Ministry, Trauma & Healing : Nicole Martin

Jason Daye | , , , , ,

Ministry, Trauma & Healing - Nicole Martin - 43 - FrontStage BackStage with Jason Daye

How might trauma in our own lives impact the way we serve in ministry? In this week’s conversation on FrontStage BackStage, host Jason Daye is joined by the Reverend Dr. Nicole Martin, who was recently appointed as the Chief Impact Officer at Christianity Today. Previously, Nicole served as the Senior Vice President of Ministry Impact at the American Bible Society, where she also provided leadership to the Trauma Healing Institute. Nicole has written several books and currently serves on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals. Together, Nicole and I explore some of the potential dangers and the positive benefits when it comes to examining trauma in our own lives. And we also look at how we can help make our lives, our homes, and our churches, places of healing.

Looking to dig more deeply into this topic and conversation? Every week we go the extra mile and create a free toolkit so you and your ministry team can dive deeper into the topic that is discussed. Find your Weekly Toolkit below… Love well, Live well, Lead well!

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Additional Resource Links

Trauma Healing Institute – Find helpful resources for yourself and your local church or ministry. The Trauma Healing Institute is a global collaboration of ministries dedicated to helping people around the world heal from the pain of trauma.

AACC.net – The American Association of Christian Counselors has resources, including a national database of Christian counselors in America

PastorServe – Talking through those things that concern you or trigger you with a trusted, safe individual can be extremely helpful and healthy. Pastors and ministry leaders can receive a complimentary session with a ministry coach at http://PastorServe.org/freesession

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Key Insights and Concepts

  • Trauma can be defined as a wound of the heart. Just as we care for a physical wound, such as bandaging it, protecting it, and helping it to heal, we must also care for wounds of the heart.
  • One way ministry leaders can begin identifying trauma in their own lives is to consider what triggers then
  • When identifying one’s own trauma, one must be careful to not go to either of two extremes: dismissing one’s trauma altogether or believing every single discomfort in one’s life is trauma
  • Pastors have to tend to their own wounds, because it is out of their woundedness that they can connect to the wounds of others
  • When leaders do not tend to their own trauma, they tend to substitute other things in the place of healing. This can lead to dangerous outcomes.
  • Ministry leaders need to allow God to bring healing to their heart, so that they can faithfully and effectively be a vessel of healing for others
  • Every pastor needs to have safe people in their immediate community who can speak God’s Word over them and provide space for healing.
  • Leaders often believe God will do more for others than he will do for them. It is vital for ministry leaders to believe that God wants to heal them every bit as much as he wants to heal others.
  • Pastors and ministry leaders must be willing to speak about brokenness and sin if they hope to lead people to healing, redemption, and forgiveness
  • Studies have shown that the greatest healing happens when there is scripture engagement in community. Scripture + people = healing.

Questions for Reflection

  • Have I taken time to reflect on myself and identify potential trauma? If not, why not?
  • How would I describe my tendencies when it comes to identifying trauma in my own life? Do I lean toward one of the extremes? Am I more likely to dismiss my trauma altogether? Am I more likely to misidentify trauma and over-identify things in my life as trauma?
  • Have I taken the time to tend to my own wounds? If not, what steps will I take to begin tending to my wounds? What will this look like?
  • How is understanding my own woundedness related to my ministry?
  • Are there any examples in my life where I have seen the healing from my own trauma and woundedness help me ministry more effectively?
  • Am I substituting anything in place of addressing my own healing? Am I self-medicating for my wounds with unhealthy things?
  • Who are the safe people in my community that I can talk to about my wounds? Who is speaking God’s Word over me? (Pastors and ministry leaders can receive a complimentary session with a trusted ministry coach at http://PastorServe.org/freesession)
  • When I am being honest with myself, do I struggle to believe that God can heal my woundedness and trauma? If so, why do I struggle with this?
  • Are we speaking about brokenness and sin in the ministries at our local church? Are we speaking about healing, redemption, and forgiveness? How do we see these topics addressed?
  • How are we making space for Scripture + People – Healing in the ministries of our local church? How can we do better in this area?

Full-Text Transcript

How might trauma in our own lives impact the way we serve in ministry?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by the Reverend Dr. Nicole Martin, who was recently appointed as the Chief Impact Officer at Christianity Today. Previously, Nicole served as the Senior Vice President of Ministry Impact at the American Bible Society, where she also provided leadership to the Trauma Healing Institute. Nicole has written several books, and currently serves on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals. Together, Nicole and I explore some of the potential dangers and the positive benefits when it comes to examining trauma in our own lives. And we also look at how we can help make our lives, our homes, and our churches, places of healing. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I am your host, Jason Daye, and it is my distinct privilege every single week, to sit down with a trusted ministry leader, and to dive into a topic, all designed to help you, and pastors and ministry leaders just like you, to embrace a healthy, sustainable rhythm in both life and ministry. And FrontStage BackStage is proud to be a part of the PastorServe network. And every single week, we don’t only have a conversation, but our team also creates an entire resource, a toolkit actually, for you to use with your team in your local church, that you can dive more deeply into the topic at hand. So you can find that at PastorServe.org/network. And we encourage you to avail yourself of that. They are reflection questions, key insights, all different types of resources and tools to help you serve your local context, your local community, better. And so we encourage you to check that out. Now, if you’re following us on YouTube, we ask that you give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We love to get to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and praying for your ministry. So please do that. And then whether you’re joining us on YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform, be sure to follow, be sure to subscribe, we don’t want you missing out on any of these amazing conversations. And I am very excited for the amazing conversation we’re about to dive into. I’d like to welcome to FrontStage BackStage, Dr. Nicole Martin. Nicole, welcome.

Nicole Martin
Thank you so much, Jason, it’s such a blessing to be here.

Jason Daye
Yes, I’m so excited that we have the opportunity to sit down and talk and we’re going to be tackling a topic that doesn’t get probably the attention that it necessarily needs or deserves. And so I’m excited about getting into that. And, and I kind of want to just dive in and get started on this. Now, Nicole, you’ve had the opportunity, and you spent a lot of time working in in the field of trauma and healing, trauma ministry, those types of things. And in fact, I know you’re working on a manuscript, on a new book, kind of in the same field as well, excited to hear that, looking forward to that coming out. But as we’re looking at trauma, to begin, Nicole, because we can actually think of trauma in a variety of ways, right? So can you help us better understand how we define trauma, what trauma truly is?

Nicole Martin
Absolutely, thank you again, just for having me. And I, you know, I like to start these conversations, mostly because I’ve had so many with the real experts to say I am not a therapist or counselor or psychologist. I am a minister. I’m a leader. And I’ve had the honor of working alongside great professionals. But I have noticed that when we leave the conversation about trauma only to the psychologists and to the counselors, then we miss out on what God can do, how God can use this very real pain and weave it into ministry and leadership and make us better for it. So with that, I think the best definition of trauma came from the Trauma Healing Institute. And it says that trauma is simply a wound of the heart. And I like that definition because when we think about a physical wound we do so much to care for it ,we bandage it, we put the you know, antiseptic on it, we put whatever solution needs to be applied to make sure that that wound gets healing. We’re careful around the wound, we’re not banging around. We’re not introducing it to crazy substances. But when it comes to a wound of the heart, we need to actually treat it in the same way and trauma, simply as a wound of the heart, is any instance, scenario, circumstance that you experienced or experience through others that causes intense fear, anxiety, horror, terror, anything that causes you to kind of cringe up, that is a heart wound and that is trauma.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I so appreciate this. That’s super helpful, Nicole. And, you know, it’s valuable for us to identify trauma in our lives and in our lives as pastors and as ministry leaders. And and we’re going to get to that. But before we get to that piece, Nicole, I’d love to hear your thoughts on sort of this idea of identifying, and perhaps even misidentifying trauma in our own lives. Because it seems that there can be maybe two extremes. And of course, there’s a big spectrum. But there are two extremes. One is, you know, on one hand, I just dismiss my trauma altogether, right, sort of sweep it under the rug, you know, I have this overly idealistic or optimistic mindset. And then you have the other extreme, right, Nicole, where it’s like, we can label every single discomfort that we’ve ever experienced in our lives as trauma. So Nicole, talk to us a little bit about these tendencies. And how we can really be honest with ourselves as we identify trauma in our lives.

Nicole Martin
That’s such a great question. So I think one thing that we as leaders can do as we identify trauma is to think about, sometimes we can back into our trauma by thinking about our triggers. So for example, I have a friend who was triggered every time she was overlooked, every single time, whether it was a meeting, or if she was raising her hand and a group, or if she said something, and people didn’t hear her, or if she’s at a restaurant, and she was overlooked. That triggering moment just stirred up within her such anger and angst and fear. And she started to feel like something is not right, because this moment is, is changing the way I deal with people, she would snap at people, she’d be really, really upset. So she went and kind of dealt with her trauma with counselors and realized that it came from her childhood, being in a family of four kids and feeling like everybody was always tended to except for her, feeling like her needs were overlooked. And there was one moment where she had a significant need in her family. And it was overlooked. And it was that moment, that was the kind of the source of the pain. And she had to realize it by the symptoms of the things that triggered her. I think all of us can start to assess our lives by thinking about what are the things that trigger me to deep fear? Or what are the things that trigger me to deep anger? And is that something that I need to deal with? Because it’s impacting my ministry? Or is that just I need to pray and calm myself down? You know, like, sometimes it is, Listen, you just you haven’t had enough sleep, I need to get some rest. But other times, when you see that consistent pattern over and over, it is important for us as leaders to say what is it about this moment, because if we’re not careful, we’ll think it’s about that person. And really, it’s about us. Now, on the other side of things. I do have, I do know a lot of people, sadly, more than I’d like to know. But I know a lot of people who say everything is trauma. You know, you didn’t call me back. And I’m really traumatized by the fact that you waited three days to return my call, or, you know, I didn’t get the right coffee, they handed me a coffee that wasn’t mine. And that really just, you know, brings up trauma. I don’t think anyone can be in the position of minimizing someone else’s trauma. But I do think as leaders, we’re in a season where we do need to err on the side of okay, if I have caused someone offence, if I have bothered someone, even if it seems irrational to me, could it be that I need to do something differently to manage that person? Well, and if we ourselves find ourselves, you know, every other minute, saying, leaning on the mental health crutch as a way to get out of things, as a way to get beyond things, then that’s another sign that maybe we need to take a step back and talk to someone about it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good, Nicole. And it’s so interesting, because it’s a sensitive topic, because we don’t want to minimize it, as you said, at all. But at the same time, you know, there are these variations within it. And, as human nature, there are temptations for us to gravitate to different extremes oftentimes, because we’re getting something for ourselves out of it. And so I think that’s a great distinction and something that we need to be aware of in our own lives, as we’re thinking about the trauma. So, let’s kind of move to that. As we’re, you know, thinking as ministers, as pastors, why, Nicole, is it important for us to take the time and to be able to identify true trauma in our own lives?

Nicole Martin
Oh, my goodness. Okay. So I’m doing a little bit of kind of research and trying to explore this myself because I was apprehensive to talking about and working with trauma. I was, I grew up with resilience as the key word. You pull yourself up, you get up, you move on, you don’t cry, you don’t worry about it. And if you cry, you spend two minutes crying, and then you move on. So I was not familiar with this world of trauma. And I also didn’t have a great deal of compassion for people who were traumatized. You know, I had a great deal of compassion for trauma that was way beyond, for the extremes of trauma, for people who had been abused, or people who had been, you know, their family members had been killed before their eyes, I had great deal of compassion for that, but very little compassion for what I would have termed first world trauma, you know, like, okay, so you didn’t get the snack at snack time in second grade, so therefore, you’re traumatized. So I’ve been doing a little research to figure out why, why is, how did, how did God make this shift in my heart? And why is the shift important for leaders? Number one, the reality of the pandemic cannot be underestimated. I know we’re tired of talking about it. I know we’re half in and half out, and are we post pandemic, are we still in pandemic, but the reality is, every single person across the globe was affected by a disease that took out millions of people, and is still around, by a virus. And I think we cannot underestimate, pastors, what it meant that so many pastors had to do virtual funerals, that that family members on times when we were tending to get together that we could not get together, we cannot underestimate the fact that an entire generation had to study online. For the majority of their childhood years, my daughter started kindergarten, started kindergarten. I thank the Lord that I survived it, but started kindergarten online. And I know there’s exceptions to every rule, there are many pastors who feel like we were fine during the pandemic, we don’t have any loss. In fact, my business grew or my family got closer, or my health got better, those are always true. But for the vast majority of the world, the pandemic caused trauma that they cannot express yet. On top of that, we still have a workforce that’s affected by trauma, we are still seeing drastic unemployment rates, we’re still seeing people who don’t want to do the full time job, they want to do the hustle, a couple of part time jobs. We’re seeing people overwhelmed by social media, overwhelmed by television, Netflix on binge, overwhelmed by all of the trappings of this world, pornography and alcoholism and drugs. So to ignore that might be to ignore the mission field. And I would say pastors have to tend to our own wounds, because it is out of our woundedness that we can connect to the wounds of others, Jesus comes back to the disciples, he comes back in the beautiful Upper Room, they’re praying, they finally brought Thomas back in, he shows up, he’s in the midst. And he says to Thomas, something so beautiful. Look at my hands. Put your hands there. Why? Because you can see the wounds of the nails. Touch my side, put your hand there. Why? Because you can still see my scars. If the resurrected Jesus came back with a scar so that he could be recognized, so that he can have a connection with his disciples, why not every pastor, every leader, being well-connected with our scars, so that we can enter into this world of suffering and say, I may not have gone through what you went through, but I certainly understand.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so helpful. And I think that’s a huge piece when it comes to ministering out of our healing, right? Because we’re ministering out of… we have been wounded, we have found healing through Christ, through His Church, through those experiences, and now we have the opportunity to minister out of that. There’s a danger side, I think as well, if we don’t recognize our own trauma, because the expression ‘hurt people hurt people’ and I’m sure everyone watching has, you know, heard that expression, right. And so, there is the positive side of this. We identify our own trauma, because then we can, you know, find common ground with others who are suffering, right. And we think of that, but talk to us a little bit, Nicole, about the the not-so-positive side, the dangerous side of not understanding our own trauma and working through a healing process with Christ through that.

Nicole Martin
That’s right. You know, of all the stories that I’ve been listening to lately, I think the most dangerous part of leaders not listening to their own trauma is what happens to the family. We can say the danger is you could affect the people in the congregation. Yes, you will. We could say the danger is that you could you know, not have a good sense of self or it could affect your relationship with God. Yes, it will. Unhealed trauma affects your relationship with God. But I think the the part that brings me the most pain is how unhealed trauma of leaders and pastors affects their families. So my dad was a pastor. He was an amazing man of God, not perfect, but he loved his family and he passed in August of last year. So I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on his legacy, and one of the things that stand out to me is that he never missed a recital. He never missed a dance. My dad had all kinds of meetings, he had Bible studies he had, you know, you know how church life is every Saturday, there’s something. But Saturdays were the times when my sister and I would have things and my dad never missed one, he may have been late, he may have had to, you know, drop us off and pick us up, but he was always there. And when we don’t tend to our trauma, we tend to put other things in the place of healing. That’s the dangerous part. So as a leader, if I have, particularly a childhood wound that’s manifested later in life, it will affect how I raise my children. And I’ll start to find other things to try and heal that wound. And I’ll miss out on a chance to be at least present for the people that I love the most. It will affect marriages, unhealed trauma can result in major rifts in husbands and wives, a big gap in communication and inability to feel compassion toward another, an inability to share emotions, because your emotions have been wounded, an inability to trust. So when it affects the family, then it affects the person and ultimately it will affect the church.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s, that’s good. Super helpful. Nicole, as we’re in ministry, and we’re reflecting on this conversation about trauma and, in fact, we all know that the conversation around trauma has increased, has been amplified. And the pandemic, I think was a huge piece of that, to kind of help us say, Okay, wait a second, there’s something here, right. And for those of us who are serving, you know, we have to have a servant’s heart, we tend to be thinking of okay, how can we minister? How can we meet people where they are? Those types of things. But as pastors and ministry leaders, I’m reflecting on this conversation of trauma, oftentimes, we run to, how do we serve others? How do we serve? But as we pull back and say, Okay, let’s sit with this for a moment and think about my own trauma, Nicole, what are helpful steps, you know, for someone watching along right now thinking, you know what, I tend to run in to help others, but maybe I need to pull back for a moment and think. What are some helpful steps to actually process through, and again, without, you know, we don’t need to… life is difficult enough. We don’t need to create our own trauma, just like we don’t need to create our own drama, right? To identify and recognize that. What were some healthy steps to kind of process that?

Nicole Martin
Yeah, that is such a great question. I think the first thing to recognize is that it’s a scary thing to have to face your own woundedness and your own brokenness. As leaders, sometimes we start to believe the hype, not because we think we’re all great, but because it helps, it helps to believe I can preach a good sermon, it helps to believe that I can help people you know, it helps. So I would say the first step might be owning that it’s scary, owning this is a scary thing to do. I think the second thing to do is to believe that God wants to heal you as much as he wants to heal others. I am always comforted and surprised by the fact that leaders tend to believe that God will do more for others than he will do for us. And we don’t always think about it, but we play our lives out like that. Yeah, God’s gonna answer that person’s prayer. But as for me, I need to figure out my Plan B’s because God’s not going to answer. So I do think there’s an element of faith that says, God will bring to me what he wants to bring through me, he will bring it to me, he will bring the healing to me, in the same way that he wants to bring it through me. And then just be prepared to be still and listen to God. And the perfect example of this is actually I think, Elijah. So you think about Elijah, he battles the 450 prophets, you know, he annihilates them he’s, he kills them, and then he runs away. And why does he run away? Because he’s afraid, he’s afraid. And an angel comes in and says, Why are you running and he says, I’m afraid like a monkey. I just got all the people that are gonna come for me. And let’s see Angel do this, and by the book, feeds him nourishes him and puts him to sleep. Quick pauses, say every leader needs a nap, every leader needs a bath. But you know, he’s fed, he’s rested. And then he wakes up. And then the next part so you have the part of owning the fear, I am afraid you have the part of believing that God can minister to you he receives the food that the angel brings to him, which must have been the world’s best power low forever. Because on that loaf of bread, he runs for 40 days. And then what does he do? He waits to hear the voice of God and I think those three steps are really simple, because I have to confess it’s a scary thing. I have to receive that God when wants me to be healed that he wants to nourish me with good food and good sleep. And then I have to be willing to wait for him. And the hardest part, I think for leaders is, what if waiting means I can’t preach next Sunday, because I’m still waiting on the Lord. Maybe it’s an opportunity to call someone and say, Hey, can you minister for me because I need some time to wait on the Lord, I need to be ministered to. What if waiting on the Lord means I can’t be there for a family in need. Maybe this is a good time to think about who are your number twos and threes and fours so that you can wait on the Lord. And the last thing is, there’s a quote that I’ve just been taken by Bernard of Clairvaux. He says, you know, we should learn to be more like reservoirs, instead of canals. Canals give out simultaneously what they receive, but the reservoir awaits the fullness. And then I love the last part, he says Do not presume to be more generous than God. Like, oh my gosh, like, that’s it. Right?

Jason Daye
That’s awesome. I love that. I love that. That’s super helpful to to think through how we might process, because we do need to slow down, we do need to recognize that trauma could exist, we need to kind of move through that fear or that hey, could this be in my life? Because oftentimes, we are just really, really kind of looking to the next thing, right, we’re looking to the next thing, as opposed to pulling back a little bit. So that’s good, that’s helpful. As we are thinking about the Church, the Church is a place of healing. Yeah. But sometimes the Church can inflict trauma as well. Right. And there’s been a lot of conversation around this, you know, in the media, a lot of conversation within the Church world itself, outside the Church world recently. So talk to us a little bit, Nicole, about this idea of how do we accept that there’s trauma, and the Church has inflicted trauma, and at the same time try to restore the church as a healing place in our world?

Nicole Martin
Absolutely. So this is, I think this is a really hard question, because so much of the systems of the world have kind of influenced the Church. And what I mean is, specifically systems of power, when leaders don’t tend to their own wounds, the woundedness of rejection, or the woundedness of failure, or the woundedness of even abuse, when we don’t do that, then we take on positions of power, without recognizing just how power can wound others. Diane Lindbergh has a lot about this, she talks a lot about the abuse of power winds within the Church. Andy Crouch even has really great writings on just how to navigate power in institutions. But I think at the core, power is the one reason that is almost responsible across the board for the abuse that happens in the Church. It’s a person in power taking advantage of someone who’s not, sometimes it’s a person in power, who knows exactly what they’re doing, because they’re a predator, and because they need healing. And because sometimes, especially in large churches, we want doers and executors, and we don’t pause to think about whether or not they are whole and healthy and connected and accountable. Other times the abuse that happens because of a position of power happens without knowing, it’s a volunteer, who says, hey, you know what, I don’t like what you’re doing, and so I’m going to tell you to leave. And they don’t even think about how that could have affected that person or how their words have affected someone else. So I think one way that we can make the Church a healthier place is by identifying that it’s broken. When we forget that the Church is not the hospital and we are the physicians, but that the church is a hospital and God is the physician, when we forget that, and we leave people open to say this is a perfect place and you’re gonna be loved. And you know, we set expectations that aren’t right. But I remember visiting a church and they were like, We are broken. We’re not a perfect church. And we’re not. We’re not what is it? We’re not a perfect church, but we serve a perfect God. They said if you’re looking for a perfect church, you couldn’t join it. But I think part of it is setting the expectation. Part of it also is bringing back the biblical notion of lament. What does it look like in our congregations to grieve together, to lament the things that happen through our hands, to confess our sins? I hate the fact that… hate is a strong word, I know it, but it bothers me that we don’t talk about sin very much in our churches. So how can we talk about healing if we don’t talk about brokenness? How do we talk about redemption and forgiveness if we don’t talk about sin? So, you know, part of it is just recognizing that the enemy would love to use the powers of the world to abuse others. And then secondly, create some systems for lament, for forgiveness, for reconciliation, for redemption. And then prayerfully we’ll be more like a peer hospital, where the wounded is, you know, where I’m reaching over off of my gurney onto yours and saying it’s gonna be okay. And not where I’m coming as the expert saying to you, you’ve got to get it together.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That’s good. Good image there. Nicole, as we’re looking at this topic altogether, the trauma in the lives of ministry leaders, how that plays out in our ministries, how that plays out in our churches, how that plays out in our own lives, in relationship with God, is there anything else that you’ve seen over the years as you’ve worked in this area, as you’ve studied, as you’ve researched, that you think will be helpful to pastors and ministry leaders who are saying, Yes, this topic of trauma is something that has been elevated, and it’s something that I need to look at. Do you have additional thoughts around that, and how we can do that in a healthy way?

Nicole Martin
Absolutely. So going back to the Trauma Healing Institute, which by the way, is a wonderful resource for any pastor or leader who’s trying to set groups within their church. One of the the early parts of research that came out and now is being repeated, is the reality that the greatest healing happens when there is scripture engagement in community. Scripture plus people equals healing. And it’s, it’s absolutely astonishing, because we’ve studied it. Overseas, you can see it in very impoverished countries where there’s very little resource, there are few doctors, we have seen, and I have seen myself, people who come together with the power of God’s Word in community, and prayer, and, and talking through their pain, that God can bring healing through that community together. I’ve seen it even in my own church, I’ve seen how, whether it was before curriculums when people would come together in prayer meetings and read the Word of God. I’ve seen how God can bring healing through that. I’ve seen prayer, even in liturgical settings and Anglican churches, where they can come together in community. So I would say, first, for pastors, just for you, not your congregation, I would say every pastor has to ask himself or herself, who is my community, who’s in my community, that might speak God’s Word over me and be the place of healing? Where are my safe people? Where are my people that will not just make me feel good with a beer in my hand, but will come around with the Word of God, so that we might sharpen each other and grow together and heal. And I think, again, tons of research from Barna and from others that show the greatest transformation happens when people encounter scripture in community. So pastors, please don’t forsake community, I know that you’re leading communities, I know that you feel like you are in a community because you got your church, but you need a community, you need a group of people that you can say, Please pray for me. Or you can say, I need the Word, and they will be there for you. And I think that’s really the best thing we can offer. And there’s lots of curriculum out there, lots of books, you know, you can find whatever works best for you. Just make sure that you have community, one or two and have the word of God.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Love that, Nicole. And that, and that is so key, because oftentimes, we do assume we’re, quote, unquote, in community, you know, because we’re in ministry, and we have a community but are we personally engaged in community? So I love that, it’s such a great reminder. And Nicole, it’s been absolutely amazing to have you on FrontStage BackStage. Yes, great topic. You did mention some resources, the Trauma Healing Institute and we’ll have links to that in the in the toolkit that goes along with this people can find that a PastorServe.org/network Are there other resources that you might recommend? I know, there are lots of different books. And I mean, you could go down a, you know, a rabbit trail on that. But yes, are there other other resources that you can think of?

Nicole Martin
Oh, so many. I mean, I think most of the resources that I would cite are probably already listed on the Trauma Healing Institute resource. There’s a trauma healing basics resource that allows you to go through and print resources that might be quick finds for you. AACC.net. Another fantastic resource. That’s the American Association of Christian counselors. Pastors again, small plug, if you’re a pastor, and you don’t have a counselor, please get one. Even if you only talk to that counselor, once a quarter, or once a month, just have someone that you can call to say, I need to talk this out. So AACC.net is a wonderful resource, you can type in your zip code and find a counselor near you. And if there are other resources that I can think of, I’ll be sure to send them to you. But those are definitely the top two.

Jason Daye
Yeah, yeah. And we will have links to both those. Thank you for that. And yeah, I love, I love the fact that you talk so much about the idea of having community having relationships, important relationships in your life, like a counselor, like a friend that you can lean upon, those types of things. So very, very important, something that we believe in very strongly at PastorServe as well. So Oh, Nicole, it has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for taking time again to be with us. God bless you, my sister. Any final words as we close that you’d like to leave with our pastors and ministry leaders?

Nicole Martin
Yeah, I would say, let God heal the wounds of your heart. God is so good and so faithful. And he will not do through you something that he cannot do in you. Allow God to bring healing to your heart, so that you can faithfully and effectively be a vessel of healing for others.

Jason Daye
Amen, that’s a great word, sister. Thank you so much, Nicole, God bless you,

Nicole Martin
God bless you.

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.

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