Posted on Thursday, January 28, 2016

Patience & Leadership Go Hand in Hand

by Joshua Reich

If you are anything like me, you are not a patient person.

Patience is hard.

I always hear people joke, don’t pray for patience.

Why?

We want things now. We are an instant culture. We want fast food. We want to post pictures instantly. It’s even called Instagram.

Patience is hard when it comes to leadership as well, not only because of the reasons just mentioned and the way we are wired and how our culture operates but because of how long things take in leadership.

Let me explain.

Leaders are future oriented people. One of the things that separates leaders from followers is the ability of leaders to see a desired future and move people towards it. Because of this, by the time things become a reality, leaders have lived with them for months, sometimes years.

When a church launches a new initiative, ministry, program, a building campaign, buys land or hires a new staff member, the leaders have anticipated this moment for months or years.

Patience is hard. And crucial.

For leaders, because change feels like an eternity to them, it is easy to forget how whiplashed our followers can feel when a change happens. For a leader, they have read books, prayed, talked to mentors and other leaders, listened, and waited for months to launch something. When their followers give pushback, they think the problem is with the followers (and it may be), but often they are not giving their followers the same time to process the change as they had to think about the change.

If you are in a spot as a leader who is about to make a change or launch something, here are some ways to handle it:

Be patient. Yes, you may need to wait a little longer. The time may not be right, the funds may not be there, the momentum may not be in your corner. You may need to have a little more patience.
Give people time. If you took weeks or months to research and process this decision, give your followers at least some time to sit with it. Let them ask questions. Just because someone has questions or gives pushback does not mean they are being divisive or are not on board. They are processing.
Be honest about the loss, not just the excitement of the future. When discussing a change, talk about the loss. With every change there are gains and losses. Leaders see the gains, followers see the losses. Leader, look at the losses and talk about them, let your followers know you hear them, but help them see the gains.
Be excited and decisive. At some point the time for patience and waiting is over, and it is time to be decisive and move forward. When is that time? It depends on the situation, but you are the leader, so you’ll know.

4 ways to lead when it is hard to lead.

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 Tuesday, January 19, 2016

How do You Handle Success?

by Joshua Reich

I remember talking to a mentor once, and she asked, “Josh, do you enjoy success?”

Honestly, the question stopped me in my tracks, and I didn’t say anything for awhile.

The truth is, as a leader I am trained to fix things. I am wired to find things that are not working and make them start working or stop them. To find something that is going well and make it great.

As soon as something is fixed or working well, we go looking for the next thing to fix. Who has time to sit back and enjoy success?

But let me ask you, “How do you handle success? Do you enjoy success?”

How do you handle success?

Have you thought about that as a church leader?

Many times in life we wallow in things that aren’t working. This didn’t go our way. We didn’t get a raise or a promotion. We prayed for this, and instead that happened. It is easy to become pessimistic.

It is easy to fix things. It makes us feel active and important, like we are needed.

Most leaders do not know how to enjoy something. We are always so focused on future things and projects that we fail to see what is right in front of us.

If something just succeeded for you, take a moment and enjoy it. You worked hard for that to happen. You set goals, made sacrifices and it worked. Gather your team together and enjoy it.

Posted on Thursday, January 14, 2016

How to be a Team in Marriage

by Joshua Reich

Many times when I talk to couples who are frustrated in their marriage, how their spouse reacts to or helps/hurts them in reaching their goals comes up.

A common cause of frustration and arguments in marriage.

I’ve heard couples tell me, “We’re getting divorced because she is holding me back.” One woman told me, “He just isn’t on board with what I want to do with my life, so we’re going our separate ways.”

This is easy to do.

After all, didn’t we get married so we could have a teammate help us accomplish what we want to accomplish?

The cycle in marriage becomes about what we want and the goals we have in our heads: completing school, starting a business/church, certain financial benchmarks. When our spouse doesn’t get on board they are just dead weight getting in the way.

I realized a few years ago that I had made our marriage and family all about my goals. I’m a pretty driven person, and so we moved to Arizona to plant a church. We talked together about what this would mean, but as our kids started to get older, I realized that in my goal setting and drivenness, I left little room for Katie to explore her goals and dreams.

Does your spouse have room for their dreams in your marriage?

Now there are times in a marriage when you put the goals of one over the other. Maybe an opportunity comes along you can’t pass up. Maybe you decide when you get married that when you have kids the wife will stay home with the kids, so getting the man’s career off the ground matters greatly.

If you aren’t careful though, eventually a marriage will revolve around one person, and it can slowly suck the life and dreams out of the other.

Let me suggest a good (but scary) question to discuss as a couple: Are there any dreams you have right now that I am keeping you from reaching?

Now there are some dreams you have to let go of simply because you chose to get married. There are some dreams you let go of because you have kids. Not all of them, but your life is different now.

Usually the reason we don’t create space for our spouse is our selfishness. We will dress it up in different ways. Church planters will dress it up in God’s will. I did this for a long time. God called me to plant a church, she said yes to it, so it’s now our calling and our goal.

A conversation every pastor and his wife MUST have.

Let me speak to pastors for a minute. You help the people in your church discern God’s will for their lives. You help them learn how God has gifted them and how to best use those gifts and talents. Do you do that for your wife? She is part of your church. Who is she apart from being a pastor’s wife? Who is she as a person who attends your church, and what has God called her to?

Too many couples either give up hope on accomplishing something together, or if given enough time, their dreams will well up inside of them until they will begin thinking about pursuing them apart from the other person.

When, if you took the step of being a teammate to your spouse, you could unleash their dreams together.

How to stand with your spouse instead of against them.

Posted on Thursday, January 7, 2016

5 Systems Every Church Needs

by Joshua Reich

Depending on who you ask about church systems, you will either get excited looks about the potential of them and how they can help people, or you will get looks of disgust because they sound like the business world and not very shepherding.

Yet the reason many churches fail is not because of a lack of caring but a lack of intentionality.

The reason many churches fail is not because of a lack of caring but a lack of intentionality.

They are led by pastors who are incredibly relational and shepherding but lack the organizational skills to help people grow. And that is the crucial piece of that word failure. I’m not talking about not growing but about failing to help people reach the growth in their discipleship that God has for them.

In a small church, that happens one-on-one with a pastor. As a church grows, that must begin to spread out or there will be a lid on how many people a church can disciple and help grow in their relationship with Jesus.

The answer to that dilemma: systems.

Many large churches have these systems down and do a great job at them. Sadly, many church plants need these systems but do not have them in place, so they fail to get the traction they’d like or see the growth in the lives of their people.

Here are five systems you need to have in place to not only grow as a church, but help your people grow:

5 systems every church plant needs to grow.

1. First time guest. When a guest shows up at your church, what happens? How do you know they came? When you are smaller as a church, you know someone is a guest because you know everyone, or the guest comes dressed up and the regular attenders don’t do that. But as you grow it becomes easier for people to slip in and out. It is good to give people anonymity until they’re ready to let themselves be known to you. But when they are ready, how will they tell you? Is it a connection card? What will you do with that information? If you get a connection card this Sunday, what happens to that on Monday?

You can’t leave that to chance.

I remember hearing Rick Warren say once, “God sends people to churches who are ready for those people to come.” I believe that is true. Many churches that are growing can tell you what happens when someone walks in their doors.

“God sends people to churches who are ready for those people to come.” -Rick Warren

We give something to a guest because we want to break down the barrier that the church wants something from them. That makes people defensive, especially men, as they are waiting for the church to ask for something. Instead we give them a gift, and then after their first time with us we send them a Starbucks gift card to say thanks. I get so many comments from second time guests who tell me they returned to our church because when they went to Starbucks, they thought of our church.

2. New believer. If someone became a Christian this Sunday in your church, what would you do? Of course you would be excited, but in that excitement do you have a plan for that person to help them grow? More than likely it would involve meeting with the pastor of the church. What if 25 people became followers of Jesus this Sunday? Now, you can’t meet with all those people. So what happens?

This is where you need a system and a plan to know what happens. Who do they talk to? Do they take a class? Do you have people in your church prepared and ready to talk with new believers?

5 systems every growing church has.

3. First time giver. Giving can get weird in churches because it’s money and it’s private. Many pastors think it is wrong to know who gives in your church. I don’t see that anywhere in the Bible. Now if you struggle with treating bigger givers differently than those who give less, than that is something to work through, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Giving is a spiritual gift that many people in your church have, just like leadership and mercy are a spiritual gift. My hunch is that you know who has the gift of leadership, evangelism or hospitality in your church. You should know who has the gift of giving. And just as an aside, just because someone gives a lot does not make them the wealthiest people in your church, and you already know who the wealthiest people in your church are simply by going to their house and seeing their car and clothes.

In the same way that you should know who has the gift of giving in your church, you should know who gives for the first time in your church and do something with that. That is a huge step of faith on their part. Many pastors overlook that because they are always thinking about the budget and bills, and when someone gives that’s just helpful. But that person is now saying, “I want to grow in my faith. I want to hold loosely to what God has given me and trust Him. I’m bought in here to the point that I’m giving my money.” That is a huge step!

Celebrate that. Help that person continue to grow in that. They may have the gift of giving, they may not, but have a plan to help that person grow in that discipline. Giving is a crucial piece of spiritual growth and being a disciple of Jesus. Don’t let it happen by chance.

4. Community and relationships. Every church leader knows that growth happens best in the context of relationships. We preach on it and tell people that, but we fail to realize that community and moving into a small group of some kind is a huge step for people. It’s a time commitment in an already busy schedule. There is the fear of going to a house of a person they don’t know. How long will the group meet? Many groups are meeting until Jesus returns. What happens if the person goes to a group and doesn’t like it or the leader? Now it is really awkward when they see that person at church, and so many people choose to skip it all together.

These are barriers you have to get past if you want to see people enter into relationships at your church. We’ve experimented with three month small groups and told people, “You can do P90x for 90 days; try a group for 90 days.” We’ve also started to encourage people to enter a serving team first before joining a group. It is less of a commitment in their mind and still gets them shoulder to shoulder with other followers of Jesus. And serving helps you in your spiritual growth.

5. Leadership development. This last one took us the longest to develop, and because of that I believe it really stunted our health and growth as a church. Every pastor wants more leaders in his church. If you want to plant churches, you want men around you who want to plant churches. Yet many pastors simply hope those people will find their churches. If your church is near a seminary or a Bible college, that may just happen and will mask that you don’t have a plan to develop leaders.

Think about it like this: if you wanted to have 10 elder caliber leaders a year from now, how would you develop them? What would have to happen for that to occur?

If you want to plant a church two years from now and that person would come from within your church right now, how would you get that person ready? How would you find that person?

You need a leadership development system.

5 systems every church needs to be healthy.

Like I said at the beginning, systems are often seen as bad or mechanical, so many shepherding leaders don’t use them. Systems help move people in their relationship with Jesus. Systems are crucial to the health of your church and the growth of your people.

Church systems are crucial to the health of your church and the growth of your people.

Posted on Monday, January 4, 2016

How do I Get my Husband to Lead at Home?

by Joshua Reich

One of the questions Katie and I get a lot is, “How do I get my husband to lead at home?”

How do I get my husband to lead at home?

One of the biggest reasons men don’t lead at home is twofold: 1) They don’t think they can do it, and 2) Their wife is leading (because he isn’t and stuff has to get done), and she is very good at it.

2 reasons men don’t lead in their home.

One thing men don’t do often is duplicate efforts. If you as a wife are leading at home, taking up the mantle of the spiritual life of your family, keeping the family on track in scheduling to make sure you aren’t overwhelmed, he won’t do it.

While Scripture calls men to lead in their homes, most women do it, and honestly most women are better suited to do it. But as I have seen over and over, and Scripture is on point with this, when we get off track from God’s way, even with gifting in the mix, it is disastrous.

So if you are doing anything you want your husband to do, stop doing it.

I remember Katie pulling me aside one time and saying, “I really want you to do _____ in our family, and right now I’m doing it. I’m going to stop doing it in hopes that you will pick it up.” I didn’t start overnight, but I was able to see the importance in something.

I think for a man to lead, he needs to drive the bus of what comes into his home in terms of TV and entertainment, protecting his family on the internet and what is taught spiritually. This does not mean he does it all. In fact, Katie does more of this than I do because she spends more time with the kids, but she looks for me to lead the charge on this.

Protect your family’s schedule. This means you need to make sure date nights and daddy dates are happening, you aren’t involved in too many things and you make sure priorities happen. (Which means if you make baseball practice and scouts more of a priority than church and community for 10 years, don’t be surprised when your kids go to college and leave church. It is not the church’s fault; the onus is on you as a man.)

Women, if your husband isn’t doing this, don’t berate him, don’t send him a link to this (unless you’ve talked about it), don’t hand him a book or tell him there are husbands doing this, so he needs to step up.

Ask God, pray for him, ask God to make him into the man God wants him to be, not the man you want him to be. And stop doing the things God has called him to do, even if that means something might not get done for a time.

Let me end with this. Men often struggle to do something they think they might not be good at, even the real risk-taking adventurous guys. They will take risks at work, but they are often scared to death about failing in front of their wife or kids. This is often the biggest barrier to a man taking the lead at home. This gives the wife a great opportunity to cheer him on and help him succeed.

A barrier to men leading at home is their fear of failure.

Too many people do not set their spouse up to succeed. If you want your husband to take the lead at home, instead of nagging him one more time, how could you help him succeed? How could you cheer him on? What is one thing you could do to partner with him in this?

3 ways to get your husband to lead at home.

Posted on Monday, December 14, 2015

4 Ways to Learn from a Mistake

by Joshua Reich

No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from success to go beyond the state of the art. -Henry Petroski

Mistakes and missteps in life are painful but incredibly helpful if we don’t waste them.

When you make a decision in your church, business or life and it doesn’t pan out as you expected, what do you do with that? You can either let it go and move on pretending it never happened. You can mope about life being hard and waste the experience. Or you can dissect the decision and learn from it.

Only one of those choices will actually move you forward; the other two will keep you stuck or move you backwards.

Do you feel like you make mistakes and never learn from them?

In The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems, the authors give four questions to ask as you reflect on an action or decision in your life:

What did I/we expect to accomplish?
What, in fact, did I/we accomplish?
Why are the answers to questions 1 and 2 different? (Notice that the question is not, “Who’s to blame?”)
What actions do we have to take to make sure this does not happen again? In other words, what did we learn?

4 questions to grow when you make a bad choice.

Posted on Wednesday, December 2, 2015

How to Survive a Challenging Season

by Joshua Reich

All of us have lived through a challenging season. You might be in one now, just coming out of one or waiting for yours to happen. (Only the truly pessimistic of us are really waiting, but you get the idea.)

They can happen when we least expect it: a disruption in our career or finances, a child that is hard to parent, a spouse who all of a sudden becomes distant, a sickness we didn’t expect or plan for, or simply life not going as we planned.

Challenges.

They are relational, financial, spiritual, emotional, and physical.

They know no limits. Challenges have no heart, so they aren’t worried about you and your survival.

Here are some questions I ask myself as I’m going through a challenging season:

3 questions to ask during a challenging season.

What is God trying to teach me in this season? It is easy to get angry in a challenging season and blame the person you think caused the it. You may be right, but doing that will not help you for very long. Eventually that will exhaust you, and you’ll still be in a challenging season. So take a day, be angry, and then wake up tomorrow and start looking forward. By asking this question you begin to get to what God is trying to do, which is helpful because it takes our eyes off ourselves. God does not waste experiences and moments. He uses them for his glory and our good.
What is God preparing me for by having me in this season? Because God doesn’t waste moments, what we walk through today is helpful for tomorrow. Begin looking forward, looking and asking God for what He is doing.
What is God’s invitation to me in this season? This question comes from Jim Cofield in The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection. This has been a powerful reminder to me in moments of pain and hurt.

How to survive a challenging season.

In his book Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth, Samuel Chand lists five things we know about God or learn through difficult seasons:

God never abandons us, even when we can’t sense his presence.
Our faith and character are developed most powerfully in times of adversity.
God sometimes delivers us from pain, but more often he delivers us through it.
Life’s most defining moments are usually painful experiences.
We do not grow in those moments by default.

5 promises of God to you in a challenging season.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2015

What a Pastor Wants from His Church

by Joshua Reich

Someone asked me what made a lead pastor love his church. Outside of the obvious: being called by God to lead and love the church they are in, the answer is pretty simple.

What a lead pastor wants from his church is also what a church wants from their pastor.

Here are some things that if you attend a church, your lead pastor wants from you but maybe has never said (in no particular order):

What a pastor wants from his church is what his church wants from him.

1. Commitment.

A church wants their pastor to stick through thick and thin, and so does a pastor. He wants people who will stick with the vision and not quit. He wants people who are sold out to what God has called them to, not just consumers who show up for the latest sermon series.

Your pastor wants a church that has people willing to push through hard times and stay committed. This is not something our culture does very well, and most churched people are terrible at it. Hurt feelings, leave the church. Don’t like the music, leave the church. Moved to a new facility I don’t like, leave the church. Sadly, pastors and the people who attend their church don’t expect the other to stay. They have both watched too many people come and go. This should not be so.

Your pastor wants you to be committed to your church.

2. Loyalty.

Your pastor wants you to be loyal. Being loyal does not mean following blindly. Loyalty means that when you have hurt feelings, you talk it out with the person who hurt your feelings, not share a prayer request in your small group about it. Loyalty means that when you hear people being divisive, you stop it instead of joining in or being silent.

3. Growth.

Yes, every pastor wants the church to grow, but that’s not what he wants from you. He wants you to grow into the person God has called you to be. He wants you to use your gifts inside the church and outside the church. He wants you to be in community and take the risk to make that happen and make community a beautiful thing. He wants you to be generous not only with your time but also with your stuff. He doesn’t want you to be stingy.

Your pastor wants you to grow spiritually.

4. Prayer.

In the same way that you want your pastor and leaders to pray for you, your pastor wants you to pray for him and his family. He wants you to lift him up during the week while he’s working on a sermon, he wants your prayers on Saturday night before church, and then afterwards when he’s exhausted and spent. If you don’t know how you can pray for your pastor, you can ask or simply pray during those times.

Your pastor wants you to pray for him and his family.

5. Appreciation.

Everyone wants to be appreciated for what they do, whether it is as a volunteer, in a job or in a relationship. We all want people to say thanks, give a gift or let us know how something made a difference in our lives.

Being a pastor is no different.

While many churches use October as pastor appreciation month and say thanks to their pastor then, some churches give their pastors gifts or people in the church are generous in some way, many churches show no appreciation to their pastor outside of saying, “Today’s sermon was nice.” To be fair, many pastors do not show appreciation to their volunteers and staff, and so the cycle continues. I’ve talked to many pastors who left their church, not because God told them but because they didn’t feel appreciated.

Your pastor wants to be appreciated.

There are more things that could be added to this list, but if every person in a church did these five things, I believe the longevity and happiness of pastors would soar. I also believe the health of churches would greatly increase.

5 things your pastor wants from his church.

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.