“Leadership is lonely.” I have believed this statement for years. As a young leader, I listened to many mature & godly leaders discuss how to be faithful in ministry. Why? Because I wanted to learn from them.

Essentially, these three responsibilities create the role description for an SGL coach. So, if you are making a description on paper (which I highly suggest you do), then start with these three core objectives:

Every ministry trains its volunteers. But does it work? Most leaders conduct volunteer training events at the beginning of the semester and then fool themselves into thinking that this will effectively train volunteers to do the ministry's work.

A successful August re-launch begins in April. One thing all strategic pastors do is focus on the highly important when it's not urgent to be done.

A lot of ministries can't afford TrainedUp, Ministry Grid, or Kajabi. Plus, most ministries do not have a videographer to shoot and edit if they could. However, hosting your volunteer training videos is essential to creating a scalable training system for your ministry. In this week's newsletter, we want to share with you how to make and host online volunteer training courses almost entirely for free.

I am thoroughly disrupted.

You need to re-learn your lessons.

I bet the student ministry at your church has a retreat. But do you?

Do you have a self-leadership system?If there is one thing I’ve had to learn the hard way, it is that an unhealthy leader cannot lead a healthy ministry.

You need to start waking up earlier.

I've been in ministry long enough to know that our "why" can get compromised so easily. In the beginning, it was about God and serving people, but our "why" can shift to productivity, attendance, money, and influence. Now, none of those things that I just listed are bad. However, none of those things are a healthy "why" for ministry. I think that you need to work hard, be productive, reach more people this year than you did last year, and grow your influence.

Here's a harsh reality: your ministry won't always experience growth. Your attendance won't always be substantial. Your team won't always break growth barriers. Your strategy won't always be effective. What do you do when a challenging night, event, or semester turns into a difficult season? I can promise you if you've been in ministry for more than a year, you know that a storm is on the horizon.

I found myself so anxious, angry, and tired that I had gained 40 lbs; I would get sick and vomit for 24-48 hours from stress, and I wanted to quit.

Does ministry ever stress you out? Of course, it does. Maybe it's how personal and pastoral life overlap or the burden for people's eternity. The weight of ministry is a real thing. If you lead in any capacity and make decisions, odds are you have goals to hit, change to manage, and complaints to deal with. Throw in long hours and ministry pay, and you have all the ingredients for significant stress.

Your first-time guest experience doesn’t begin at church. It begins far earlier. It begins on your website. It begins on your Instagram. It begins on your Google Reviews. It begins on your live stream. It begins on the road when people drive by. Guests experience your church weeks before they ever decide to show up in person physically.

What if your burnout is your decision? In today's ministry world, we talk a lot about burnout. And for good reason, as I have written about here, the tenure of pastors is tragically short. But I think we've shifted the blame for burnout to the wrong place. Instead, I think we need to look at ourselves first:

My question is – Is your ministry simple enough to fit onto one page? If you can’t, your ministry will not scale easily because it will be too complicated

In part one, which I encourage you to read here, we look at five critical issues impacting the tenure of youth pastors. As you'll notice, many of those impacts were directly related to external circumstances. While those reasons are true for many, we cannot overlook the internal reasons why YPs leave ministry. I think we need to say "Enough of the victim mentality!" Let's look at the other side of the coin.