Sabbatical Report
Jason Matters
November 11, 2010
First of all, I want to say thank you to the Church Board and everyone at New Vision Church for granting me a seven week sabbatical. There have been points in the last few years when I felt worn out and discouraged and was reminded that I have seven weeks of rest and renewal coming up- and at times this hope kept me going. Thank you to the sabbatical committee for working so hard over the last few months to prepare for this. Thank you to everyone who accepted additional responsibilities while I was gone.
Did We Meet Our Goals?
Disengagement from regular ministry responsibilities to allow for rest and renewal – Ministry is difficult because it involves significant emotional and mental energy, and physical energy in terms of the number of hours required to do the job well. I believe I was able to completely disengage by only receiving personal email, by not reading my Facebook “home” page, by not receiving calls from church members, and by not having meetings to prepare for or lead. I truly unplugged and rested my mind and emotions.
Extended time to spend with family – Near the end of my sabbatical Erica mentioned how nice it was to have me around for seven weeks without any distractions or meetings, and to have me around on Sunday mornings to help with the kids. I spent a lot of time with my kids. Our plans for our week in Cincinatti changed repeatedly and Erica and I were only able to spend one night at Inkeeper’s Ministry, but we enjoyed that one night. The final week in San Diego with no kids was absolutely wonderful. I am so glad Erica was able to join me. It was the best week of the entire sabbatical! Parenting continues to be a huge challenge for me. As I reflected about my own strengths and weaknesses, I recognized that I am a strong introvert and I cherish alone time. However, alone time often does not exist when you have a toddler and preschooler at home. I underestimated how difficult it would be to rest at home. Erica and I should have communicated more about how I would spend my days.
The Opportunity to visit other churches – I visited 6 churches. Most of them are growing and effectively reaching their communities. Most of them are large to super-large. I enjoyed worshipping without having to lead anything or be in charge of anything. I enjoyed experiencing new environments and experiencing churches from the perspective of the first time visitor. I felt very affirmed- I believe that we offer a very high quality worship experience for our size. And hey, I got to meet my hero, Rick Warren!
Time to reflect on my first seven years in ministry and to discover how to maximize my strengths and address my weaknesses. - I did a lot of thinking. I kept a journal nearby to record thoughts and insights. I participated in one three hour coaching session with Dr. Sondra Cave, a certified strengths consultant and pastor’s wife, and she helped me to see how my strengths can help overcome some of my weaknesses. I am planning to meet with her again in 6 months for follow-up. I also spent a lot of time meditating on 1st Timothy. God regularly gave me new insights about ministry and myself.
Time to pray and dream about the future ministry at New Vision – In addition to my role as pastor, I thought and prayed a lot about the future of our ministry at New Vision. I believe we need to make some immediate changes. I also have some ideas that I would like to discuss with our church board concerning a revised outreach and growth strategy.
I believe I met the goals for the sabbatical, and I believe that I will be a better pastor because of my experience. I feel refreshed and energized and ready to lead New Vision into the future.
Books I Read
The Strategically Small Church – This book talks about the value of small churches. The author encourages small churches to not see their size as a liability but as a strength, and to make the most of it. Small churches can be: intimate, authentic, nimble, and effective. I read this book because I believe people in Raymore prefer smaller churches and we need to include this in our future growth strategy.
Simple Church – This book talks about the need for churches to simplify their ministries. Churches are tempted to have to many programs to meet every need and demand. However, the authors interviewed hundreds of churches and found that churches with fewer, but more effective programs, produce stronger disciples of Jesus. If we want, we can take the survey to help determine if New Vision is simple or cluttered.
Organic Church – This book really rocked my mind. I love and I hate it. The author presents what I believe is an extreme position on how church should be done. But I believe his basic critique of modern churches is correct: we spend too much time and energy creating high quality, entertaining worship services, and not enough time disclipling those who really love Jesus. He also advocates taking church out of our buildings to places where non-Christians gather- coffeeshops, parks, etc. I think we can gain from his model of doing small groups.
Leading On Empty – This book is about how leaders, especially pastors, need to guard against burn out, and includes some helpful suggestions for how to prevent burnout, including prioritizing your life and ministry objectives, taking Sabbaths and sabbaticals, etc. The author suggests being aware of what activities drain you and what activities energize you. I spent a lot of time reflecting on this for me.
Living Your Strengths – This book is about ministering through your strengths. I completed the Strengthsfinder inventory and attended 2 workshops earlier this summer, then I read this book before undergoing some individual strengths coaching while on sabbatical. This book helped me to understand the strengths-based approach, and it helped me understand my top 5 strengths. Just in case you care, my top 5 strengths are: Learner, Intellection, Analyzer, Input, & Context. This puts me in the “strategic thinking” category, versus the relating, executing or influencing category.
Getting Things Done – This book presents a time management/personal management program to help a person handle multiple projects, tasks, appointments in both work and personal life. The read the first half of the book, which explained the process and tips for preparing to use the system. The second half will instruct me how to implement the system. I will implement the system now that I am back working full-time.
Action Points
During the last two weeks of the sabbatical, I began to compile a list of items that I would like to address as a result of what I have experienced while on sabbatical.
1. I need to NOT lead a L.I.F.E. Group – It was not wise for me to lead 2 groups. I have come to the conclusion that I should not lead any group. When I lead a group, it implies that leading a LIFE group is a pastor-thing. But it is not that complicated. It also takes away another evening, and I only have a few, that I need to spend meeting with people, visiting new families, etc.
2. I will give more time to preaching and teaching – since this is an area of strength, I need to give it the time it deserves. I will schedule times away for advance planning, and I will work to include the input and ideas of others. I also want to work with Beth and the worship team to craft our entire worship services around the themes of the message series.
3. I will schedule regular one-day personal retreats – This comes from the book, Leading On Empty. When I get busy and stressed, I fall into the rut of just getting through the day and through the week. At that point, my creativity as well as my productivity falls. These one day retreats are opportunities for focused reflection, prayer, renewal, and dreaming.
4. I want to read more books – Books are a good source of ideas, challenges, sermon material. This will help me stay fresh and on the cutting edge of ministry.
5. I will implement the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal management system to help me stay focused, relaxed, but productive.
6. As a church, we need to create a Facebook page – One pastor/workshop presenter said that every church should double what they are doing on Facebook, as it is so effective. We need to encourage our people to interact with each other on Facebook, share prayer requests, sermon ideas, pictures, etc.
7. I will learn more about Twitter and examine its possibilities for ministry, connection, and church marketing.
8. I will learn to slow down my thinking, share my thoughts with others in order to gain their valuable input, and not get too far ahead of others with my ideas. This is from the coaching session. I get ideas, think about them and land on my conclusions. Then I get stubborn in thinking I am right. I struggle with bringing people along with me. I am learning to see others’ input as additional sources of information to analyze, thereby producing a better conclusion!
9. I must lead the way in evangelism. We can wait for people to walk through our doors- we have to proactively build relationships with our unsaved friends and neighbors. I must lead by example.
10. I need to start my day with some alone time. When I start my day by rolling out of a warm bed in order to get 1 or 2 kids up for the morning, I set up my family for a bad day. When I get up early and enjoy some alone time, and then get the kids up, I am in a much better mood and I set a better tone for everyone’s day.
11. I will work with Beth and others to keep our worship services 1 hour and 15 minutes. When I visited other churches, I was ready to be done before an hour and a half. Services usually felt too long because of lengthy sermons (Rick Warren preached for an hour and 15 minutes). I think that if we mange our time well, and if I give more time to preaching better messages, we can dismiss by 11:45 and people will not go home worn out, but maybe will want more and feel motivated to get more through participating in other ministries.
12. I will learn more about Life Transformation Groups (LTV’s) and pray about implementing them at New Vision as supplements to our LIFE Groups. This is from the Organic Church book. I believe this will aid in leadership development, deep discipleship, and involvement of more people in groups.
13. I will pray more, read more, and begin to discuss with the board and other leaders an idea I have for how we can effectively reach our city, but in a different way than we have done before. (If I told you any more right now, I would be getting ahead of myself, breaking action point 8)
14. Our city is filled with hurting, broken and lost people who are headed for hell and we all must continue to sacrifice and serve in order to reach them!
Thank you again for the opportunity to enjoy the past seven weeks. I pray that it has been beneficial for New Vision Church, all of our members, and for me and my family.
Let’s continue to talk about our experiences!
1 comment:
Thanks for sharing this! I was going to call you this week to see how it went, so thanks for the sneak peek:-) I am so glad that you were able to do exactly what you wanted out of these seven weeks. I had been praying for you during this time and will continue to pray that you will be able to implement the changes that you wrote about. Thanks for being transparent- it is not an easy thing to do. Enjoy your day off:-)
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