Breaking Free from Ministry Burnout : Bill Simmons

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends. Welcome to another 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 we dive into a topic to help you thrive in both life and leadership. We love encouraging pastors and ministry leaders, and I’m very excited about this week’s conversation, as I will be joined by Bill Simmons. Bill is President and CEO of Hope Rises International and the author of The Way of Interruption. Bill, welcome to FrontStage BackStage.

Bill Simmons
Hey, Jason, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, super excited about our conversation. Now, Bill, I’m grateful that you have chosen to share about what God has taught you and how the spirit has shaped you through your own experience of kind of ministry burnout, and I’d love for us to just begin there. Bill, can you share with us what you were sensing? What were you feeling? What were you experiencing that made you understand that you were facing some burnout in ministry?

Bill Simmons
Yeah, I think it’s a great question, right? Because we talked about burnout, and yet, I’m sure that there is no single clinical definition of what that is, or the exact moment you are now officially burned out. You’ve crossed the threshold. So, the question is, how do we navigate through those challenges, which I think are under the category of burnout? So, I think burnout looks like exhaustion, and as a leader who’s exhausted, then that looks like unhealthy leadership. I think that certainly would have been what was true for me. There was a moment I remember, I was headed back from Ghana. We have an office there, and meeting with my team and partners. On the way back, I had the worst thing happen. I’m saying that facetiously. My airplane seat got messed up, so I remember being on the phone with the airline in the US, and my boarding time was going to be in jeopardy, but I knew I was like having this meltdown inside. I sort of had this out-of-body experience a little bit, where I’m observing myself, and I’m thinking, what is this? Is this what a real meltdown looks like, or a nervous breakdown, which is also a thing that doesn’t exist, but we talk about? But I just knew that I was not engaging in the moment well. Of course, it wasn’t about that moment. It had nothing to do with my airplane seat. It was all the preponderance of things that have been happening in my life, and how tired I was. For me, the key part was navigating the issue of control and how God worked in that in my life, which we can talk about more. But burnout was this edge of being unhealthy inside myself and meeting the world and situations, but it was also then the pivotal moment that at least I was able to see it. I knew that this was not the way. I thought to myself, I said, Why can’t I just get on the airplane? Doesn’t matter the seat. Just accept. Be content, as Paul says, Why can’t I just be content? I knew it was more than just this moment, and so I began to consult some folks. I remember as a dear friend who actually wrote one of the prayers and liturgies in the book, she deals with trauma victims, war trauma victims in Kosovo and Bosnia. I was sharing with her in a group, and she said, You know, what you’re describing sounds like burnout. That was the first time I had anyone say that, or had that word used in my own vocabulary, and I thought, oh, burnout, that’s not something leaders go around just saying and bearing with proudly. Yeah, I really had a brush with burnout, and had to deal with the shame around what does that mean? Does that mean I was not enough? Of course, it does. Were never enough. So that was the pivotal moment for me, was her sort of raising that up. I thought, oh, I need to pay attention. Then that led to a journey that, ultimately, a lot of other things happened that we can get into. But that’s how it showed up for me, and control was a big part of that.

Jason Daye
Yeah, yeah. Thank you for that bill. So let’s lean a little bit into that idea of control. How did control, or lack of control, or desire for more control, whatever it looks like, how did that kind of manifest? How did you recognize that that was actually kind of a pivotal piece of what you were experiencing?

Bill Simmons
Yeah, I certainly don’t think I recognized it immediately, but I think for all of our own individual stories, and you know this, all your listeners know this, ministry leaders are in this space where we understand that people’s own stories, of course, radically affect how they intersect with any of these things. So my own story, growing up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and having some challenges that I faced there that fall under some category of trauma. People want to use big Ts and little Ts. I don’t know, doesn’t matter to me, but it certainly began to shape sort of the person that I was becoming and how I was protecting myself from things in life. So that meant that I started to approach my life that way. That gets more and more unhealthy if you’re not aware of it. I think, early in my own journey toward God working in a radical way in my life in these areas, I needed to understand sort of what was at the root. I had a wonderful former pastor who was also a therapist. I had some time with him, and he really helped me uncover sort of the root of this shadow part of my life and my story, and how it then showed up as control. So, control for me was constantly mitigating for the downside, which sounds like, what’s so bad about that? Well, it means that I ended up undermining, often, my staff and team. The very people I wanted to empower as executives and leaders were the people who, I wasn’t a micro manager, I would just often manage after the fact, and change people’s minds for them at the end. That’s very disempowering, and that was discouraging to me. I knew it was a problem. But I couldn’t really understand the root of it. As I began to sort of pull the lid off of that and understand the origin of that, it was certainly a critical point and part of the process for me, so that I was able to then say, Okay, I’m going to navigate through this. Now I understand. Yes, this is true, and that shows up now as control. So, now I need to be in a constant state of yielding, which is also an old sermon, right? Just open hands and releasing things. There’s nothing new about that, but sometimes we think we’re doing it, and we don’t realize that we’re not. It took some people speaking into my life that really helped me to see that. Then that issue of control, which I think for pastors and for para church ministry leaders, we often fight this battle with feeling like everything depends on us, and that the Ministry and the church, the work, we are the hub of this thing. My journey through that and through sabbatical was slowly peeling back and saying, none of this depends on me. I had to learn that the only role that I have that God can’t replace is being a husband and a father, and he can replace me in my ministry. So he doesn’t need me to be the CEO of Hope Rises International. He wants me. That’s the beautiful thing is to be wanted, to be invited, and used then by God. But if I step over that line, and then it becomes that it hinges on me, then I have to control everything. I mean, if it all hinges on you, of course, you have to make sure it all works, and that’s exhausting. So, peeling all of that back has been the process.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s really insightful. Bill, something that I can’t help but notice as you’re sharing is that other people were instrumental for you. People who you trusted, people who knew you, seemed to be instrumental in speaking into your life and helping you kind of uncover things, maybe see things that, as you said, you kind of knew it was there, but you weren’t able to name it necessarily or put your finger on it. Share with us a little bit about kind of that relational aspect and the value of that for a ministry leader.

Bill Simmons
I mean, that’s absolutely right. I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t already been on a journey, I think. That’s sort of the end of the journey. It’s not the beginning. Sort of for me, what felt very radical in the last three years, four years, it really was an accumulation of things. So certainly, I’ve been invested in executive coaching for years. I’ve done some therapy. I’ve done whatever the investment in my own development, I had been doing those things along the way, but I always felt like there was something missing. There’s some part I felt like I was blinded to some part of my life. But I had built in, to your point, I had built in some wonderful relationships. I’m a part of an organization, a network called the Accord Network, which is Christian international relief and development organizations, from Compassion to World Vision. It’s 140 or so members, and they have a wonderful thing that they’ve been doing for, I think, 14 or 15 years now, which is they do executive retreats, and they’re built around the small group, high confidentiality model. Everyone brings in an issue, and you interact around that and work through it together. Out of those who had attended, many of them, I developed wonderful relationships among people who were co-laboring in this space. It’s those voices that began to be very important as I started to ask this question: What do I need to do? I know that I’m having these feelings, I’m not as healthy as I need to be, and that’s not good for me. It’s not good for my family. It’s not good for my work. So what do I do? So then those people were there. They didn’t just appear right on the scene right at the end, as they had been cultivated. This is where I would say that, well, it’s one thing to have your friends then sort of help you say, hey, you know you might maybe you consider taking a break or taking a sabbatical, but then do you have the support around you to actually make that happen? I think that’s the other area where I’m extremely blessed. I have a wonderful board, a wonderful board governance system. So, when I went to my board and I said, I think I need to take a three-month sabbatical. There was no pause, there was no beat, or hey, we should talk or discuss this. It’s absolutely. What do you need? What support do you need? We’ll make this happen. I think that was just as critical. So, friends and relationships are critical, but for leaders who are listening, to have a board that is supportive is just as important. Next week, I’m going to Dallas to be a part of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, ECFA. They’re sort of launching at the Christian Leadership Alliance their new standards of leader care and this is all aimed at what it means to support, for boards and elder boards, to support leaders, to help them be healthy, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. All of these things are so important. So I think I couldn’t have done it without every single one of those things. With good friends around me, with a good board, a good system, and all of that facilitated how God was then able to use all of that to work in my life. I’m sure he could have done it without it, but, boy, it’s essential if you want to reach into a place of pause, recovery, and restoration, you need those support systems around you, and I’m very blessed to have that.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find that for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for that, Bill. As you were sharing there, I began to think, man, that’s incredible. It’s awesome that you’ve cultivated some of those relationships, some of those personal friendships, some of that kind of peer-colleague type relationships. Then the blessing of, as you said, the support of your board. Bill, what would you say to a pastor or a ministry leader who feels like they’re in a space where burnout is, they’re on the edge of burnout, but they do not feel they have a strong support structure around them? Or maybe they’re even fearful of approaching their, whether it’s their elder board at their local church, or their board of directors, and saying, Hey, listen, I’m on the edge here. I’d love to pull back and have a sabbatical. What advice would you have for them?

Bill Simmons
Yeah, I guess there are two answers to that question. One is the sort of the tough love question, way to respond, which is, if your board is not like that, then you might need to pray more about what sort of board you may want to work for. That’s a harder decision, and you sort of have to be pretty daring. So I’m not naive to think that everyone’s just going to take that on. But I do think that if a board, I do have to question what a board is doing, if they’re not thinking through and discerning about how to care for their leader. I would have real concerns about that board. But maybe that’s the situation you’re in. You can’t change that overnight. So what do you do? Which is the other side of the equation. There are resources, and maybe some of them are free. I’m not aware of free ones, but certainly affordable. There are organizations out there that provide this sort of counseling, spiritual direction that can help you think about sabbatical or ways to build in even just Sabbath into your rhythm, and you don’t have to have three months off. How does Sabbath become a practice? There are groups like Soul Care. I think Mindy Caliguire has been on here, I think, with you. She’s on my board. Mindy is great. Her organization is wonderful. There’s Coracle, which is out of the DC area. They’re also similar, spiritual formation, direction, soul care-minded people. I’m sure there are plenty of others, but my point is that there are resources out there, and I think your house organization is the same, right? Pastor Serve does the same thing. So, there are plenty of resources out here that people can lean in. I would just say, ask for the resource. Go find someone who can help you walk through. Don’t wait if you’re feeling these things, and people are feeling these things. I did a survey of 60 CEOs in a room at breakfast last October and asked it was a Survey Monkey online, live in the room, and asked them on a scale of 1 to 10 where they were on the burnout scale, and 10 being I’m burned out. That room of 60 people was at 8.5 out of 10. That’s pretty staggering, and I know it’s the same in the general pastoral space. ECFA and others have done these surveys, and 80 to 90% of pastors are feeling burned out. So, I think, we can also deal with the symptoms, which is sort of what we’re talking about. What do I do if I’m feeling this way? I think we also have to ask some of the causality questions. You know, why? What is leading to a pastor being burned out, or to a parachurch ministry leader being burned out, and I did not have any empirical evidence. My book alludes to something I feel is a drag coefficient on parachurch ministry leaders. I’ve come to believe there’s the opposite drag on pastors, and that is, I think, that when we’re called to operate out of our vocation, and yet, we’re implicitly expected to operate there, we are not going to function well. So, the reality is that, I think, pastors and churches are, in Eugene Peterson’s book called The Pastor, I think he talks about this. He talks about how he loved teaching and preaching, but he hated running the church, and that’s because his vocation is not administration and being an executive. He’s called to teach and to preach, and yet we expect him to do both. In the inverse, for parachurch ministry leaders, we are vocationally called to be executives of organizations, run a great organization that supports the work of the church, and yet we’re implicitly expected to somehow be a great, inspirational, visionary, do spiritual formation in our organizations, and have this expectation to do that, and it’s draining. I’m sure it’s bigger than that. I’m sure there are other things people can do, great sociological research, probably to add to this. But I know from my own experience and from talking to other CEOs and other pastors that there feels like there’s something at least true in that it may not be all of the truth, but certainly that’s part of it. So, my journey to writing a book was also journeying through, how do I lean into being a Christ-formed organization without taking on the mantle of being a pastor and taking on the role of spiritual formation, which is not what God has called me to do? How do we balance that so that I can have a healthy relationship with it and not feel like, Man, I’m failing this. I’m not motivated to do this. That’s a drain when you show up that way.

Jason Daye
Right. Absolutely, Bill. Yeah, I think it’s very insightful. I think that what you’ve observed both at a parachurch and within pastoral ministry, I think, is right on. That sense of responsibility and expectation to kind of fill some roles that we’re not really wired to fill. So, that definitely weighs upon us. Now, Bill, let’s shift. So, we’ve talked about the burnout, and we’ve talked about the feeling, the experience, and all that. But help us understand what you experienced during your sabbatical, that was really kind of some of the aha moments that have now transformed your life coming through that? You share a lot of this in The Way of Interruption, your book, that others can kind of consider, embrace, and maybe avoid getting to the brink of burnout.

Bill Simmons
Yeah, I think you’re probably familiar with Abraham Heschel, and his book is called Sabbath. But I think if people haven’t read that book, I would highly encourage it, because he really gives us access to sort of God’s heart and soul behind the gift of Sabbath. So a sabbatical is just a protracted Sabbath. I often hear people say, Well, I took a sabbatical and I went and wrote a book. I thought, Well, that does not sound like a sabbatical. That is not sabbatical. So, I really tried to lean into. I knew, well, I’ll preface it by saying, I knew being a highly control-oriented person, I wanted to have everything planned, oriented. That the danger, the risk, that I ran going on a sabbatical was that I would just plan the thing to death and become the CEO of a sabbatical, and not actually stop doing anything. So, I had just a couple of sort of big things I put on the calendar. But in general, I wanted to live into Leviticus 25, and this is also in Exodus. But, God says, After six years, in the seventh year, the land should lie fallow, and you don’t get to do anything with it, and neither do your livestock and your servants. No one gets to do anything. I have to think about what in the world in an agricultural and agrarian society, what are people doing if they can’t plow, they can’t sow, they can’t reap. Well, they’re doing nothing. Because that’s the call is to do nothing. So I had to think, well, what does that mean for me to actually let the land lie fallow? Because that is not how I want to be, and so I tried to live into that. That was my whole goal. So, my entire three-month sabbatical, I never once prayed about my organization or role. I never asked God for a new vision. I never thought about all the things I should be doing. I also never, inversely, created internal plans where I’m gonna do these 12 things, and that’s how I’m gonna know I had a successful sabbatical, and that’s exactly not the point. There’s no score, outcome, or impact measure that you can put on a sabbatical. The point is to release yourself, release the land of your life to God, and let Him do what He wills. I think that’s the issue we have with Sabbath in general. I think we don’t appreciate what is it that God will do in us if we actually pause, rest, and cease from doing things, which is what I love. I love that the Hebrews 4 sabbatical, our Sabbath, is Shabbat, which means cease. It doesn’t mean rest. Rest may be something God does in us, but if rest is the aim of Sabbath, then we’re going to try to generate something that’s going to create rest as some outcome. I think that if we just start with the whole purpose of what God did on the seventh day, which is he ceased. Can we do that? So that was my aim in my sabbatical. My encouragement to other leaders has been, who have since taken sabbaticals is to do everything you can not to overplan this and to just be able to be present to your family, your loved ones, to the moment, whatever that is, and let God figure out the rest. The miracle for me was, as I said, and it does feel like a miracle. But the closest thing I’ve had to a miracle in the last few years is after my sabbatical. Two days after my sabbatical, God gave me a very clear vision for my organization, and I had never once spent a moment thinking about it, which is how I knew it was like God had been nurturing this little plant all during my sabbatical. I had spent no time trying to think about what God is calling us back to or toward. None. So it was really this amazing moment, because I thought, God did all of this because it’s never been about me. So, it was this wonderful reminder that if I just rest in Him, I just cease and allow myself to be with him and trust him, he’ll show up with what I need when I need it. That was true, and it was terrifying. I’ve sat down with leaders who are terrified of the idea of going somewhere and being quiet for two days or three days. And I get that. I’ve had to learn how to be alone. I mean, that is a hard thing to learn in today’s world, how to just be alone with ourselves, and I think sabbaticals are probably healthier if you can be on a journey of learning how to be alone. So, in other words, there’s not one thing that God did and that He healed me of all of this in my sabbatical, in this moment. It was in the releasing of myself. Since then, and well, during and since, all of the patterns and the practices that God instilled into my life, I’ve had to exert zero energy in trying to maintain them. They have just become the way that I live and I look forward to them, and that feels very foreign to me as someone who spent most of their life and faith journey striving after the next quiet time model I’m going to practice next year, or find the next resource that’s going to really unlock, and all of a sudden I find myself in these rhythms and ways, and it’s like God is sustaining me and doing it, and I haven’t had to exert energy. Sorry, that was a long response to your question. But I found so much healing in that release that I feel a lot about it.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, Bill. That’s beautiful. So, let’s lean into the rhythms a little bit that you experienced. That, in The Way of Interruption, you kind of lay this out, and you kind of help us understand these rhythms and what this looks like. So, share with us what it is that you discovered and that is now sustaining you in such a way.

Bill Simmons
Yeah, I think this is where the simplicity of what I propose is, I have to fight my own shame about it. I’m really just saying something that’s the most simple thing anyone could ever say. So, I use a lot more ancient, well-respected people in the book to sort of back me up on this, whether that’s Calvin, Luther, or Augustine. I think what I’m trying to capture are things that release us from the constant need or desire to reinvent the wheel, and that just means doing what the Church has always done. I think, and GK Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy, talks about going off in search of everything, and then he finally comes back and he plants the flag, and he only discovers that he’s back home, and in a land that’s already been discovered. He says, somewhere else, that he spent his whole life trying to conjure this faith and practice, and he later realized he could have learned it all in this catechism. I think we all spend this, and especially in the modern world, we have this incessant desire to invent and create. So again, yielding up control, for me, was to just do what the church has been doing for several 1000 years, and taking the best of that. So the practices, the first one, is more of a, I wouldn’t call it, maybe it’s a contemplative practice. I haven’t thought about it that way until this moment, but it wouldn’t sound like that. That is, in our hurried world, I’m simply encouraging people to take a minute and pause before whatever the rhythm is of your life. In our case, as an organization, the rhythm is meetings that are all day long, meeting after meeting. So, can we put in front of all of those a consistent interruption? Interrupting the workflow to allow ourselves to reorient ourselves to God, and to allow God to re-enter that space, which then might shape our space and our work to be more like him. But we don’t have a particular formative outcome that we’re looking for. It’s just an orientation. So pausing, as I’ve talked to leaders about this, one of the more challenging things, really, has been people saying, You really just stop and you have a minute to three minutes of quiet and silence? And I said, Yeah, we really do. That sounds the most foreign. Reading a Psalm does not sound as foreign as being quiet for a minute or two, maybe three. I dare people to take three. It’s a good number, three, right? So, take three minutes and see how weird that feels. But I do think Jesus modeled this. He was never in a hurry, and people always wished he were somewhere faster than he was. If he’d just been there, Lazarus wouldn’t have been in that position. If he could have gotten to Jairus’s daughter faster. He’s constantly trying to get the disciples away in a boat to give them pause, a break, and breathing room. So, when he does this with Pilate, we didn’t know, in the holy week last week, we’re reminded of his ability to be silent and not say anything when he’s questioned by the high priest or by Pilate. This is someone who understands how to pause, breathe, take a second, and has not hurried. So if Jesus can do that, then what can we learn from that as a way of being in a world that continues to push us faster and faster? Technology is pushing and crushing all the limits of space. We can’t even get up and take a coffee break anymore. These things all have disappeared. So, pausing is the one that I think opens the space for spiritual practice. It’s the hardest one. It’s more a way of being. But I give this example, this real-world story, of how important developing it is or any of these things as practices, because if we think, Oh, these are things we know how to do, we’re going to pull those tools out of our box when an event shows up. Well, that’s just not the real world. If you’ve never used a lathe before, having one in your garage doesn’t help you when you need a lathe, and if you’ve never used it, it doesn’t matter. So, we had a staff person who said he wanted to consider offering his resignation, as he felt like that was maybe best for us in the organization. Which, this is a generous, mature person saying this, I think that’s a gift. I said, Well, we’ll need to think about this. So he went away, and the first thing we did was we sat in silence with this for four or five minutes, allowing people to process this surprise, sit in it, and not rush to words, not rush to judgment, not rush to action. Let’s sit with it. Then, we actually reached for the book, and we prayed the prayer for discernment that’s in the book. We prayed it together, and then we began to slowly discuss this potential staff departure. We would not have done that three years ago. We would not have gone there, and we wouldn’t have created that space. But the pause and having it as a practice is why it then gives us that immediate ability, then in those moments, to show up to it. Everyone talks about, oh, if you’re in an argument with your spouse, take six deep breaths. Well, if you never take six deep breaths, you’re not going to do that with your spouse. Maybe you should try taking 60 deep breaths, four or five times a day, together with your spouse, when you’re not in a heated moment. So when you are, you might go back to it. I mean, I know that sounds simple, but I think I don’t want to miss it. The primary, the whole book, is about interrupting and pause. Pause is an interruption. So everything starts there. And whatever comes after it in your organization, we include the ancient rhythm of reading, reading a part of a psalm together as a way for God to invade our space. It’s also a very ecumenical space to be in, in a multi-denominational, parachurch ministry. Then we pray, whatever that means, whether that’s letting the psalm be the prayer, or praying back part of the Psalm, and then go about our work. It doesn’t take long, two to five minutes before every meeting, we interrupt ourselves, remind ourselves, and that has proven very, very helpful. So, I mean, it works individually, it works in organizations, but it means that no longer is Bill Simmons coming up with the ministry theme of the month, and I’m going to prepare some sort of a message that I’m going to talk about. I actually just don’t do that anymore. I let God speak. I let him speak through His Word, and I leave that up to him. It’s sort of me saying, if he’s not enough, then that’s just how it’s going to be. That is hard for a leader to say. We like to fill the dead air, and sometimes we feel like God’s dead air. And I think that’s just not true.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good. We do have that tendency, I was just thinking, as you’re talking about the pause, and challenging people to one minute, two minutes, yeah. But shoot for three minutes, maybe, and just the awkwardness, oftentimes, because we live in a world where we’re, as you said, accustomed to filling the empty space, right? And we feel like, go, go, go. But just pulling back and just that alone and allowing that to become a part of who we are and our culture as an organization, there’s so much value in that, and it kind of resets us, you know? It’s almost like a reboot every time, over and over and over again. That becomes not just a habit, it becomes who we are and the value of that. That’s awesome, Bill. As we’re winding down our conversation, you have the eyes and ears of pastors and ministry leaders who are all serving on the front lines. What encouragement would you like to leave with them?

Bill Simmons
Maybe a question that leads to encouragement. I’ll tell you where I’ve been challenged most recently, and I think this will be particularly for parachurch ministry leaders. But it’s because it’s for parachurch ministry leaders that it’s also for pastors, because without the church, there is no parachurch, and I think there shouldn’t be. Before the Reformation, there was no such thing as a parachurch ministry, and, really, before 1800, they didn’t exist. So, parachurch ministries are new. I have this conversation with people often that we’re still understanding, what does it mean to be a Christian organization doing a work in the world, where our theological birth is out of Acts 6 in the birth of the deacons. So, how do we work and support the church? I think that’s its own question, and some great theologians should continue to think about this. I don’t think we think about it enough. We just suddenly have 60,000 Christian nonprofit organizations in the United States, and the question is, are they all actually supporting the church? Or are we out over our skis or not? I think these are good questions. The reason I think it’s important, and I think this is a great area for pastors and parachurch ministries to have dialog, is I think that what we have missed in our concern for individuals and people on our staffs, is we’ve missed that in a parachurch ministry organization, almost always we have lack of reciprocity. So that means, for me as a CEO, because I signed the paychecks of all my staff, even though we may all be co-laborers in Christ, there is an inequality there. So if the CEO says we’re going to read this book, we’re going to read this book, and if we’re going to have this practice, we’re going to have this practice, and people can’t, I mean, they can opt out, but it means they’re going to lose their job, and they’re going to go somewhere else. That’s how you opt out. Whereas, in the church, if people don’t want to do the Bible study on Wednesday, they don’t have to go. If they don’t like the sermon topic, if the pastor is daring enough to put it out in front, they don’t show up. We have the ability to opt in and out of, in our spiritual lives, of practice, of different things. Or, obviously, you could leave your church if you really disagreed with something. That’s a lot more difficult in parachurch ministries. So, I think we haven’t talked about that. So I think I want to encourage this discourse around, how do we really honor individuals, especially in parachurch ministries? I would encourage leaders to think about, are we really giving people an invitation, or is it an expectation? Because I think that’s a real challenge. Otherwise, it moves into an area of coercion, and I think that we don’t want to say that. We don’t want to say that. Could that really be true? It’s because it’s a very soft coercion. But everyone I’ve ever told to read a book in my organization has read the book. And now, I don’t recommend. I mean, I don’t say, Hey, we’re going to read this book together. The last time I did that, I really felt convicted after it. I thought that I just shouldn’t have done that, or I could have instead said, here’s a book. What do you all think? What do you think about reading this together, and then have everyone opt in or out. Then can I express no judgment on those who said I’m not interested, right? Will I diminish their participation, or whatever? I mean, it’s hard. It is definitely hard. What I would love to see is more pastors really concerned about how connected parachurch ministries are to their work in the world, and I would love to encourage parachurch ministry leaders to think about how connected are we to the church. I mean, the organized Church, not just the global body of Christ at work. But, how are we, in fact, supporting and relieving? Because that was the whole point. The apostles needed to be relieved from this particular work. So are we, in fact, relieving and assisting the church in that way? And can we tell that story? I have a lot of passion and concern about that, and hope that pastors and parachurch ministry leaders will create dialouge around that, because I think that’s where their encouragement can be is, can we see ourselves continue to be more and more of one single thing? So people don’t think about Compassion International as this other thing that exists apart from the church, even though they work through the church around the world, but in the US, I don’t know how we think about that? Can we do that and create an environment where leaders, especially in parachurch ministries, reach into a much more epistemic humility? A place where we’re much more willing to say that you don’t have to do this my way, because I’m not your pastor, I’m not your priest, and so I’m going to give you the option. That is, again, for a leader, a difficult space, because we’re not Apple. I mean, Apple, they can say this is how it’s going to be. Those are our values. We’re going to do it this way. We’re in a weird space because we’re neither the church nor are we truly a corporation. So, how do we balance that? I think we have the toughest job in the world, in some ways, to balance something no one else is balancing. So I don’t know if that’s encouraging, but sometimes I found it to be encouraging for someone to give voice to some tension or something that is happening. So yeah, I feel that, and that’s true. And can we navigate it together?

Jason Daye
Yeah, yeah. That’s very helpful. Definitely something to wrestle through, and something to dialouge around, to see and to discern together. You know what I mean? Not just discern in our own silos, discern together how this can be. Bill, it’s been absolutely wonderful to have you with us here on the show. The Way of Interruption, an incredible, incredible book. What I loved about the book is that it’s not just some ideas and some theories, it’s practices, and then a ton of resources within the book that you can actually implement. It’s like, you don’t have to take this book and then go find other things. You’ve packed a ton of liturgy, prayers, and different things within the book to make it very, very accessible and very easy for a ministry leader to lean into this and to begin to develop that sort of a culture. So, thank you for that. For those of you watching or listening, there will be links to Bill’s book and to Bill’s ministry as well, Hope Rises International, and the Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, which provides insights and questions to help you and your team at your local church dig more deeply into this conversation that we just had. You can find that atPastorServe.org/network, so please be sure to check that out. Bill, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for making time to hang out with us here on FrontStage BackStage.

Bill Simmons
Alright, thanks, Jason. It’s been great to be here.

Jason Daye
Alright. God bless you.

Bill Simmons
You too

Jason Daye
Here at Pastor Serve, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.