The Lord has led us to do some pretty radical things in our church family.
One of those things is to allow everyone to spend time with their families and friends on fifth Sundays. There's only four months in the year that have a fifth Sunday, so we use them as a time for rest and rejuvenation.
We realize this goes against many church traditions, but we recently came across some statistics that might explain why the Lord is leading us this way.
Check these out:
* 80% of pastors believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastors’ children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.
* 33% state that being in the ministry is an outright hazard to their family.
* 90% feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the ministry demands.
* 50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job.
* 70% say they have a lower self-image now than when they first started.
* 70% do not have someone they consider a close friend.
* 40% report serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month.
* 33% confess having been involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in the church.
* 50% have considered leaving the ministry in the last months.
* 50% of the ministers starting out will not last 5 years.
* 94% of clergy families feel the pressures of the pastor’s ministry.
* The profession of “Pastor” is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions.
* Pastors are listed just above “car salesman”.
* Over 4,000 churches closed in America the year this survey was made.
* Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month that same year, the numbers were similar last year.
* Over 1,300 pastors were terminated by the local church each month, many without cause. This has been happening every year in this new millennium.
Our conclusion is that IF WE KEEP DOING THINGS THE SAME WAY, WE WILL CONTINUE TO GET THE SAME RESULTS.
We believe the Lord is giving us practical things that we can change in order to break these negative results. One of those changes is to simply give all of us an occasional Sunday away from the church setting and allow everyone to spend that day with their families.
So, ENJOY YOUR 5TH SUNDAY FAMILY BREAK and realize these Sunday breaks, along with many of our strategies, simply mean that GOD is giving us the wisdom to do something completely different. HE is not going to allow us to become another one of these statistics.
