Monthly Archives: April 2026

Setting boundaries

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Set boundaries with your family in mind

I was a full-time seminary student when I got my first job in ministry. It was a great position that afforded me significant responsibility and opportunity to use my gifts with our church’s college group, all while being mentored into ministry by the college pastor, Chuck.

I was so excited to be doing meaningful kingdom work that I had no concept of boundaries. I would work long hours, teach one to two weekly large group meetings with our students, lead a Bible study, and meet with students one-on-one most of the other nights of the week. I said yes to every opportunity that came my way, whether I had time for it or not.

But Chuck was a good mentor, both in teaching me ministry and in teaching me to be healthy. He would pop into my office some days and ask, “How many hours have you worked this week?”

“I’m not really sure,” was my usual answer.

“I’ve seen you here too much!” he would bark.

“But I have to finish the …” Chuck would never let me finish that sentence. “No you don’t. What you need to do is rest. Go home and find something fun and unproductive to do.”

So began my journey toward healthy boundaries in ministry.

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Chief among these boundaries was the practice of sabbath-keeping, a concept that was utterly foreign to me at the time — and frankly sounded ludicrous. My life was so crazy busy and overcommitted that I would read assigned books at stoplights, and Chuck wanted me to reduce my available working time by a full day? To somehow find one seventh more time on my other days to do all that I needed to do?

But as this discipline slowly began to do its work in me, I found that somehow sabbath allowed me to do more, not less. Yes, I had to get used to having a full day of not working. But I came to find that when I was working, I was more present to God and others. My time had decreased, but somehow I was able to do more in the time I had. And because I had a hard cap on the amount of time I permitted myself to work, I began to learn what I should say yes to and what I should say no to. Sabbath-keeping taught me the crucial importance of boundaries — how to set them, and how to keep them.

Since getting married, and even more so since having children, I’ve come to realise that these boundaries are not just important for my health, but also for those I love.

Consequently, I’m always looking for small ways to practice this, like taking my email notification off my phone so I can be more present when I’m home (because, I’ve learned, I’m incapable of not checking the email when that little notification pops up), or in bigger ways, like limiting the total number of hours I will work in a given week, and the times when I will do so.

 

 

Planting a church without losing your soul, Nine Questions for the Spiritually Formed Pastor, by Tim Morey

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Preceding

  1. The beginning of church planting
  2. In need to plant more churches
  3. Adding vulnerability to our power for churchplanting
  4. Failing loudly
  5. Being ambitious for those around

 

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Related

  1. The Pillars of Leadership
  2. Don’t Be Busy Be Productive
  3. Boundaries
  4. The Importance of Boundaries in Emotional Wellbeing
  5. The importance of boundaries for all humans
  6. Adulting 101: The Importance of Setting Boundaries in Personal and Professional Life
  7. Importance of Boundaries
  8. Healthy Boundaries: Signs You Need Them & How to Set Them
  9. Top 10 Pet Peeves Impacting Your Self-Care
  10. ✨ The Quiet Freedom of Letting Go ✨
  11. # Lessons Learned from Life #
  12. Avoiding Burnout: Healthy Habits for Receptive People
  13. From Burnout to Boundaries: How Solar Plexus Energy Empowers You
  14. The Year Has Come And Gone

Being ambitious for those around

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Be ambitious for those around you

To the extent we can, we’ve attempted to make every ministry in the church team-based, such that there is no area where only one person is able to perform a given task. A brilliant practice that we picked up early on has helped immensely with this. When a person is looking to start a given ministry, we ask two questions.

The first is, Who will do it with you? If you can find two or three others who want to share in this, then great, you’re now a ministry team.

The second question is just as important: When will you take your first day off?

This question does two things. First, it communicates a message we find easy to state but harder to show: you are more important than what you do. Second, it means you as a ministry team leader have to teach someone else to do what you do.

We regard burning people out to be a serious sin, and a failure of leadership on our part. As such, no one should be the only person who is able to perform a given task, such that if you get sick, go on vacation, have a baby, and so on, that thing can’t get done. Putting these two questions to new prospective leaders has gone a long way in creating a healthy ethos of servanthood, and has also given us a natural pipeline for identifying and training up new leaders within existing teams.

So where does this practice get difficult? Not in terms of organisation, but in terms of ego. Teaching others to do what you do means that you don’t get to be a superhero. In fact, our encouragement to leaders is to be intentionally ambitious for those around you — look for those who will be able to do it better than you do. This came home to me as we were putting this into practice for our worship gatherings. If we were asking every other team to operate in this way, then we needed to take a team approach to teaching and preaching the Bible, right?

Don’t get me wrong — I wanted to take a team approach. I knew intellectually that I certainly wouldn’t be the only person in the church gifted to teach, that our church would benefit from a diversity of voices in the pulpit, and even that I would be a much better pastor if every three or four weeks I was able to work on other things because I wasn’t preparing a message.

But I was scared. What if the church likes the other teachers more than me? What is my value as pastor of this church if I am not its best teacher? Swallowing this fear and doing what I knew was best for the church required a lot of prayer and the occasional pep talk from those near me. And even though this process has now been repeated many times, it continues to challenge me every time we have brought a lay person or new staff member into the teaching rotation.

 

Planting a church without losing your soul, Nine Questions for the Spiritually Formed Pastor, by Tim Morey

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Preceding

  1. The beginning of church planting
  2. In need to plant more churches
  3. Adding vulnerability to our power for churchplanting
  4. Failing loudly

Failing loudly

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Fail loudly. Shame and insecurity being what they are, most of us respond to failure by hiding. We reach for our proverbial fig leaf (i.e., an area of unquestioned strength) and try to hide behind it in order to mitigate our feeling of being exposed as weak. But the truth is that those leaders who are willing to be public about their failures actually do the most good for themselves and those they lead.

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Andy Crouch tells about a study that followed a cohort of middle managers over the course of their careers, to see why some advanced into senior leadership and some did not. When the study concluded, there was only one factor that set apart the more successful managers: the speed and degree to which they owned their failures. When something went wrong in their area of responsibility, one group acted as if everything was fine when it wasn’t, and did their best to keep their bosses and peers from seeing where they were lacking. This strategy proved ineffective in the long run, as this group experienced less career advancement. But, contrary to what many would expect, those who were most public with their failings advanced further in their careers over time. Crouch concludes,

“The ones who succeeded were the ones who failed loudly, quickly, and boldly — rather than softly, timidly, and slowly.”

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I struggle with this. I’m too proud and have too much of my ego wrapped up in my accomplishments. When I fail, I’m embarrassed, and the last thing I want is to look incompetent in front of others. But the counterintuitive truth is that if I want to lead well, my incompetence is exactly what I need to let others see. “Church planting,” it seems, “is kryptonite for pride.”

Practically speaking, what does this look like? Own your mistakes. Apologise without delay, privately and publicly. And don’t underestimate the importance of laughing at yourself.

After a lifetime of seminary teaching, one of my professors, Dr. Eddie Gibbs, had boiled down his most important pieces of advice for pastors to a handful of pithy maxims. The one I found most surprising was,

“Don’t take yourself too seriously.”

Huh? This is one of the most important things a pastor can do for their church?

But as I thought it about it more, I could see the wisdom. Think about it: what better way to model grace than to give it to yourself? To let your people watch you attempt hard things, and when you fail, to see you dust yourself off and try again?

If you want to create a church culture where people feel empowered to attempt innovative ways of being the church, they need to not only see what praise awaits them if they succeed, but what it will look like in those inevitable times when they fail. The truth is, you and I as pastors set the tone. If we take ourselves so seriously that we can’t laugh at our failings, no one else will dare laugh at their own either.

An important corollary here is that the church that wants to innovate must celebrate effort, not success.

 

Planting a church without losing your soul, Nine Questions for the Spiritually Formed Pastor, by Tim Morey

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Preceding

  1. The beginning of church planting
  2. In need to plant more churches
  3. Adding vulnerability to our power for churchplanting

 

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Additional reading

  1. History of Christianity
  2. Sometimes we face trials
  3. Man proposes, God disposes
  4. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail
  5. Ability (part 4) Thought about the ability to have ability
  6. Giving cogent reasons to young people why Christian faith is relevant to them

 

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Related

Weak but strong: Write and speak by the Spirit
Much guidance on “Christian living” – and many helps for Christian writers, speakers, pastors, teachers – train us that way. This approach teaches a Christianity that either ignores, or tries to exploit, the Holy Spirit. Using Jesus’ name, it calls us to speak and act “from human wisdom.”

The Nazarene Pastor Shortage and What One Church is Doing About It
Why does Central church have so many young men and women called into the ministry?
The students have seen their peers called into ministry and have been open to God speaking to themselves too. Sometimes it’s a snowball effect, one student is called into ministry then another and another and another… it just keeps growing.

Adding vulnerability to our power for churchplanting

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Find people you can submit to. Another way we add vulnerability to our power is by proactively seeking out accountability. Historically, this was known as the discipline of submission, and it was seen as essential to pastoral health and vitality.

In speaking to this need, Eugene Peterson invokes the old adage that

“the doctor who has himself as a patient is a fool,”

which he then applies to pastors.

“If those entrusted with the care of the body cannot be trusted to look after their own bodies, far less can those entrusted with the care of souls look after their own souls, which are even more complex than bodies and have a correspondingly greater capacity for self-deceit.”

In the beginning, he says, pastors are self-motivated to be people of prayer, Scripture, and self-disciplined growth. But we need someone to direct us, because over time our passions cool and our disciplines slip. We need someone to direct us more, not less, as we mature.

“On the lower slopes of the mountain, it never occurred to me to have a guide. But about halfway up the mountain, alarmed at how many maimed and dead bodies of other pastors I was seeing, I became frightened. Aware of the danger of the enterprise and my own ignorance of the mountain, I decided that I must have a skilled guide, a spiritual director.”

 

Tom Eisenman, spiritual director

I do spiritual direction with Christian leaders. I have over fifty clients I meet with monthly, many of whom are church planters. In first meetings with church planters, the stories I hear are often disturbingly similar. Most land somewhere on the overwhelmed scale, weighed down by crushing responsibilities, unrealistic expectations, and far too many squeaky wheels to grease.

Church planting is exhausting. Families of these pastors have to survive on time scraps, and marriages are frequently stretched to the breaking point. It’s not uncommon for church planters to describe their reality using the familiar illustration of circus performers trying to keep dozens of plates all up and spinning on shaky poles. And more workshops on what to look for in poles and plates and how to improve spinning are not effectively alleviating the stress.

Pete Scazzero, a ministry crisis survivor, writes,

“The overall health of any church or ministry 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.

 

Planting a church without losing your soul, Nine Questions for the Spiritually Formed Pastor, by Tim Morey

 

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Preceding

  1. The beginning of church planting
  2. In need to plant more churches

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Related

  1. Weaknesses That Make You a Better Team Player
    What we label as “weakness” is simply a different strength—one that serves the group as a whole. Teams don’t flourish because everyone is impressive; they flourish because people are real, responsive, and rooted in humility. Sometimes the most quietly powerful team players are those who lead not from dominance, but from depth.
  2. We don’t (only) have a rabbinic pipeline problem
    The Atra report listens closely to rabbis and rabbinical students across denominations, and it names the real deterrents — debt, relocation, pay, job insecurity, isolation — without blaming anyone. It also confirms what many of us feel in our bones: the work is deeply meaningful, and the path precarious.
    For those of us who care about spiritual leadership — as rabbis, lay leaders, educators, funders and organizers — this kind of map is what we’ve needed. But if we read it only as addressing a “rabbi pipeline” problem, we miss the deeper invitation to rethink how leadership is formed, shared and practiced in Jewish life.
  3. Resilient Leadership Philosophy: Why Servant Leaders Are Needed
    We’ve spent decades elevating charisma over character, control over connection, and dominance over dignity. The result? Burned-out workplaces, toxic politics, shallow influencers, and broken institutions.
    We’re not in the age of the “great resignation.” We’re in the age of the great reevaluation—and servant leaders are the only ones equipped for what’s coming next.
    Because real servant leadership is not about being liked.
    It’s about being trusted in the storm.
  4. Signs You’re a Natural Leader (Even If You Don’t Feel Like One)
    Many men lead without even realizing it. This CLG Lifestyle guide reveals subtle signs you’re a natural leader—even if you doubt yourself—and how to grow into the man God designed you to be.
  5. The heartache of the spiritual path
    Whether we know it or not, when we step onto the spiritual path, we are making a decision to feel everything, to experience everything. As a spiritual director once told me, “Unfortunately, we do not get to selectively numb. We can feel everything or nothing.” Openness is a package deal.
  6. Spiritual discernment through prayer and community
    Without prayer, we are left trying to do God’s will with only self and the world to guide us. Without spiritual community, we are the sole interpreters of God’s voice in our lives and, while no one else can truly know what he is speaking to us in our hearts, God also speaks through the people he has placed in our lives. God did not make us to be alone.
  7. Why the Welcoming Prayer Helps Let Go of Worry
    Letting go of the desire to change doesn’t mean resignation or passivity. It means releasing the ego’s grasp of us that wants to fix, manage, or perfect ourselves to earn acceptance, love, or safety.
  8. How to Lead a Spiritual Team Without Burning Out
    Leading a spiritual team without burning out starts with accepting that your primary responsibility is not to carry everyone’s energy, but to steward the container—through clear boundaries, shared ownership, sustainable rhythms, and daily practices that keep you connected to your own Source.
  9. How Can I Hold Space Without Burning Out as a Spiritual Leader?
    Holding space without burning out starts with remembering that you are a facilitator, not a savior. Your role is to be present, grounded, and compassionate while keeping your emotional center anchored in your own body, values, and limits.
    Because real servant leadership is not about being liked.
    It’s about being trusted in the storm.
  10. Cultivating Healthy Spiritual Leadership
    “As we seek to cultivate healthy spiritual leadership, we must resist any drift toward positional superiority and instead affirm diverse models of leadership found throughout the global church. To walk in step with the Spirit, we must honor the voices of those God has raised up from within, not just those with titles. The nature of spiritual leadership listens, learns, and leads in discernment within community.”
  11. Shepherds After God’s Own Heart
    Note that ‘pastor’ and ‘shepherd’ are derived from the same Greek word poimen. A shepherd or pastor is not an office but a primary function within the churches. Ephesians tells us that God gave some to be pastors and teachers. It is a gift that God works in the person to have a unique care for the saints. You can’t add a title to a person and accomplish this effect.
    The flock must be fed, and the flock must be kept safe by men who delight in them (See Mark 13:33; and compare Luke 21:36 and Ephesians 6:18). Early on in Genesis 33:13-15, God is laying down these qualities of leadership that will serve as the criteria for Israel and the churches of God.