that would be set aside for spiritual disciplines and connection with God.

Two things I learned about establishing this time as a spiritual habit.

First, set realistic expectations.

When I began to re-engage with God during these morning times I knew that 60 to 75 minutes alone with God was what I aspired to.  However, I knew that going from 0 minutes per day to 75 minutes per day overnight was highly unlikely.  So I blocked out an hour and then set a lower minimum that I would complete every day.  For me it was 15 minutes.  I figured that if a spent five minutes journaling, five minutes reading Scripture, and five minutes praying it would be much more than I had been doing and would be sufficient to get me growing again.  But having the full hour blocked out gave me the freedom to go longer if I desired to do so.  For the first few weeks I was struggling to get the full 15 minutes in, but over time it gradually grew into the longer time I want and need.

Second, give yourself grace.

Spiritual disciplines are pathways that help us encounter God’s grace; not legalistic expectations that earn God’s favor and love.  In the early weeks of re-establishing this routine there were days that I missed.  There still are occasional days that I miss.  I can beat myself up on those days or I can extend grace to myself and show up the next morning for my time with God.  Beating myself up did not help me recover from my meltdown and did not reinforce the disciplines as a joyful part of my life.  And beating myself up did not help me experience or receive the grace that I was seeking through the disciplines in the first place.  I had to keep reminding myself of that.  I had to give myself grace when I missed and encourage myself to show up the next day.

Get a Space

I found it helpful to pick a place where I will have my time with God.  For me, I actually set three places: 1) a writing table in the basement, 2) the corner table at my Starbucks, 3) the desk in my office.  At the appointed time each day, I make sure I am at one of these locations ready for my time with God.  Identifying the place has helped create the right frame of mind to participate in the disciplines.  Identifying more than one space has helped bring variety and flexibility to my time with God.  This continues to bring renewed energy and focus to my engagement with the disciplines.

Develop a Pattern

Let simplicity be your guide.  I determined that I would utilize a three-part pattern to loosely structure my time with God: Journaling, Scripture reading/meditation, and prayer.  This is not to say that these are the only three things a person could do or that this is the right pattern for you.  These are simply the things that I need in my journey right now.  Journaling for reflection and perspective.  Scripture reading and meditation to hear the voice of God through the Word of God.  Prayer to converse with God by listening and speaking to him.

These three things can be done in any order and do not adhere to strict time-frames.  In fact, more often than not, I jump back and forth between all three throughout my time with God.  Together, they help me connect with God, grow spiritually, and depend on God for strength to live and lead.

Ask Yourself

How committed are you to connect with God? When do you connect with God?  Where?  How?

I’d recommend that you take some time to read these three books:

1. Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers by Fil Anderson

2. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Lim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

3.  Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation by Ruth Haley Barton

These books were extremely helpful to me.  What suggestions do you have for good books to read related to ministry burnout?  Leave a comment below and tell us what resources you found helpful.

Soon after my meltdown occurred, and I realized how serious my situation was, I launched a project to “rebuild my life.” I determined to take four steps to walk me through the process of recovery. And like taking four steps, they each had to happen one at a time; you can’t take four steps at once. In this series of posts, I want to share with you four questions that framed the steps I took and am taking to rebuild my life.

Step One: What Am I Giving My Energy To?

Make a List

The first step I took was to take inventory of my commitments and re-evaluate what my energy was being investing in. This process took about 6 to 8 weeks. I literally sat down at my computer and listed out every commitment I had made, big or small, important or insignificant. That process gave me a list of over 70 projects I was working on in my job, 9 coaching projects, and over a dozen personal projects. After I had the list together, I reversed engineered the list into categories or groupings. I discovered that the nearly 100 projects I was working on covered nearly 25 different areas of focus.

Overcommitment=Overwhelm

It may seem like I became an out-of-control list maker. In fact, I had one person say, “I couldn’t write all my stuff down like that; I would go crazy knowing everything I was supposed to do.” They encouraged me to stop writing these things down and trash my lists. However, what I found is that writing it down and making it tangible in one list where I could see it all gave me the wonderful gift of self-awareness. I was overwhelmed because I was overcommitted. My system was perfectly designed for the results I was getting. If I wanted different results (i.e. – less overwhelm in my life), I needed to change my system. I needed to eliminate, delegate, and renegotiate my commitments. I needed to ruthlessly make adjustments until my commitments were clear, focused, and manageable.

Eliminate

Some of my commitments were dead. Some of them were not good ideas or were simply not practical. Others were good ideas at the time they were initiated, but over time they became irrelevant because the world changed. When I came to a dead project on my list I let it go…with the delete button.

Some of my commitments were good things, but they did not represent the best things I could and should be doing with my time. As Jim Collins says, “Good is the enemy of the great.” I had to eliminate some good things to clear the decks for the best things.  Again, the delete button.

Delegate

Some of my commitments needed to be done, but could be or needed to be handled by someone else. I delegated those to the appropriate person.

Renegotiate

Some of my commitments were bigger projects that were due within a year, but did not require me to start working on them now. I put them on my calendar for the appropriate time when they needed to be started.

Still other commitments were good ideas, but I did not have the bandwidth to complete them. I put them on my someday/maybe list.

Commitments to Complete

After eliminating, delegating, and renegotiating, I was left with the commitments that I needed to follow through on until they were completed. My work list dropped to 40-50 active projects, the range where it currently hovers. My coaching list was trimmed to 6 projects, four of which will conclude this month. And my personal project list hovers around 6 to 8 items. Nearly 100 commitments were reduced down to 50-60 commitments I truly need to be focused on. My 25 areas of focus have been narrowed down to 7 professional areas of focus and 7 personal areas of focus.

The Point

Here’s the point. I experienced a meltdown because I was stretched too thin and burning the candle at both ends. The road to recovery for me and for many of those who are facing burnout begins with figuring out where your energy is going. Then you have to make the hard decisions about what you will and will NOT do. You are burnt out because you are doing too much. You have to step back and eliminate some of your commitments. This is the only way that you can begin to win the battle against overwhelm, stress, and burnout.

Ask Yourself

What are you giving your energy to? Are there things you are committed to that need to be eliminated? Delegated? Renegotiated?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about spiritual disciplines…how they work, what they accomplish, and how they take shape in your life.  If you’d like to join the conversation, leave a comment below.