Posted on Monday, February 27, 2017

Is Every Open Door God’s Will?

by Joshua Reich

Often when we think about God’s will, we think about it in very mystical terms. It is floating out there waiting for us to find it, much like a unicorn. Everyone is seeking, few have found it but if you do, it changes everything.

On the other side, we try to make it as practical as possible. Simply look for open doors. If a door is open, that must be God’s will, a mentor told me once.

Is Every Open Door God’s Will?

Every open door?

Some doors that are open to us are God’s will and others aren’t.

I want to speak to the person who stares at open doors.

Too often we miss God’s will because we are looking at an open door just waiting.

What are we waiting for?

For conclusive proof. For God to make it obvious. For God to take away every other door so we know which of four doors in front of us to walk through.

Yet faith doesn’t work this way. Yes, God gives us obvious ways to follow His plan in the Bible. We know that every follower of Jesus is to use his gifts and talents for the glory of God. Where and how are not spelled out. Part of the adventure of faith is the risk of those steps.

Instead of staring at open doors wondering, “Is this the one?”, walk forward. Take a hold of the handle and see if it stays open and what God has on the other side.

Posted on Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The Weight & Joy of Being a Pastor: God Using You

by Joshua Reich

One of the best parts of being a pastor (or a Christian for that matter) is seeing God use you. There is nothing like using the gifts God has given to you.

Recently I’ve been sharing some of the weights and joys of being a pastor to help people who attend church understand what it is like to be a pastor and how they can support their pastor and his family, but also to encourage pastors to keep going and not give up, as so many do.

Being a pastor is unique. It isn’t harder than another job, just different.

If you’ve missed any of the weights or joys I’ve covered, you can see them here: Preaching God’s word every week, You can’t change people, God’s call on your life, Seeing life change and People under you are counting on you.

Joy #3: God Using You

This joy is much like joy #1. The fact that a holy God would use us is crazy.

For God to use us, we need to have a posture that allows him to use us. God does not force you to allow him to use you, but he does draw you to himself so that he can use you.

This also gets at our stories. Too many Christians are embarrassed by their stories and what they were like before God saved them. God does not waste stories. While we should not glory in our sins, we also need to see them as things that God wants to use right now. Our stories are not mistakes. God did not save us too late; he saved us at the right time.

We also need to have a level of humility that will allow God to work through us. I think too often, especially as pastors, we want to control everything. We cannot control the way God is moving and how he is working. We need to go along for the ride. Whether that is in a service, a sermon or a conversation, we need to be open to how God is moving and whom he is moving. This is scary because we give up control, but that is when the greatest things happen.

There is nothing like being in the middle of God working and being a part of it. There is nothing like seeing someone get it, seeing someone cross the line of faith, get baptized, come out of addiction. There is nothing like it.

Posted on Thursday, October 27, 2016

The Weight & Joy of Being a Pastor: Preaching

by Joshua Reich

There is a weight that pastors feel that I don’t know translates into other jobs. I think that people in churches can know about it but not fully understand it. I know that as a youth pastor I didn’t truly understand the weight of pastoring until becoming a lead pastor. For no particular reason it just worked that way.

The weight of pastoring.

While there are many weights that a pastor carries, some of them are just human weights that others carry (including parenting), but I thought up five that I think pastors particularly carry on a daily basis because of what they do each and every week. There is an important distinction here: these are not pains. These are the weights of pastoring. There is a huge difference between pain and weight (so no one misses that).

Over the coming months I wanted to share some of the weights and joys of pastoring.

Weight #1: Preaching God’s Word Every Week

One of my favorite parts of my job is preaching every week, and for your pastor, this is probably one of his favorite parts of his job. Yes, I call it preaching, not teaching. For me the goal of preaching is life change, not to pass on information or to make people smarter.

There is this weight of knowing that each week you are standing in front of a group of people and trying to communicate in an accurate way what the Bible says. The idea of God using you and speaking through you is incredibly weighty. The idea that in our church every week there are broken marriages, addictions, pain, hurt, questions, doubts, people who are struggling with their faith, people who are trying to piece together their faith, and people who don’t know Jesus and are going to spend eternity without Him.

This is weighty.

It keeps me and other pastors up during the week, it humbles us as we read, as we pray, as we think through the faces and the stories every week of our churches.

While we don’t decide for people, and we don’t make people change, the weight is the part that we play in this. The idea that God can and does use preaching every week is weighty.

The weight that if we’re not prepared, we dishonor God and the call He has placed on our lives. If we’re not prepared, someone may think their suspicions of God, church and pastors have been confirmed, and they move farther away from God rather than closer.

One of the things that I try to do every week, and it doesn’t always happen, is to stand up at Revolution and preach like it is the last time I am going to preach. This is pastor talk for leaving it all on the field.

I’m often asked by people how they can help me or support me (or support their pastor). Here are some ways:

Pray during the week when I’m studying.
Pray on Saturday night. I rarely sleep well on Saturday nights as I am thinking about Sunday morning.
Come on Sunday expecting God to show up.
Don’t bring something up on Sunday before church; wait until after church. That sounds rude, but for me personally, if I can stay focused on my message before church, it goes so much better for me.
Pray and support Katie. The best way to serve and care for a pastor is to serve and care for his wife. While I carry a weight and have a target on my back, Katie feels it even more, and it is often lonelier and heavier for her.

How to pray for your pastor.

Posted on Monday, August 29, 2016

6 Reasons Why Being on Time Matters

by Joshua Reich

Have you ever met someone for coffee, only to have them show up late? Or gone to a meeting that was supposed to start at 6pm but started closer to 6:20? Or gone to a church service that was supposed to start at 9am but started closer to 9:13.

It’s frustrating. It’s also disrespectful and I think it hinders your influence in life.

Here are three things that being on time shows:

3 reasons you should never be late.

Your Leadership, Influence and Time

1. It shows respect to the person you are meeting with (and their time). When you’re late you communicate, “I’m more important than you.” Now you would never say this, but being late can be an attempted power play. It shows a lack of care for the other person because it says, “Your time isn’t as valuable as my time, and what you have after this isn’t as important as this is.” You can’t make that decision.

2. It shows you are self disciplined. When you are late (even though it will happen sometimes), it often shows you aren’t disciplined. Maybe your previous appointment went long, which means you should let the person know you will be late. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for someone who is late and not knowing when they will be there. So let the person know.

But being on time means you have planned your day, you know how long a drive will take or how long a meeting will take. It also means you keep meetings on track and don’t allow a 30 minute meeting to become a 90 minute meeting.

3. It shows you have your priorities in line. As a leader or a person who wants to have influence, your priority is people. Wasting their time by being late shows your priorities are out of line. It also shows you think higher of yourself than the other person.

3 reasons being late hinders your influence.

Church and Time

Now let’s apply all of these to a church.

3 reasons you lose influence as a church when you start a service late.

Why? So many churches and church plants don’t start on time. I remember when we first started Revolution and it was 10am, and the only people in the auditorium were myself, the band and the tech team. Our worship leader looked at me and said, “Do we start?” I thought for a minute and said, “Yep, we start on time.”

1. It shows respect to the people who came (and their time). Time is important in our culture, and we don’t like it when someone else wastes our time. For a church, you want to communicate to guests (and they are usually on time) that you will respect their time. This communicates, we will respect you. It communicates care and respect to the kids’ workers, because churches that start late often go late, and that is a fast way to lose kids’ workers. (They often have enough stuff planned for the allotted time, so if you go over, the Holy Spirit better be sending revival!)

Pastors often think, “We are supposed to start at 10, but most people don’t show up until 10:10, so we’ll start at 10:12.” Here’s what you just told everyone in your church: “We start at 10:12 so come then.” Which means they’ll show up at 10:20.

2. It shows you are disciplined. A lot happens on a Sunday morning, and it is easy to fall behind schedule or start late, especially if you are a portable church. This means to start on time you need systems to make sure things get done in a timely manner and aren’t stressful. Are some mornings stressful? Yes. Do things break and fall apart? Yes. But that shouldn’t be the norm.

3. It shows you have your priorities in line. Again, people are your priority, and if you as a church care about their time, whether they are a guest, a member or a volunteer, you communicate care to them. When you don’t prioritize time, you communicate you don’t care.

6 ways to grow your influence through how you use time.

Posted on Monday, February 1, 2016

How to Make Your Next Sermon Great

by Joshua Reich

When it comes to anything in life, whether it is marriage, parenting, leadership, or work, someone pays the price.

In marriage you can either pay the price at the beginning, working through all the junk you brought into your marriage; or you can pay it later when you are unhappy and married or divorced.

As a single you can pay the price to stay pure and wait until you get married to have sex. Or you can pay the price after you get married as you work through what it meant to give your body away before you got married. Or your spouse will have to deal with that thought.

The same is true for preaching.

Either the pastor pays the price in preparation, studying, praying, planning, reading, and listening to God; or his church pays the price when they have to listen to him stand up there completely unprepared, unsure of what his big idea is, as he wanders through his sermon aimlessly like the nation of Israel did on their way to the Promised Land.

Too many pastors make their church pay the price.

I was talking with a few pastors the other day who told me, “It’s Wednesday, I’ve got a title.” If all you have on Wednesday is a title, you are not paying the price for your sermon.

In preaching, someone pays a price, the church for listening or the pastor in prep.

Paying the price means you plan a preaching calendar, you think through where you are going as a church. You study, you pray through the text asking God to reveal to you what it is about, what your church needs to hear. You read commentaries and other books, you look into the context to better communicate the text.

Preaching every week is easily the biggest weight I carry and the biggest joy I experience.

On Saturday night I lie in bed thinking through my talk and the text for Sunday. At this point in my preparation I almost have the text I’m preaching on memorized and have thought through the ins and outs. I am now thinking more about who will be there, how I will communicate it. I begin praying for those I think of and those whom I don’t know, those who are coming to Revolution as a last ditch effort on God. This is the weight of preaching. If you do not feel this, I don’t think you should preach. Why? When you stand up to preach you are literally reaching into Hell and pulling people who are on the path to Hell (Matthew 7:13 – 14). I realize that is a paraphrase, but that is the spiritual battle of preaching. That is what’s at stake.

Sunday night I lie awake worrying if I said everything I should’ve said. Did God want me to say something else? Was I clear? I pray for those who made decisions, whether to get baptized, start following Jesus, or any number of next steps we talk through on a Sunday. I pray for the spiritual protection of those who made decisions. I know that night will be a very difficult night as Satan and his angels will be going to work on those individuals.

Pastors, do you pray for those who are coming and for those who make decisions? This is the price of preaching. This is the price of pastoring.

If you are not willing to pay it, then do something else. Lives are at stake. Souls are at stake. Marriages are at stake. Families are at stake. Eternities are at stake.

Pay the price.

Posted on Thursday, January 21, 2016

How to Figure out God’s Will

by Joshua Reich

Every time you say yes to something, you say no to something else.

This truth has had an enormous impact on how I live my life, how I make decisions, how we do our calendar as a family and how I lead Revolution Church.

But how do you know what to say yes and no to? That’s the most common question I get from someone who has read my book or has heard me say this in a talk. Honestly, it’s different for each person.

Too often we focus on what we want to do in the next day, week or month and then make a decision based on that. Let me frame it a different way for you: What kind of person do you want to become in the next month? In the next half year? One year from now, who do you want to be?

Will this involve doing something? Yes, but it changes the context.

For example, if a year from now you want to be closer to Jesus than you are today, a stronger disciple, then you will make the choice to say yes to community, yes to serving in your church, yes to reading your Bible, and yes to inviting people to church. That will then determine what you say no to.

Often we hope that something will happen. We will simply become kinder, more generous, thinner or smarter without putting in the work or even be willing to make a choice towards something. If you want to become a person who is known for ________, then you will have to make decisions for that to happen. A wish and a hope are not enough.

How to figure out God’s will for your life.

Take your marriage or another relationship. What if six months from now that relationship was stronger? It would mean that what you are doing right now would have to change. You would need to make more of an effort, you would have to say yes to giving time and energy to that relationship and saying no to something else (ie. golfing, sleeping in, working too late).

We often think we have no power over where our life goes, what our marriage becomes, the relationship we have with God or how kind we are. Yet we do. Every day we make decisions that get our life somewhere.

Here’s the problem: we never sit down to ask, Where do I want to end up?

How to figure out God’s calling in your life.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2015

4 Things Healthy Leaders Do

by Joshua Reich

No leader or pastor starts their career or starts a church with thinking about quitting. All of them start with grand plans and dreams of the future and finishing, retiring, making it to the end with friends and family around them.

Yet statistically that is incredibly rare. Most quit, give up, fall out of the race or simply stop trying while still collecting a paycheck.

According to stats:

78% of pastors say they have no close friends.
1,500 pastors quit each month.
70% of pastors battle depression.
Only 10% of pastors will retire as a pastor.

Recently I’ve had several pastors talk about not wanting to burn out, which seems like a good goal. But the moment you start talking about burnout, you have moved into a dangerous place.

Let me throw out a different question, one I think is better: How can you lead and live at a sustainable pace?

How can you lead and live at a sustainable pace?

There is a great passage in Matthew that you have more than likely heard a sermon on, or if you are a pastor you’ve preached on this passage. It is so common and so easy to forget the power in it.

To remind you, this is what it says in The Message version:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

I think according to this passage, there are four things healthy leaders (or non-leaders) do:

4 things healthy leaders do.

1. Healthy leaders don’t try to be God.

We say we aren’t trying to be God or we say we can’t save anyone, only the Holy Spirit can, but many leaders carry the burden that they can, or at the very least, they will try.

We think, “If I can just talk to them, or get them to read this book or hear this podcast, that will help.” It might, but it might not.

We can also drift so far from God personally that we simply lead out of our abilities and strengths. This is easy to do if you have a strong speaking gift. You can cover up your lack of relationship with God by being charismatic or interesting on stage.

Healthy leaders don’t try to be God.

2. Healthy leaders walk and work with Jesus, not for Jesus.

Yes, Jesus is the chief shepherd and the senior pastor of your church, but you don’t work for him. We work with him and through the power of the Holy Spirit. We follow what the Spirit starts and is doing.

We talk about our priority list as Christians being God, family, job. Yet it is easy for a pastor’s list to be God/job, family because of how closely connected his job and God are. Often this is so subtle that no one sees it, or if they do they don’t say anything about it.

I firmly believe there is a calling that comes with being a pastor, but, and please hear this: being a pastor is also a job. A job that will end. A job you will retire from one day.

If we aren’t careful, we start to become unhealthy when our identity is too wrapped up in what we do. This is why we get hurt when someone rejects a sermon, our advice or the vision of the church. We feel like they are rejecting us, because our sermon, that vision, is who we are. It is our identity.

That’s a dangerous spot.

Healthy leaders walk and work with Jesus, not for Jesus.

3. Healthy leaders don’t force stuff.

The reason I love this version of these verses are two phrases. The first is, Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I am like most leaders. We are incredibly driven, we make things happen, and we force it.

How many times have you played a conversation in your head before it happens: you’ll say this, they’ll say this, then you’ll respond, then they’ll respond, and this is how it ends. Then the meeting goes just like that and you think, “That could’ve been an email.”

We also can very easily force our kids and our wife to be something they aren’t.

One of the saddest things to watch is, as a man is pushing his calling and planting his church, his wife is sitting there dying emotionally, physically, spiritually.

Here’s a question for you as a leader: Is your family too much about your calling and goals? Does your wife have space for hers?

Healthy leaders don’t force stuff.

4. Healthy leaders don’t carry burdens they aren’t meant to carry.

I’m a perfectionist. In every part of my life, I carry a burden of wanting everything to be perfect. Every experience with my kids and my wife, I build up in my mind, and when it fails to reach that I get stressed out and angry.

Another struggle for many leaders is they don’t know how to handle the emotional side of ministry. We struggle with our emotions of hurt, depression, loss, anger, and then as those emotions entangle with the emotions of those in our church and we walk with them through divorce, miscarriages, death, suicide, and addictions (just to name a few), we become at a loss of what to do with all the burdens.

Healthy leaders don’t carry burdens they aren’t meant to carry.

In the end, Matthew 11 is an invitation from Jesus to live freely and lightly. That’s the second phrase in this passage that is so beautiful. Many pastors do not live in this place. Many followers of Jesus never experience this, yet this is supposed to be the normal Christian experience.

Posted on Friday, June 26, 2015

Why Pastors Are Afraid to Preach on Marriage

by Joshua Reich

That may seem like a weird blog title, but I think pastors have some genuine fear about preaching on marriage and relationships.

In the past few weeks as I have talked with pastors about our series through the Song of Solomon, many of them have expressed how they would never preach through that book. In fact, I looked at the websites of churches who “preach through books of the Bible verse-by-verse,” and the Song of Solomon is one of the books most pastors skip.

I’ve already detailed why a pastor should preach on marriage, relationships and singleness on a yearly basis, but why don’t they?

Here are a few reasons:

1. Their marriage isn’t what it should be. I think this is the reason pastors don’t talk about marriage, relationships and sex in their sermons. Their marriage is falling apart. They aren’t happy, their wife is miserable, maybe they are having an affair, are addicted to porn. In short, if they preach on marriage they would be a hypocrite. Honestly, I’ve had a number of pastors tell me this is the reason they don’t preach on marriage, and every time I hear it, my heart breaks. Not only for their church and what they are missing, but also for the pastor and his wife.

They are stuck, and they don’t know what to do. They are sad, heartbroken, miserable, angry with each other, fighting off bitterness, maybe considering a divorce (but they don’t know how to support themselves if they get divorced). They may even be considering cheating on their spouse.

If this is you, you shouldn’t preach on marriage, but you also need to not walk through this alone. You need to take a break from ministry, involve your elders, see a Christian counselor. Something. Anything to work on your marriage to get it on the track it needs to be.

Most pastors don’t preach on marriage because their marriage isn’t what it should be.

2. Marriage, being single, divorce are all private matters, and many pastors fear private matters. Many pastors, believe it or not, are fearful of diving into the personal matters of your life. Money and sex are topics pastors are afraid to talk about, often because they think their church doesn’t want to hear about those things. Honestly, what the Bible says about these two topics is probably something everyone in your church wants to know.

Money & sex are 2 topics everyone in your church wants to hear about.

It is difficult to wade into the waters of porn and sexual addiction, divorce, unhappy marriages, and brokenness. It is uncomfortable and not very fun. But as a pastor, that is where your people live and need your help.

3. They don’t want to exclude anyone. This is a real reason why many pastors don’t preach on marriage and relationships, and I understand it. It is hard when you talk about roles in marriage knowing that a single person is sitting there who finds this completely irrelevant, or a divorced person who begins feeling guilty about their failure. It is hard to talk about being single and purity as your married couples sit there and think, “What does this have to do with me?”

Those are all true.

At the same time, part of teaching your church is helping them understand that just because something doesn’t feel relevant doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant. I need to know the struggles of someone who is single or dating so I can be a good friend to my single and dating friends. The same goes with divorce and marriage. If you are single, you may be married one day, and it is great if you can learn a thing or two now before getting there.

4. Pastors don’t want to deal with the pain that comes with it. The moment you start talking about marriage, relationships, divorce, dating and sexuality, you are about to open a can of worms that you may not want to in your church. You will find yourself wading into abuse, anger, bitterness, addictions, hurts and family of origin issues that often feel like a web that will never untangle. I had a pastor tell me he doesn’t preach on these topics because he doesn’t want to deal with those hurts in the lives of his people.

Yet this is the exact spot most of the hurt in your church resides, these topics. These are the fights that couples are having, this loneliness is why singles hurt so much at night and why they fall into arms they shouldn’t and pull up websites they shouldn’t. This hurt and disillusionment is why wives get bitter and why husbands aren’t servants to their wives.

Most hurt and regrets in our lives are sexual, so churches should talk about them.

5. Pastors don’t want angry emails. As someone who preaches on these topics regularly, and having preached the Song of Solomon twice in the seven years Revolution has existed, I can tell you that marriage, divorce, dating, sexual addictions, porn and sex are fast ways to get angry emails.

Just tell a wife that the word submission is in the Bible. Talk about sex and see what happens. We challenged married couples to do something sexual everyday for 30 days. Some people loved that, others didn’t. I heard from both. I had people tell me the Song of Solomon shouldn’t be in the Bible, that it really isn’t about sex but about God’s love for us. If you have read through the Song of Solomon, it’s kind of awkward; it’s like being a voyeur to someone’s sexual life. It’s descriptive, clear, intimate and inspired by the Holy Spirit just like John and Romans are.

If you preach on these topics, don’t go into them blindly. You will make people angry. Some is to be expected. When you talk about forgiving someone who abused you or your ex-husband, expect some anger and hurt. This is natural and okay. This is an opportunity for you to disciple someone to be more like Jesus. Will that be easy? No. Will it be worth it? Yes.