My friend Clayton King, who has never served as a senior pastor (and had not expected to), suddenly found himself leading one of the nation\u2019s largest congregations as interim pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina.<\/p>\n
In a recent interview, he talked about leading a church through a period of crisis and transition, and he offers insights that all of us need to hear. Clayton observed: \u201cFight discouragement with all you have. Pray for the Lord to renew to you the joy of your salvation. The greatest way to fight discouragement is to let the Word of God be the primary source of your emotions\u2026.<\/p>\n
“You start to think you\u2019re worse than you are because you listen to all the criticism that\u2019s thrown at you. Or you start to think you\u2019re better than you are because you listen to all the praise people give you. We have to shut both of those voices out. Don\u2019t let the praise go to your head. Don\u2019t let the criticism go to your heart. Keep it about Jesus.<\/p>\n
“The second thing I would say to a pastor is this: do not isolate yourself. If the enemy can isolate us, he can assassinate us. We are so vulnerable when we are alone. The pastorate is a scary and lonely place because you get into your own headspace.<\/p>\n
“Invite friends into your life. I invite men into my life to watch football games, to eat, to go hunting, to go fishing. We hang out for a couple hours and confess our weaknesses. We pastors fall into the trap of feeling like we can\u2019t be honest with brothers because they may look at us differently. But it\u2019s up to us to have people in our lives we can confess our weakness to. James 5:16 says, \u2018Confess your faults to each other and pray for each other so that you might be healed.\u2019<\/p>\n
“If we don\u2019t have those people in our lives for accountability, confession and friendship, we\u2019re going to end up isolated. We\u2019re going to end up out of ministry. Or we\u2019re going to end up depressed and sick and unhealthy, and that affects our wives, our children and our congregations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My friend Clayton King, who has never served as a senior pastor (and had not expected to), suddenly found himself leading one of the nation\u2019s largest congregations as interim pastor of NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina. In a recent interview, he talked about leading a church through a period of crisis and transition, and … Continue reading “The Importance of Accountability, Confession and Friendship”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}