Resilient Ministry: Navigating Disappointments Without Burnout: Lisa Victoria Fields

Full-Text Transcript

As pastors and ministry leaders, how can we take our pain and disappointments and allow God to reframe them for his good and his glory?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Lisa Victoria Fields. Lisa is a renowned Christian apologist who’s produced two documentaries. She serves as the CEO of the Jude 3 Project, and her most recent book is entitled When Faith Disappoints. Together, Lisa and I look at some of the pain and disappointments that we often experience in our lives and leadership. Lisa then shares from her experiences as a ministry leader some keys in processing through these disappointments so we can avoid burning out in ministry. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of Frontstage Backstage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and together, we dive into a conversation all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy, sustainable rhythms so that you can flourish in both your life and leadership. We are proud to be part of the Pastor Serve Network, and every week, not only do we have a conversation, but our team creates an entire toolkit that complements the conversation that we have. So, with each episode, you have the opportunity to download this toolkit, where you’ll find a ton of resources, including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. In that growth guide, you’ll find insights from our conversation and some questions that you can process through and even take the leaders at your local church through as well, and again, just dig into the conversation, the topic that’s discussed, more deeply. So, we encourage you to find that at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors, and we have a group of trusted ministry coaches who would love to offer you a complimentary coaching session. You can learn more about that by visiting PastorServe.org/freesession. Now, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please take a moment to give us a thumbs up. It really helps. The YouTube algorithm helps us get these episodes in front of more pastors and ministry leaders like you, so we appreciate that. Then, if you’ll just take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below, we love getting to know our audience better, and we’ll be praying for you and your ministry. Now, whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe or follow so you do not miss out on these great conversations. I do have a great conversation for you today. At this time, I’d like to welcome Lisa Victoria Fields to the show, Lisa, welcome.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Thank you for having me, Jason. I’m excited to be here.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I’m excited to have you as well. You are part of a fascinating ministry, the Jude 3 Project, right? Doing a lot of work, and I don’t know if all of our listeners are familiar with it. So, before we dive into our topic today, Lisa, I’d love to give you an opportunity to share a little bit about what Jude 3 is all about.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, Jude 3 Project is a Christian apologetics organization that specifically targets the African American demographic by helping them know what they believe and why they believe it. We believe that our job is to help Christians and skeptics reimagine faith through multimedia. So, we do a lot of work with conversations, film, conferences, and experiences to help people think about faith differently.

Jason Daye
That’s awesome, Lisa, you guys do great work, and a lot of the things that you guys create and experiences you put together really are engaging people in fresh ways, which is what I absolutely love. So, thank you for the work you do for the kingdom there, Lisa. Now, one of the things that all of us as Christ followers experience, to some degree, is our doubts and questions as we’re working through our own faith. What’s interesting, Lisa, for us who serve in ministry as pastors or as ministry leaders, sometimes wrestling through those doubts, wrestling through those questions, sometimes we struggle with it being okay for us to do that, right? Because we think we have to have it all figured out. Never let them see you sweat type of a thing, and have it dialed in. So, Lisa, talk to us a little bit, if you would, about how we can think about these things that we wrestle with, these questions, and these doubts that we might have as we are serving in ministry.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, I think one of the first things we need to do is give ourselves permission to wrestle, even as leaders. One of the most helpful experiences I had, and I talk about it in the book, is my experience with my professor, my New Testament professor, Dr Leo Perser, who is my favorite all-time professor ever, and more because of just how he answered my questions. I remember struggling, as a seminary student, with the problem of evil, that classic problem that everybody struggles with at some point in their life, right? I’m training for ministry, so I’m having a faith crisis in the midst of training for ministry as a seminary student. Like God, can I trust you? I know all the logical answers and the reasons we have for the problem of evil, but right now, it’s just not emotionally satisfying for me. So I went to Dr Perser, thinking he was going to give me some amazing answer, some philosophical answer, or some robust theological answer, and all he said was, me too. It gave me permission to wrestle. It freed me up because here is someone who has a PhD in New Testament, is over the apologetics program at the University, at the seminary, and he’s like, Yeah, me too. He normalized it for me. So, what I really want leaders to know is that this is a common struggle. Sometimes, we think this person is not struggling. This person I admire is not struggling with the problem of evil, or this person I admire is not struggling. They’re beyond wrestling with God. His saying, “Me too,” freed me from that false narrative that I had in my mind that, no, this is a struggle that people have. People question God, and even Jesus on the cross, he asked the question of God, why have you forsaken me? So if questions aren’t beyond our Savior, then they are something that should be normalized for us.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I absolutely love that. That story, Lisa, as you share it in the book, does a couple of things, I think, for us. One, it gives us, as you said, I love the way you say it. It gives us permission to wrestle with some of these questions. But I love what your professor did for you, right? Which we can do for others as ministry leaders, right? We have the opportunity to normalize it for them. We have the opportunity to say, hey, I wrestle with those things too, and there’s beauty in that because then relationally, we can kind of come together and we can walk together. It’s not like this dichotomy, false dichotomy, where we set up, I’m a ministry leader, I’ve got it all figured out. So there’s real beauty in admitting that we wrestle with those things and admitting that emotionally, there are some of those things, as you said, that we process through. Now, in your new book, When Faith Disappoints, not only do you talk about giving permission, but you talk about a lot of these pain points that are really, again, normalizing this, right? A common to all of us on our journey. So share with me a little bit, Lisa, about why is it helpful for us to identify those pain points in our journeys.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, when I got into apologetics, I thought it was just about reason, just about convincing people, and if I had the right argument and said it in the most persuasive way, I could convince every skeptic. That’s the false reality I had in my mind. As I started to have conversations with people, I realized it’s more complex than this. Most people’s questions are deeply rooted in pain. So they may come to you and say, I don’t believe in God because of evolution. You’re like, okay, cool, but before I talk to you about science and faith, when did you start thinking that? What was the moment you started believing that God didn’t exist? Well, my mom, when I was four, she was dying of cancer, and I prayed and prayed, and she still died. Then you’re saying, okay, so this is not a logical issue. It is on the outer layer, but on the very inner layer, it is a pain issue. It is, God, you don’t hear me, or someone who prayed and was abused, God, you didn’t protect me. So, I found the most helpful thing is to get to the root of the issue and not just argue with people about the fruit. Yes, we have intellectual answers to deep, theological, and philosophical questions. Yes, I could do that too, but I’ve just found more engagement when I’m able to lean into people’s pain and say, Okay. You’re struggling with your identity. You’re struggling with personhood. You’re struggling with why are you here, purpose. You’re struggling with protection. You’re like you’ve had all these pains, and God didn’t protect you. So you’re struggling with protection. So you’re trying to construct a worldview in which you feel protected. So I’ve just found that that’s been more helpful in engaging skeptics and engaging people who are in the church, that are there physically, but they’re gone mentally, and I feel like that’s so much of the church right now. They’re coming out of routine. They’re coming because the church has a good kid’s ministry, and they want the kids to go to church, but mentally and emotionally, they’re not there because they’ve been so disappointed by life, and so they’re just coming. So I really wanted to minister to the pain of not just the skeptics, but the people who are in the pews that are really not there mentally.

Jason Daye
Yeah, yeah. I love that, Lisa. Let’s lean into that a little bit if we could because you talk about people being disappointed with life, and then the title of your book is When Faith Disappoints, right? So we’re leaning into this idea of disappointment and these pain points because that’s where people are human, right? As you said, we can have an intellectual conversation all we want, but the humanity is in those pain points and in those times of disappointment. Talk to us a little bit about this idea of the disappointment in faith. What do you mean by that and where do we see God showing up in the midst of that?

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, so disappointment in faith is really the disappointment around the ideas that you had around God and what God was supposed to do in your life. So many Christians have constructed a Christianity based on principles or pieced-together Bible scriptures or pieced-together sermons. So that faith that they’ve constructed disappoints them because it’s not based on a holistic view of God’s word, which causes a very fragmented view of God. So I always like to use the illustration, I always say, when I get a new Apple product, it says, have you read the terms and conditions? I say, Yes. I have not read them. Most of us don’t read the terms and conditions. We just say we agree to it and we go from there. That’s how most of us come to faith. We’re like, Yeah, I believe the Bible, but we’ve never actually read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. So our view of God is really pieced-together things that we’ve heard or pieced-together things that we’ve read, and then we construct a faith based on that. For most people, because their faith is built on these things they’ve strung together, it collapses in the time of disappointment, right? Because it’s not a full picture of God. So if they grew up in a more prosperity-leaning church, when pain comes, the confusion comes, because I’m doing right. I’m doing all that I’m supposed to do. Why is my life collapsing like this? Or our view of God and our faith is mixed with the American dream. So we kind of infuse this prosperity within even how we think about it because we’re thinking about it through the lens of the American dream. So those are some of the ways in which we’ve been disappointed. We get disappointed by faith or just what we think God should be. Just the idea in our mind of what I think protection is. What do I think peace is? Or we have just bad definitions. So I talk about even peace. How do we define it? I talk about in the book, do we see peace as an absence of negative emotion? Do we see peace as an absence of tears? Then it’s like, hold on. Well, if Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and he cried and experienced these emotions, so there’s never a time Jesus didn’t have peace, but he still had moments of tears, then what does that say about how I view peace? So a lot of reframing and a lot of thinking through, critically, the definitions that we have for the things that create or further intensify the pain that we experience.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Lisa, as we look at this, we consider this idea of disappointment, and disappointment in our faith, when we come from that perspective of a ministry leader or a pastor, we often can be disappointed ourselves in how we envisioned what being a pastor was going to be like. We envisioned what being a ministry leader was going to be like, a youth pastor, or whatever it is, right? Inevitably, life happens, right? We experience the reality of the real world. We’re in seminary, we’re studying, we’re preparing, excited, gunned up, we get out there, and then, oh, wow, this is more challenging. Or they’re in pain, or there are people who are accusing us of things, and we’re just trying to live out the Gospel, right? Then people are coming at us, they’re being critical, and all of these things, right? How can we as pastors and ministry leaders really process through some of those disappointments? What are some of the ways that we could reframe those pains in our lives so that we can grow in our faith, but also impart that to those that we’re called to serve?

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, great question. So my father’s a pastor. I’m a PK. He has this quote that says, confession to God brings forgiveness of sin. Confession to people brings healing from sin. He’s referring to the James passage. Confess your faults one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed. That healing comes through community. That healing comes through confession to people. It’s not just about that I feel like I’m a leader, so I can’t take this to anybody. I have to deal with it. It’s like, no, that’s not the mode in which we are healed. We’re healed in community. We’re healed in confession and community. That’s the the vehicle God has given us to be healed from the impacts of the sin we commit and the sins committed against us. So one is community and confession within community. I think about leaders, many of us being isolated and many of us not having relationships. Many of our relationships are ministry relationships that are just like you do stuff for me, I do stuff for you, and then when we get on each other’s platforms, we call each other the best of friends, and it’s like, Well, I haven’t talked to you in six months or a year since I came to preach for you last time. That’s the kind of community that leaders often have, this very shallow community, and you can’t heal without deep community. So when we’re talking about pain, I would say, we have to get it out of our mouths to get it out of our hearts. We have to talk to somebody. For a lot of leaders, I know that’s difficult because you’ve been hurt. Some people are like, I cannot share my weaknesses because I’ll be fired. So there’s a lot of fear around that, but I believe the enemy uses that fear to keep us from the freedom that we desperately need. So it is to look for community. I talked about in the book that if you need an onboard ramp to community, maybe therapy might be the onboard ramp, but therapy cannot be the only thing. Therapy is a good tool. I have a therapist. But it’s therapy plus people, outside of a professional, that God has designed for you to grow. I think that is one of the ways, in addition to, as a leader, a strong devotional life. I know that for me when I’m traveling at a certain season in my life, especially in 2020, I hit a brick wall. I was traveling, I was fundraising, and I was trying to do everything. I was the only full-time person. Everything fell on me and then Covid happened. So you have unhealthy habits already, and then you hit a pandemic. I was just like, I can’t do this anymore. Emotionally, I don’t have anything left. I don’t have anything. There was a friend of mine that’s a pastor. He said, Lisa, if you continue this way, you’re going to destroy yourself. He said, I wasn’t doing anything crazy, but he could see the trajectory of burnout. He was like, you’re going to destroy yourself because you are running on empty. He said I want you to do three things for me. He told me to get the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, and he was like, No, I’m not going to even tell you to get it. I’m going to mail it to you. So he mailed it to me and he gave me a copy of Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Day by Day, it was like the little workbook, and an app called Centering Prayer that was about this centering prayer mode that I had never thought through before. Those three things just helped so much in the rebuilding of my devotional life because I couldn’t even, this book wouldn’t have even been written if I hadn’t done those things. I didn’t have anything in me to help people navigate pain because I hadn’t dealt with my own in a really deep way. So it was those three things that changed the trajectory of my life. It was community, it was cultivating a robust devotional life outside of studying to prepare to lecture, or whatever. It was that, and then it was just creating better rhythms in my life for fun. So I even moved. I moved to a whole other state because I had more friends. All my friends had moved from Florida, and I was like, I need to have a social life apart from my work. If I stay here, my family’s here, that’s great, but I need people my age that are in the same season of life to just do life with socially, so I won’t go crazy. Those are practical things that I did when I hit that burnout in 2020 and if I had not done what my friend had asked me I would not be here today.

Jason Daye
Yeah. So much wisdom, Lisa, as you share that, and just the relationship piece, I think, is so vitally important. Your relationship with others, your relationship with God, and all those things. What a great friend, great pastor and friend, that saw this in your life, spoke into it, and gave you resources. I mean, we all hope to be that friend to others, but we all need those friends in our lives. I think that that’s an absolutely fantastic story. Lisa, as we look at reframing the pain that we find, you touch on this in your book, When Faith Disappoints, that we’re experiencing these different pains, and we’re trying to navigate them. One thing is to kind of sit in them, but how do we begin to reframe them so we can see how God is redeeming those in our lives?

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah. So I talk about this in the chapter on provision. I was frustrated for years at the fundraising journey God had me on. I hated every moment of it. I was just like, this isn’t there. I feel like I’m starting and apologetics is an older white man sport, as somebody put it for me one time. I was just like, God, you sent me as a young black woman, that I’m like the opposite end of the spectrum from what is happening. So I’m trying to fundraise and it’s just not going anywhere, right? Then the pandemic hit, and then all the skills that I had to learn, and all the ways in which other streams of revenue that I had to learn, were actually preparation for that hard season. So we actually grew more in the pandemic than any other season because of what God had cultivated me in those very hard seasons where I hated every single moment of it. I don’t want to relive it. I’m thankful for it now, but I still don’t want to relive it. It was like, Oh, I see what you were doing. Like, if I hadn’t had that, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. Or I talk about, even a part of my peace chapter, I opened it up about a devastating relationship that I had with a pastor. It was very difficult, but then it was like, Oh, even coming out of that, thinking about the work I do now, it gives me another level of awareness. There are some people in the pastor positions who are doing all kinds of things, and if I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t have been aware of what to look for, how to be thinking about things, and be more discerning. Because, my dad, I have a great father, and I was very sheltered. So when I see a preacher, I think of one particular thing. I think of my dad, you know? But if I had gone into what I’m doing now with that level of naivete, I would have been swallowed up, right? So I had to have, as jolting of an experience as it was, it was eye-opening to like. It gave me a sense of wisdom and discernment. So it’s like, those things, when you look back, it’s like, oh, God, I see now. I’m reframing how I experienced this. This is different than what I thought you were doing. So, yeah, those are some ways that it was reframed for me.

Jason Daye
That’s excellent, Lisa, and one thing you mentioned is that when we look back, we can begin to see how God was preparing us. One of the challenges is that in the midst of it, we don’t always feel that, right? That’s the pain part, right? So, we have to remind ourselves in the midst of it that, hey, God is a redeemer. God can redeem this. God can help us reframe this and make it beneficial to us. Lisa, one of the things that you touch on as you go through these different pains, you talk about purpose. One of the things that I really appreciate is when you focus in on purpose, and I think this is important as pastors and ministry leaders, because we can often, not intentionally, I think we can just slip into this, but get focused on our achievements, right? On what we are doing for the kingdom, right? That can be our driver and if we’re not careful, that can kind of overcome and become the dominant driver in our lives and in our ministries, which isn’t necessarily healthy. So you talk about purpose and thinking through purpose in some very positive and healthy ways. Can you unfold that for us a little bit, Lisa?

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, I see so many people weighed down by this burden of purpose. I see young people and leaders, just looking on social media, like, am I achieving purpose? Our metric of success or purpose is how many followers we have, how many people are impacted, or how many people know our name, and it’s like, no, that’s not purpose. Purpose is not what I achieve. It is who I become. One of the helpful reframings for me was that I achieved a lot in a short amount of time, and the more I achieved, the more unhappy I became. So I was like, something is off about my view of purpose. This is not solving the pain. Then I had a close friend that I realized their motivation for purpose or achieving something great was because they had gone through so much trauma as a child, and they had to make their trauma make sense by doing something grand. It’s like God took me through and allowed all of this to happen to me so I can achieve something great, and if I don’t achieve something great, then I cannot make the pain make sense. It really kind of gave me a new understanding of how some people, even through their trauma, are trying to make sense of the pain through achievement, right? They’re trying to balance it out, right? This pain has to be balanced out. So as I was thinking about that, I was like, let’s kind of think about this. What am I trying to free myself from? If there’s trauma, achievement is not going to heal the trauma. People knowing your name is not going to heal the trauma. It’s only going to intensify it. So let’s kind of reframe and then think about that differently. It’s not going to give you the sense of peace that you think it will. So let’s kind of think about that differently. Even if you have purpose in your life, or something where you’re achieving great things, pain is still going to happen. So I talk about when Jude 3 was growing, 2020, I’m hitting the wall, my mentor died and my grandfather died in the same week. All of that collides. I’m doing purposeful things, but my personal life is full of grief and pain, right? So people are celebrating me, but inwardly, I’m just grieving and like, Man, I don’t want to do this, right? So I just wanted to reframe purpose in a way to help people see it’s not going to be a healer for you, even if a million people know your name, it’s not going to heal the wound inside. If your need for purpose or people knowing your name is to heal a trauma, it’s not going to do that. Purpose is you being conformed in the image of God. It’s who you become. If you achieve purpose and it destroys your family or it destroys your relationships, you’ve missed the whole thing. If it destroys your relationship with God, you’ve missed it. So many of us are willing to sacrifice family, friends, and our relationship with God to be known by strangers. I just wanted to reframe that for us.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good. I really appreciate that chapter in the book. When Faith Disappoints, Lisa, is an absolutely fantastic book. As we’re kind of closing down our conversation, I’d love to give you an opportunity just to share some words of encouragement with brothers and sisters who are serving on the front lines of ministry.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah, one piece of encouragement. You are not alone. You may feel like you’re alone. You may feel like nobody’s going through this, or it’s just hard for you. It’s hard for everybody on different levels. We all have different levels of hard in different seasons, and the Lord cares about the things that concern you. He is not deaf to your concerns. He is not deaf to your family crisis. He is not deaf to the ministry crisis in your church. He still will fulfill what he said he would do in your life. It may look different than you thought. You may think that you failed in ministry because we only have 50 people coming or we only have 20 people coming, and it’s like, no, that is not failure. So I just want to encourage you that you don’t have to make success this grand thing. Success is doing what God tells you to do. Be encouraged because this pain is just a comma and it’s not a period. So I pray that this book, When Faith Disappoints, blesses you and encourages you to know that it’s okay to wrestle and God will meet you in the wrestle.

Jason Daye
Love it. Great word. Thank you, Lisa, so much. For those who are watching or listening long, we’ll have links to Lisa’s book. Then also, Lisa, we’ll have that in the toolkit for this episode at PastorServe.org/network. Links to the book and links to the Jude 3 Project. Lisa, if people want to connect with you or connect with your ministry. What’s the best way to do that?

Lisa Victoria Fields
Yeah. Jude3project.org, all of our socials are on there, or LisaVFields.com, all of my socials are on there as well, ways to contact me, and all that stuff.

Jason Daye
Excellent, perfect. We will include those links in the toolkit for this episode, so be sure to check that out. Lisa, thank you so very much for making time to hang out with us on Frontstage Backstage. Appreciate you. God bless you and the ministry that you’re doing.

Lisa Victoria Fields
Thank you, Jason. I appreciate it.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.