I read an amazing quote this week from Pastor Drew Hayes of The People’s Church this week:

“Most churches are not making much of an impact because their pastors aren’t lined up to make an impact. And that’s not their fault. They are great assistant pastors. They are great pastor-care people. But they are not great communicators and great leaders.”

I love this quote! I believe one of the greatest tragedies of the American church today is the underlying hierarchy we have created. The measure of success as a pastor in the American church today is if you  can “move up the ladder”. It is basically like the entire point of being a youth pastor has become because it usually is the step before you get to be the senior pastor.

Here’s the problem: not everyone is called to be a Lead Pastor! Being the lead pastor takes a special burden, an ability to be a great communicator, and many other things, but most of all, it takes a call from God – because it is hard and it carries more weight and responsibility than other positions in the church (the Bible says so!).

One of the biggest reasons for the decline of the church today is that we have tons of people doing the wrong thing because the church tells them it is a better thing. We need great youth pastors to keep working with youth. We need people who can’t communicate well to become executives and we need to have creative pastors and worship pastors stay in their proper seat! It is okay for me to say this because I am not a great public communicator in the least bit, so I recognize that I should not be a lead pastor. And that does make me less useful or inferior to those who are. It makes me different. And if you check out that whole section about the body having different parts and needing them all, that is a good thing!

Rant over.

I was at the beach spending time with Jesus a week or so ago, and I had a thought about how incredibly generous God has been to us and I started writing about it in my journal and I want to share a section of it here, because it was super profound and meaningful for me and I haven’t stopped talking about it yet. I hope it as meaningful for you:

“I can’t stop thinking about how kind & generous God is. Not only did he create this beauty & power & wonder in the nature, but he built us with a sense of awe and appreciation for it. All this beauty would be meaningless if we didn’t have the capacity to find joy in waves and trees and smiles and the breeze – all the simple things. God made love pleasurable, he made sex feel good, he made fun…fun, and so on. He gave us the chance to laugh and play and hug and cry and sleep and stress out too. He has truly been so kind to us. Our senses could be dull and our world boring and we would have never known what we missed, but God was so loving as to give us this world full of feelings, adventure, discovery, and excitement. And he gave us all this knowing that it increased the risk of us choosing to ignore him. But he had to show us just a tiny glimpse of the happiness eternity would bring to those who choose him and his ways. If his presence is so much better than this that it would kill us to look at him, we truly can’t have any idea what real intimacy with Christ will be. How kind God has been to us!”