Source: Can a Pastor Who Struggles with Depression Remain a Pastor?

The post Can a Pastor Who Struggles with Depression Remain a Pastor? appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by unSeminary: Welcome back to this week’s unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to have Shawn Lovejoy with us, the founder and CEO of Courage to Lead.

Shawn has been a pastor, a church planter, an entrepreneur, and a leadership coach. He started coaching pastors in 2001. Courage to Lead is there to help not only church leaders but also all kinds of other businesses lead themselves to the next level while staying healthy.

Shawn is with us today to share his own story of learning to lead his church and himself to a healthy place that honored God’s definition of success.

Grow beyond anxiety. // Anxiety is a common thread among pastors because it’s easy to become caught up with the world’s definition of success. We can become focused on growing the church faster than Jesus wants it to grow. Ask those closest to you what they think about how you and the church are doing, and use their insight to create a healthy rhythm for your church and life. It’s a spiritual fight to win that way in our ministries.14-point covenant. // Shawn found himself walking down an unhealthy path as he struggled with workaholism. After a series of honest conversations with his wife, he made changes to get himself and his church to a healthy place. Part of that included creating a 14-point covenant with his wife which he signed and honored. It included things such as committing to be home by 5pm most days of the week and never walking into the house still on his cell phone. Examine how you can partner with your spouse or family at home as they support your work in ministry.Shift the focus off of yourself. // As a pastor, the more you build the church around yourself, the less stable it is beyond you. Pastors can stay too long at a church and slowly the church’s focus moves to them rather than staying on the Lord and what is good for the church’s future health. The key questions to ask oneself are: Am I overexposed? Can I build a teaching team around me? Does everything go to hell in a handbasket when I’m absent? What decisions do I not need to be making? You don’t need to attend a meeting if you’re not the one making decisions in it.  Courage to Lead. // Shawn is the founder & CEO of Courage to Lead, which is focused on leadership growth and helps pastors lead themselves to the next level by God’s power. There are three gears of growth: culture, teams, and systems. The organization consists of a network of coaches which works with pastors across the country, helping them lead themselves and their teams well while creating a healthy organization that’s scaleable.Measuring Success. // Shawn wrote the book Measuring Success: Your Path To Significance, Satisfaction, & Leading Yourself To The Next Level focused on leadership growth and how to become the leader God wants you to be. Based on Shawn’s own experience coaching and leading as a pastor, the book also walks the reader through creating a leadership development culture in your church, staff, and family. Defining success. // If you don’t define success for yourself, the world will do it for you. One chapter of the book talks about how the most neglected metric in the church is love. Most of our attention, energy, and stress is focused around programs, productions, processes, events, and problems. But do the people on your leadership team feel like their lives are better or more stressful serving in the church?

You can get in touch with Shawn and learn more about the book and Courage to Lead at www.couragetolead.com.

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Source: Significance, Satisfaction, & Leading Yourself to the Next Level with Shawn Lovejoy

The post Significance, Satisfaction, & Leading Yourself to the Next Level with Shawn Lovejoy appeared first on Passion for Planting.

“The gospel of self-reliance is always bad news because it always leads to more anxiety.” – Steve Cuss

by Leadership Network: Does anxiety get in the way of your ability to be an effective leader? Is your inability to notice when you and those around you are anxious keeping you “stuck” in chronic unhealthy patterns? In Managing Leadership Anxiety, from Leadership Network NEXT/Harper Collins Christian Publishing Book Series, pastor and spiritual growth expert Steve Cuss offers powerful tools to help you move from being managed by anxiety to managing anxiety.

You’ll develop the capacity to notice your anxiety and your group’s anxiety. You will increase your sensitivity to the way groups develop systemic anxiety that keeps them trapped. Your personal self-awareness will increase as you learn how self gets in the way of identifying and addressing issues.

Managing Leadership Anxiety offers valuable principles to those who are hungry to understand the source of the anxiety in themselves and in the people with whom they relate. Readers will be empowered to take back control of their lives and lead in mature and vibrant ways.

The following is an excerpt from Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs

I believe leadership anxiety is generated when we think we need something in any particular moment that we don’t actually need.

When I began as a hospital chaplain, I would get anxious walking into a room because I believed I needed to know what to say or what to do. As much as I believed I needed that, it wasn’t true. As I progressed in my awareness, I was able to walk into a room not knowing what to say, not even knowing what I was walking into, because there was a larger truth at work beyond what I believed. I believed I needed knowledge to be okay; I believed I was required to say just the right thing to make things better. As I dug in deeper, I later learned that I believed I had to appear smart to be okay, so when I didn’t know what to say, I was managing my own feeling of inadequacy rather than connecting with the people in the room.

The greater truth was that God was present in those situations; God was in the room before I walked in, and God would guide me. I did not, in fact, need to know what to say. The more I depended on needing to say the right thing, the less effective I was as a chaplain.I was managing my own anxiety rather than paying attention to God. What is this dynamic, and why did I believe I needed it so strongly? Of course, I write in the past tense, but I still get anxious today in leadership contexts, and much of the time it is because the situation is putting pressure on what I think I need that I do not actually need. The situation is also blocking my capacity to notice and trust God in those moments.

Anxiety shrinks the power of the gospel because it presents a false gospel—one of self-reliance rather than reliance on God. The gospel of self-reliance is always bad news because it always leads to more anxiety. But if I can learn to notice it, eventually name its source and triggers, and move past it, I encounter the actual good news of Jesus, the gospel of grace, which always leads to freedom. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that freedom and life come when we deny, crucify, and are wary of something inside us that shrinks the gospel. What is it inside us that gets in the way?

Order your copy of Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs today.

After growing up in Perth, Western Australia, Steve eventually moved to the United States for where he married his wife Lisa. Together they have two sons and a daughter. He currently serves as Lead Pastor of Discovery Christian Church in Broomfield, Colorado, where he has been since 2005. He holds a Master of Divinity from Emmanuel Christian Seminary and has a varied and accomplished ministry background.

“Talking about it brings transformation faster than just reading about it. Before MLA was a book it was a class where people interacted, shared stories, tried things, made changes. The video course starts where the book leaves off and gives a group a way to interact with the book together in 12 sessions. It has everything you need including facilitator guide, schedule, templates and pdfs as well as the videos.”

For more information and to sign up, go here.

The post Avoiding the Gospel of Self Reliance appeared first on Leadership Network.

Source: Avoiding the Gospel of Self Reliance

The post Avoiding the Gospel of Self Reliance appeared first on Passion for Planting.