12min 41 s
As pastor, does it sometimes feel like everyone in the congregation is your boss? Are you struggling to get back more time for yourself and feeling pretty exhausted? If so, you are not alone. Listen here as Rev. Anna Tew tells how she recovered from such a place by using the flexibility of pastoral ministry to her advantage.
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15 min 50s
It’s not about “saving” the congregation, per se, but about buying the time for serious thinking about what the cong. wants for its future.
Discerning what form of ministry is faithful to the basic values & resources that you have now?
Guidance for how lay leaders can work productively with a very part-time pastor;
A targeted approach that equips and empowers the laity can do themselves:
Specific recommendations for how the laity can create and lead worship, for congregational care, etc.
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12 min 19s
The four paths are: revitalization, transformation, legacy building and ministry completion (that’s one option), and road closed ahead.
Description of each path and what is involved;
Why 1 path is much harder (a mirage really) than it may seem and why;
Why another path is the one congregations in denial often fall into (and I wish didn’t exist!);
The process of shaping and narrowing down options and focusing on transformation, and legacy building and ministry completion, and discerning which is right for that congregation.
Metaphor of the church as a ship coming into harbor and completing it voyage.
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13 min 42s
The power of metaphors for helping church navigate their lifecycle;
Imagining the wider church as a forest, and individual congregations as trees helps churches see how they fit into something larger than themselves;
Reframing this last phase of ministry not simply as decline, which is often interpreted as failure, but as a natural part of a process that’s tied to a larger system of the wider church;
Questions to aid the struggle of balancing autonomy at the congregational level with covenant at the wider church level;
How resurrection language can help; A resurrected church, like the resurrected Jesus, has some features of what it was before, but it’s not the same thing – some new “benefits” too;
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15 min 25s
How a physician or a statistician might look at someone and assess what their health was and their life expectancy – parallels with a congregation;
Examples for churches: Acute, life-threatening illnesses,
Chronic illnesses;
Toxic behavior by members;
Parallels for churches of what we’d look for in people such as diet, exercise, social connection, sleep or rest, family history, mental health;
Like people, some of the things that influence life expectancy can be changed, some cannot & which is which;
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