Is Isolation Impacting Your Ministry? : Luke Morgan

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each week, I have the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader. We dive into a topic to help you, and pastors and ministry leaders just like you, really thrive in life and leadership. I’m excited about today’s conversation as I’m joined by Luke Morgan. Luke is an executive pastor at Frontline Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He also collaborates, consults, and writes regularly about the topic of healthy ministry leadership. So, at this time, I’d like to welcome Luke to the show. Luke, welcome to FrontStage BackStage.

Luke Morgan
Thank you so much for having me, Jason. This is a real privilege. A real treat for me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, well, I’m excited. Thank you for making time to hang out with us and really dive into a topic that is important. It’s incredibly important. We’re going to be looking at the issue of isolation in ministry. It’s kind of an ironic topic in many ways because when we think about ministry, we think about people who are connected to others, who are serving others right, and who are so engaged in ministry. Before anyone who’s watching or listening says, I’ve got this, I’m not isolated, I’d like you to hang in there because it is actually one of the most overlooked and yet most dangerous pitfalls that ministry leaders can find themselves falling into. Our work at Pastor Serve, our coaches, and our team talk to so many pastors, and so many of them experience isolation. I know, Luke, a lot of the work that you do is around this topic as well. So, to kick it off, Luke, why is isolation one of those overlooked pitfalls that ministry leaders often dismiss?

Luke Morgan
Yeah, that’s a great question, Jason. So, in my practice, I see it every single day with churches of the people that are pastoring churches of 30, all the way up to people that are pastoring churches of thousands. It happens in the marketplace. It happens in nonprofits. It happens in church ministry. It’s everywhere. Part of the thing that gets people confused about it is that they feel like, well, I’m around people all the time. How could I possibly be isolated? But when I start to ask people a couple of questions here, all of a sudden, some things start to tingle a little bit. So let me just ask you this question and see if maybe this whets your appetite. So, if I were to ask you, do you agree with this question? I feel comfortable sharing my weaknesses with people I respect the most. When you hear that all of a sudden, you go, Oh, wait. I actually find that when I’m talking with people who I respect a lot, I find myself curating a lot of the things I share with that person, right? We find this all over the place. So if you’re serving as a church ministry leader, it’s likely as God’s blessed you, and you’ve been working out of your giftedness, you’ve seen your influence begin to grow. But I think all of us have had this happen before. Your influence begins to grow, and maybe you say something that’s just like, you view it maybe as a throwaway statement, and someone in your congregation just completely takes it to heart and they’re devastated, it blows their life up, and they come back and they’re in tears, and they’re like, Pastor, you hurt me. You’re like, Oh my gosh. That was just like a throwaway statement, like, I didn’t mean that. So what do we do? Well, we start to maybe curate the things that we say to people over whom we have influence. So it starts with a really good place, but then as we start to do that, oftentimes, what we’ll realize is that our congregants, or the people on our teams that we’re leading, they begin to do the same thing the other way. So for me, when I had my first staff and people on my team, I’m growing in my influence, and I’m starting to curate what I’m saying. Well maybe now, as my influence is growing a little bit, for some of these people, I might be the person that has a lot of say in how their career prospects develop, or maybe what their performance review is going to look like, or whether they’re going to get an income raise if we do pay raises and things. So people sometimes begin to curate, for me, the things that are really going on in their hearts and in their minds. So this gap begins to emerge between ourselves and the people we influence. But then I’m sure I’m the only person. Maybe you’ve never experienced this, Jason, but you go to a pastor’s conference, and what are the first couple of things people are always trying to get out of you when you meet somebody new at a conference? Maybe you know what those things are. Jason, what do they do?

Jason Daye
Yeah, mostly it’s “What’s going on with your church? How’s your mystery going?” How many people are showing up on a weekend? That’s where we get in that flow as pastors, right?

Luke Morgan
Exactly. Then we, oftentimes, it comes from a good place, but maybe we teach and preach, and we’re talking to people about the Instagram lifestyle where people are kind of curating all the bad and maybe highlighting the good and a lot of times we find ourselves doing that as well. So you think about, you’re a church pastor, you’re going to a conference. This is a place where you’re not isolated, right? You’ve got a whole bunch of people around you, but what you begin to feel is like, Man, if I were to share that half of my board told me they’re going to quit, and I don’t know we’re going to find a new board member that knows anything about anything, and actually, yeah, we had the lowest attendance we’ve ever had last week, and it was probably spring break. But maybe I’m feeling insecure about that. I don’t know why that is. So we find that, even with our peers, we begin to curate things. Then, when I talk about that question, I feel comfortable sharing my weaknesses with people I respect, we often find that even in those relationships where there’s a person that’s sort of in a mentoring relationship, we find ourselves curating the things we share, even in that environment. So the people we influence, we’re curating, the people who are peers, we’re curating, and the people who we look up to, we’re curating. All of a sudden, we realize, wow, does anybody actually know who I am anymore? So that’s why, even though it may seem surprising, well, how could I be isolated? That’s exactly how it happens.

Jason Daye
Wow, Luke, that’s so good. I love that question. Tossing that out there for us to consider because it really makes it real, right? This idea of how we isolate or insulate ourselves from, as you said, those we’re influencing, our peers, and then even those that are mentoring us and are pouring into our lives. So, how does isolation like this become so dangerous and potentially destructive?

Luke Morgan
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, here are a couple of real-life examples I’ve had. So about 10 years ago, I was first certified as a ministry coach within the Wesleyan tradition, I’m a Wesleyan ordained pastor. So I was so excited. So they say, Hey, you know, we’ll actually even cover the cost of coaching for other pastors in the network. So go ahead and call up some of them. So I’m so excited. I call this guy, I know he’s pastoring a church with maybe 80 people. I go, Hey, this is great news, we’re doing coaching now. We can do that for you. He gets really quiet, and I was like, what’s going on? He’s like, look, there’s no way I can take coaching. I was like, Well, why not? And he goes, Well, if my board knew that I was receiving coaching, they might wonder why they hired me, because they might feel like, well, we trust you to know and have these answers. We trust you to be the person who has these kinds of things. So it’s almost like we actively suppress, sometimes, people even going. So what happens, though, is, I think probably some of these really famous examples, and I really don’t like to drag names into it very much. So I think if you maybe go in your own memory banks and think of the three most high-profile church ministry failures that you can think of, of celebrity-style people, right? They are just world-class intellects, and world-class preachers and teachers. How did they fall? Well, most of the time, it becomes that they become more and more insulated, they become more put on a pedestal, and as the years go on, there are fewer and fewer people that they can trust to speak the truth into their life. So I think if there’s any story that gets at the heart of this, we’ve all read it, we’ve all preached it. 2 Samuel 11, right? So this is where David, so remember King David, after he slays the giant, and he’s actually living out in the wilderness with his soldiers, and he develops these relationships with these guys that end up becoming the mighty men, right? So he’s that kind of leader that’s out backpacking with the guys, he’s in the caves, and he grows this trust with these guys to the point that they look up to him so much. So remember that story where he’s like, I just want to drink water from that well. And the guys are like, we’re on it, right? They go and they get that for him, right? That’s the love and loyalty he had developed because he was with the guys. But as he steps into the kingship, and as his influence begins to grow, he becomes more and more isolated from the people that he once was so connected with. That’s where that second Samuel 11 story starts off. Where all his guys are out to war. And where’s he at? Well, he’s up on the rooftop, and then he just makes that terrible mistake, that terrible decision. It starts off as an inquiry that turns into like a mess-up, a fall, and then we go into cover-up mode, right? What we actually see happen there is, this is something that was lost on me until I studied this passage more carefully, there’s actually a nine-month gap between the point where he makes the mess up, and he’s confronted about it. There’s no checkup period. There’s nobody speaking into his life. Here’s the one saving grace that David even had at that point. There was one guy in the world, one guy left in the world, whom he trusted to tell him the truth. And here’s the kicker, it wasn’t just a guy he trusted to tell him the truth, but he was willing to humble himself and listen to, right? So you think about the parallels between King David and King Saul. King Saul has a man that he trusts to tell him the truth in Samuel. But what does he not have? He doesn’t have the humility to do what he tells him, and that’s the fundamental difference between these two men. They both have a person whom they can trust to tell them the truth, but only one’s got the humility. So David falls. He falls, and it’s hard, it hurts, but he doesn’t fall all the way to the bottom, and that’s where this idea of the missing wedge comes out. So I watched this. Jason, did you watch that documentary, Free Solo? Did you see that?

Jason Daye
Yep. Fascinating.

Luke Morgan
Well, I watched it. So for those of your listeners who haven’t seen this documentary, you should check it out. It’s fascinating. It’s this dude named Alex Honnold, and what Alex does is he climbs El Capitan. It’s a 3,000-foot-tall cliff face in Yosemite National Park. So he climbs it, but he has no ropes, he’s got no harness, and he’s got no safety wedges. So we watch this and it’s just astonishing. The whole documentary is like, Well, how did he train for it? He’s got these, like, microscopic holds, and he’s gotta make sure the humidity is just right. We watch this, and we’re like, I would never, ever do that, right? I’d never do it. But what we find is that so many leaders are free soloing in their leadership. And when you think about that concept, that so many of us are free soloing in our leadership, we’ve got no harness, we’ve got no safety gear, we don’t have that missing wedge. We don’t have that wedge that connects us to the rock. So I’ve got this website. You can check it out later. TheMissingWedge.com and it’s got a picture in there. Maybe you want to look at it, and it shows this very simple device. On one side of it, it’s got this aluminum nut. It’s like a wedge, and then there’s a cable that runs through it. So, as a climber is climbing up a mountain face, what they’ll do is they’ll take that nut, they’ll take that wedge, they’ll stick it in a crack in the wall, and then they clip their harness into this cable that links through there. So what happens is, if they slip, and they go to fall, they only fall to the level of that wedge. But because so many of us are free soloing in leadership, we go the King Saul method, and we fall all the way to the bottom. There’s nothing to catch us before we go all the way to the bottom, and that’s exactly what King David had. He had one guy whom he could trust. He had Nathan, the prophet, and he had the humility to do what he told them. Those are the two pieces that so many pastors are missing in their ministry today.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this 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, Luke, I think that’s a great example, a great biblical example for us to kind of wrap our minds around something that we’ve all preached, I’m sure, multiple times. The contrast, rather, between King Saul and King David. You know, it’s interesting as you were walking through that story, and just as we reflect on our ministries, we think about the proximity that we often have early in our ministry years. The intimacy that we have with those we’re serving, those we’re serving alongside. There’s a general kind of excitement. We’re in a place where we know we don’t have it all figured out. So there tends to be a little more humility and a little more openness to having others pour into our lives. But, oftentimes, what we see, Luke, is that in the life of a ministry leader, in the life of a pastor, there comes a point where they begin to, as you said, not have as many of these safety elements as they’re climbing, and that transition is often subtle, Luke. It’s not like one day we wake up, and we’re like, Yeah, we’re good. We got this. So I would love it if you could talk to us a little bit about kind of that journey of a ministry leader, and what are some of those things? Even as we reflect on King David’s life, what are some of those, I don’t know, milestones, markers, or maybe things to look out for, where we might begin to subtly transition from someone who is connected to others, someone who has people around them speaking into their lives, to getting to a position where we’re really free soloing our ministry leadership?

Luke Morgan
So for many people, it begins with a hurt, right? So you’ve got a person you trusted, you thought you could trust, and all of a sudden, you hear something you shared with them in confidence coming back through somebody else. So maybe some of us have had that happen with a maybe a board member we felt like we could trust, or maybe there was another pastor that we were close with that we thought we could trust, or even a family member sometimes, and that information comes back to us. So all of a sudden we go, Well, man, I’m really going to start being more careful what I share with people. I’m going to start curating this a little bit more. But you also see it when you think about the discipleship journey. And my view is that we’re all in a discipleship journey, whether we’re a pastor or not, doesn’t make any difference. So what happens to a lot of us is that there becomes this disconnection in our minds between this outward life that we’re living, and this isn’t just individuals. This happens with churches, happens with businesses, and happens with organizations. You’ve got this outward life. That’s like what’s on your website, or it’s what you’re curating, what you’re putting out there, and ideally, that rests upon an inward life. An inward life that’s got these principles and these ways of doing things. At some point, for some, the inner stops reflecting the outward, and when you have an outward life that doesn’t match the inward, that’s when you step into a hypocrisy mode, right? So that’s what people would say, Yeah, you’re living like a hypocrite here. But what we find is that the inward life gets buoyed between two things. On one side of it, we’ve got what I like to call governing ideas. So I got this concept of governing ideas from a friend of mine named Greg Dempster. Governing ideas like in your theology, you’ve got, well, I believe this is true. I believe community is important, right? I believe that accountability is important. I’ve got these ideas that I have, but they’re not governing ideas. A governing idea, you know your governing idea based on what you’re actually doing, right? So, Jordan Peterson talks about this, where he’d say, or somebody once asked him, Do you believe in God? He says, Well, I don’t know what you mean. And they push him on it, and he goes, Well, I really think that believing in something means you behave like it’s true, right? So that’s this concept of you’ve got these governing ideas. Your governing ideas are showing what you’re actually doing. So you may say, I value community, but you actually may value not being hurt more than you value having community. So these governing ideas begin to shape. So if you got your outward life that sets upon an inward life that’s buoyed between governing ideas on one side and people on the other. If you remove one of those wedges out of the way, the whole thing comes falling down. Now that’s fairly conceptual. Let’s talk about a real-world example of how this happens. So a dear friend of mine, he’s working in consulting for a large global ministry. You guys would know who it is. If you heard this, you’d immediately know who it is. The executive leader of this organization is a phenomenally capable individual, right? Like you’d want this guy on your board. You’d want to have coffee with this guy. But here’s how it starts. They get an instinct about something, and their instinct just says this is just right. Almost how a gambler would go, Well, I’m just going to make this decision with chips I can afford to lose, right? So I can afford to be wrong on this. But you kind of put that out there. In this person’s case, they made a high-profile executive hire that the rest of their team didn’t want them to do. They kind of overpaid for the person and just said, Hey, this is mine. We’re doing it this way. Well, invariably, as what happened with my luck or your luck, Jason, that person turned out not to be as good a hire as that person thought. But rather than step up and go, Hey, I made an oopsie here, I messed up. I need you guys to help me fix this and turn this around. What does he do? Well, he started with what he could afford to lose, and now he doubles down into where he’s betting, and he’s like, I really gotta get it back. So what does he start to do? Well, he starts to form a narrative about how it wasn’t really wrong. So now he’s moved this person to another division of the organization, but didn’t cut this person’s pay. Now this person’s got way inflated wages. So he’s in this double-down mode, right? Now he starts talking to my friend and other people that are close to him, and even as that’s not working, he’s going to triple-down mode, right? So, if you start with, I’m betting with something I can afford to lose, then you go, I’m betting on something that I really gotta get it back. I gotta get it back. Now you bet you triple down now, and you’re like, I have to get it back. So then, when you do that, and you continue to double down and triple down on these sorts of things, you erode the confidence your team has in you. You erode your ability to lead effectively. Everybody’s like, Look, man, you’re just going to do whatever you’re going to do. I know that you’ve got your own ideas, so I’m going to go ahead and not share with you what I think because I don’t want to be on the outs with you. You already know what you want. You don’t care. Now you’ve eliminated the one thing that you brought smart people around you to help you, right? So that’s like a real-life example of how this happens. You just go, Well, I just know best. You’re like something inside you, it’s maybe the Holy Spirit, or maybe your spidey sense just says, Hey, maybe check with a couple of people and not be like, No, I just got this and that. Honestly, that’s how you see it happen the most. They start with something they can afford to lose. They double down on something. Hey, I gotta get it all back. Then they triple down and start getting into territory where they can’t get it back. So that’s how I see it.

Jason Daye
At Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders just like you. If you want to learn more about how you can qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, please visit PastorServe.org/freesession. You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity. That’s PastorServe.org/freesession.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good, Luke. That speaks directly into kind of that analogy you have in regard to not only the missing wedge, that climbing wedge, but the humility piece that we saw in King David and we did not see in King Saul, is that idea of rather than being humble and saying, Hey, man, I missed this one, guys, you were right, I was wrong, right? I mean, that’s an important thing for us as ministry leaders to be able to say You were right, I was wrong. Oftentimes, we fear that, we run from that, and we’re running towards King Saul, you know, and just, as you said, doubling down, tripling down, getting to a point where we really can’t afford to lose because the cost is so high at that point. Then that pushes us into what you’ve been talking about, Luke, this idea that we have to isolate ourselves because that is the only way we can continue this process to protect almost our image, or protect our authority in some way. So, Luke, I would love for you to share with us because you write and consult a lot on this topic. We can identify the reality of this reality of isolation and insulating ourselves, and how subtly it can kind of crop up in our lives, just as it did in the life of King David, and how it’s often overlooked or often dismissed in many pastors and ministry leaders’ lives. But, Luke, the thing that you help so many with is this idea of, well, how do we combat that then? How do we make sure we don’t end up like King Saul, and not that we all want to end up like King David, like we don’t all want to make horrific decisions. But if we happen to make a decision like that, to have someone like a Nathan in our life. So what is the perspective that we need to have today in the reflection we need to make in our own lives today to ensure that?

Luke Morgan
There’s a very particular person that you need to have in your life. This is the picture of the missing wedge and it doesn’t have to just be one person. You can have multiple people here, but there are a couple of things that most people will avoid doing, or will do in a wrong way that implodes the process for me. Here’s what it is. So what you’ll find is that, and, again, if you think about the high-profile ministry failings that you’ve heard about, people begin to surround themselves with people who are fans of theirs. So if you think about those high-profile people, that they will stop including people on their boards that question them, they’ll stop including people who are better than them at something, and they’ll start doing all those insecure types of things. So the person who serves as your missing wedge, they need to love you. All right, here’s the thing. They do need to love you, but they can’t be your fan. They can’t be enamored with you. So a lot of people will think, Well, shoot, who am I going to add as my missing wedge? Well, let me go find that person who thinks I’m great, and is going to tell me all the things I want to hear, and we’ll just affirm everything. That’s not the person you want. It’s got to be a person who loves you because, and that’s an irreducible thing. You don’t want to bring in somebody who’s just going to tell you your trash because, then you’re going to be disincentivized to want to connect with that person. But if you look at that dynamic between Nathan and David, Nathan is not subservient to David. He comes because he’s got a word from the Lord for David, right? He’s sitting in that prophetic office, like the prophetic office and the kingly office, they’re two different offices, and he didn’t work for David, right? He’s got to be able to come in and speak to it. So the right person to be your missing wedge is not somebody who works for you. This has to be a person that is close enough to the thing that they can speak objectively into it. But this can’t be your best buddy. This can’t be somebody who’s enamored with you. This can’t be the congregant that you led to the Lord nine years ago, and they show up for all your stuff. This really has to be somebody who’s got the guts to tell you the truth, but loves you enough to do it in a way that you can actually hear it. Now, here’s the thing, because most of us have been in this position where we’ve kind of been curating, isolating, and all these types of things, it can be really awkward to say, Okay, well, how am I going to take one of these relationships and pivot it without it appearing like I’m going into damage control mode here? That’s what I know, and a lot of people who are listening right now are like, well, shoot, if I were to call that person, and they’re going to be like, Well, why are you calling me? Man, this conversation is getting awkward quick. Like, how do we go about doing that? So, this is one of the things that I do where I’ll step in with a person. I’ll say, hey, let’s meet for a few weeks. Let’s begin talking about the different relationships that you have in your life and how we begin to seed these relationships over time. So it doesn’t come out like, Oh shoot. Well, Luke’s on the phone with me and he’s going deep, man, like, is he having an affair or something, or is he about to leave his church, or is he going through a midlife crisis? There are ways that we can do this where we very gently seed those relationships in a way that the idea is not that you’d work with me forever. The idea is that you’d have time to build a network of people, and I could kind of serve in that role with you until we build that network for you. So you don’t need me to do this. If you feel like you’ve already had relationships that were this way in the past and you just want to restore that relationship, call that person up. Say, hey, can we meet for coffee? Can we do a Zoom meeting? Hust say, hey, you know, I feel like I’ve been growing and as my influence has grown, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been growing more isolated from other people. Honestly, it’s likely the person you’re talking to feels the same way. Sometimes it can come as a meeting of the minds here and become peers in that way and really lean into that. But a couple of things that you really want to look for in this person is that this connection point that you do is very consistent, right? If it goes two months, three months, six months, nine months, like I did for David, you’re in trouble. It has to be consistent and regular, and you really have to give the person open license to ask questions. And they probably need to know you well enough to know what those sticky points might be for you, so that they can ask you really good, directed questions. Then there’s this decision you have to make in your heart to say, look, even if I disagree with this person, I’m actually going to, in some ways, over-weight what they say because I want to demonstrate that humility and that teachability. Sometimes that even means Hey, I think I might have the better idea here, but this person who loves me and I’ve given this trust to is telling me, Hey, I think maybe the Holy Spirit’s leading me to point you this direction or think about this differently. That can be in our personal lives, in our ministry lives, and you may have a couple of different people who serve in different functions for that. But yeah, that’s usually where you start, Jason.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good, Luke. What’s fascinating is that we kind of process through that, and we think through, there are a few things that you talked about there. One is this level of love, care, and concern, right? It’s going to be someone who cares about you deeply enough to speak truth, right? So that’s huge. This idea of trust, obviously, is built in there. But one of the things that you mentioned is it’s gotta be someone that doesn’t necessarily work for you, because that can change the way they respond. As you said, they may not be quite as honest with you because there’s something on the line for them. So, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that as well. As we’re looking at just bringing these people into our lives, ensuring that we aren’t isolating ourselves. Ensuring that we do have people who are not just saying, Yes, awesome, you rock, but are willing to say, Hey, listen, I think you’re missing something here and speak truth into us. That transforms our lives. That becomes that missing wedge in our life. That becomes that Nathan for us. Luke, this has been an incredible conversation. As we wrap down, there are a couple of things I’d like for you to share. One is, if people want to connect with you or connect with the work that you do in this area, share with us the best way for them to do that.

Luke Morgan
Yeah, very simple. So you go to TheMissingWedge.com. That’s my website. I’ve got a whole bunch of buttons on there. Just hit schedule a call. I think you kind of get this by just hearing me talk. I’m a person that I’ve, all right, I’ve went seasons in my life when I had the missing wedge, and I have a lot of, maybe someday we do another talk. We can talk about the hurts and hang-ups I’ve experienced due to my own failings in that way. So I’m a person who is a good listening ear and I really want you to thrive in your ministry. Because when each pastor’s thriving in his or her ministry, the church gets better, and it makes things better for all of us. When one of us has a major failing, it hurts all of us. It really does. So if you go to that website, TheMissingWedge.com, we can set up a time to talk. Then I’ve also got a really simple, 10-question, it’s a free questionnaire there on the website, and it’ll help you identify if you might be free soloing in your leadership. It’s a free download. I don’t even think you have to give an email or anything like that. You just download it and look at it. If you’re feeling like a lot of the questions on there, you’re like, man, maybe I am experiencing this, reach out to me, or reach out to a trusted person, and just bounce that off them and see if that’s something that they resonate with as well.

Jason Daye
That’s awesome. Thank you for that, Luke. Great tool. Then, as we close down, you have the eyes and ears of pastors, ministry leaders, men and women, who are serving. What words of encouragement would you like to leave with them?

Luke Morgan
Very simply, I’d say, don’t give up. Don’t give up, even if you’re in that position where you’re looking, it’s like, Man, I was missing the missing wedge, and I’m actively falling right now. God hasn’t given up on you. We’re not going to give up on you. Don’t give up. The Holy Spirit has each of us on this journey of sanctification that we’re walking through. So even if you’re in mid-fall right now, it’s not too late. Look up. God’s got you. We, as your brothers and sisters in Christ, have you. So don’t give up. That’s my main thing, Jason.

Jason Daye
Amen, love it, Luke. Great word. Thank you so much for making time to hang out with us here on FrontStage BackStage. It has been a wonderful conversation, a very important topic, and something that each of us as pastors and ministry leaders needs to do some reflecting on. So thank you for bringing this to mind and to heart, brother.

Luke Morgan
Thank you so much for having me, Jason. It’s been a true pleasure.

Jason Daye
Alright. God bless you.

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.