Take Care Of Your Family

April 11, 2011

Church planting can become an all-consuming task. You have to become a Jack-of-all-trades and hardly ever a master of anything. The tasks required of a planter can simply overwhelm them. Recruiting meetings, strategy sessions, fund raising, vision development, marketing and outreach events, and much more are all necessary if a planter what to be successful. But that is just the beginning. In reality, every planter has three jobs; planter/pastor, husband/father, and leader.

So, what does the typical planter do? Work harder, pray harder and worry more! What too often takes place in this process is the loss of intimacy in the family. The work of planting the church causes you to push aside your life with your children and your spouse. While your investment in the church plant grows, your investment in family slows and sometimes halts altogether. Anyone who has planted church can attest to pressures between family and the mountain of work needed to accomplish the plant.

According to some of the latest research, by the Religious Research Association, divorce among the clergy is a growing trend. Around 24 percent of women and 19 percent of men, in the pulpit, are getting divorced. That is an astounding statistic. It simply goes to show that even the pastor’s home is not free from the potential problems faced by every married couple on the planet.

Peter Scazzero, author of The Emotionally Healthy Church, wrote something I think we all need to pay attention too:

The overall health of the church or ministry, or plant (my words) depends primarily on the emotional and spiritual health of its leadership. In fact, the key to successful spiritual leadership has much more to do with the leader’s internal life, than with the leader’s expertise, gifts, or experience.”

I don’t know about you, but that causes me to stop and reevaluate. We must be willing to accept the fact that the best gift we can ever give our church plant is a spiritually and emotionally healthy heart, mind, and family, particularly as it relates to our family relationships.

The greatest advice I, or anyone could ever give you is to have a plan before you get into the battle. Jesus was teaching the crowds one day and he was trying to tell them about the importance and cost of discipleship. Jesus said; “What king, going to make war against another king, does not first sit down and consult whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” His point! Don’t be foolish, understand the situation you will find yourself in and have a plan for how you will handle it.

Posted 4/11/2011 in Church Planting | 0 Comments - Add Comment