4.8 Out of 10

Last Monday I told you this issue would open with a number. Here it is: 4.8 out of 10.

During our listening year, we asked the ministry leaders of this district to rate their relational connection to one another. The average answer came back 4.8 out of 10. Alongside it came a second number: thirty-seven percent of our lead pastors could not name an accountability partner. And one sentence in the findings has stayed with me longer than either number: they know the DS, but they do not know each other.

I have read that sentence many times now, and it has never once felt like a compliment. It describes a district where the relational lines run to the center instead of to each other, like spokes on a wheel with no rim. A wheel built that way carries weight for a while. It does not carry it for long.

Let me be clear about what that finding means. This is not a personal failing. It is a gap in how we have been built. Nobody drifts into isolation on purpose. The schedule fills, the role separates, the drive between towns is long, and being everyone’s pastor makes it strangely hard to be anyone’s friend. Structure produced this, and structure can change it, which is why closing this gap is one of the first things our plan intends to do.

Scripture has been telling us this for a very long time. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). The writer is picturing laborers and travelers on the roads of ancient Israel, but the words land on pastoral ministry with uncomfortable precision, because every pastor falls sooner or later. The question the text presses is not whether you will fall but who will be there when you do. The passage ends with the image of a threefold cord that “is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Cords do not braid themselves.

So what does the braided life look like for a pastor? I find it helps to think in terms of a constellation rather than a single star, because no one relationship can do all the work. Every pastor needs colleagues who know the weight because they carry it too. Most of us need a mentor somewhere further down the road who has already survived what we are walking into. Many seasons call for a coach, someone whose questions surface the next step we could not see on our own. Every one of us needs someone who pastors our own soul, whether that is a spiritual director or simply a pastor we trust enough to answer honestly when they ask how we are really doing. And there are seasons when the wisest and strongest thing a leader can do is sit with a counselor. Nobody needs all five every season. Everybody needs more than zero.

I am not writing this from above the problem. I keep a constellation of my own, and I have for years: a mentor who has prayed with me through every season of ministry, peers who get the unpolished version of things, and a few people with standing permission to ask me the questions I would rather not answer. Proverbs 27:17 says that “iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another,” and I can tell you from experience that the sharpening only happens on contact. Iron kept in a drawer stays dull.

Here is where the plan meets the finding. Cohorts sit at the center of our pastor health work precisely because isolation was the loudest thing we heard in the listening year. This fall we are launching new cohorts across the district, and for the first time they are open to staff pastors as well as lead pastors. Here are a few of the new cohorts that are launching in September:

• NextGen Pastors. A cohort for NextGen pastors focused on developing and empowering the next generation of leaders in our churches.
  
  
• Believing and Building for Growth. A cohort for staff pastors centered on healthy growth structure, volunteer recruitment, staff culture, and leading through change.
  
  
• Bi-Vocational Pastors (Evening). A cohort for bi-vocational pastors, gathering in the evening because so many of them hold another job during the day.
  
  
• Bi-Vocational Pastors (Saturday). A cohort for bi-vocational pastors, gathering on Saturdays because so many of them hold another job during the week.
  
  
• Discipleship, Leadership, and Spiritual Health. A cohort for pastors focused on discipleship, leadership, and spiritual health. The first study will be reading through "Resilient" by John Eldridge.
  
  

A cohort will not hand you all five relationships in the constellation, but it reliably supplies the first one, colleagues who know the weight, and in my experience it is where the mentors and the friendships tend to get found. Let us know you are interested in a cohort HERE and we will work with you to find the one that fits you best.

The practice for this week is simple. Take one page and write five headings across it: colleagues, mentor, coach, soul care, counselor. Under each heading, write the actual names, not the names you wish you could write. Where a column sits empty, you have not failed a test; you have found your growth plan for the fall. And if you want help filling a column, call the district office. That is exactly what we are here for.

Next Monday we will take the helping relationships one at a time: what a coach, a mentor, a spiritual director, and a counselor each actually do, and how a Crossroads pastor goes about finding each one.