Retooling, Recalibrating, & Releasing for Ministry

Greetings fellow laborers in Christ (e.g., pastors, chaplains, missionaries, teachers, and other Christian workers)!

If you are like me, your life in ministry has been filled with times of both joy and sorrow, constancy and change, growth and pruning, excitement and exhaustion, ... sometimes all in the same week!

It may have been a while since you graduated from seminary…or perhaps you are still in the formative stages of your ministry. In any event, I’m wondering if this new season finds you sensing the need for…

• Retooling—sharpening your understanding and skills for ministry in a rapidly changing cultural context;
• Recalibrating—your approach to ministry (separating what is merely Western culture from what is more biblical and more orthodox than we have ever been) to an even greater level of biblical faithfulness and missional effectiveness through the process of a learning community;
• Releasing—has the weekly pressure of ministry led you to neglect the dream that God has imparted to you? Is there a ministry passion that has been set on the back burner for longer than you planned?

It is my belief that God wants to use us all to release a gift to the Church and to the world that would benefit from the nurturing accountability of a cohort-based ministry training program. It can be a program that is either academic or non-academic but it should be deeply relational, honestly wrestling with the scriptures and our methodologies as well as with our own attitudes, words, and actions. It is tough to self-edit so my prayer is that we all can find a learning community that will facilitate us doing the work together.