Ministry Mulligans with Jack Connell

Wow, this is quite the piece, and I suspect there are lots of church folks, including pastors, who need to read this carefully.

What mulligan would you play?

I used to be a pastor. For nearly two decades, I enjoyed the thrills, spills, chills and can’t-quite-pay-the-bills of local church ministry. Now, five years after packing up my office for the final time (including two boxes of Leadership back issues), I still think about those years in the pastorate every single day. No exceptions. It’s as though the word pastor is branded on my heart. And as I reflect on those 1,000 weeks in the world’s most glorious, dangerous profession, I often think about what I would do differently if I had another shot at it. If I was given a ministry mulligan, here is what I’d do with it.

Here are his four mulligans:

1. More collaboration, less competition
2. More pastor, less CEO
3. More rest, less rush
4. More friendship, less isolation

I’m not a pastor, so I have no mulligans to play for a pastor. But I’ve got a professor mulligan:

Less specialization, more generalization into study and work for the church and for ministry. I value the years I did only specialized study, read only technical journal articles and monographs, etc.. Those were good years and helpful years, but it was the imbalance of those years that came back later to push me into church ministry writing and reading. When it comes down to it, we are not historians but theologians — Christians who are seeking the truth in order to love God and to love others. Without that focus we become clanging cymbals.