In The Weary Leader's Guide to Burnout, Sean Nemecek takes Christian leaders on a journey from burnout through recovery and on to spiritual transformation. By understanding the causes and symptoms of their burnout, these leaders will be ready to take practical, actionable steps toward wholeness. Then, if they choose, they will be poised to do the inner work of spiritual transformation by the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. In the end, these leaders will emerge from burnout more confident in Christ, more connected with others, and with greater purpose, courage, and grace in their leadership. This book integrates biblical interpretation, theology, psychology, and contemplative spirituality into a holistic approach to recovery. It is filled with relatable stories of church leaders who have walked this path and includes discussion questions for personal contemplation or group discussion. The Weary Leader's Guide to Burnout will help pastors and Christian leaders develop an integrated approach to life, work, and ministry through healing and spiritual transformation.

You Can Learn to Handle the Onslaught of Internal and External Pressures Does anxiety get in the way of your ability to be an effective leader? Is your inability to notice when you and those around you are anxious keeping you "stuck" in chronic unhealthy patterns? In Managing Leadership Anxiety, pastor and spiritual growth expert Steve Cuss offers powerful tools to help you move from being managed by anxiety to managing anxiety. You'll develop the capacity to notice your anxiety and your group's anxiety. You will increase your sensitivity to the way groups develop systemic anxiety that keeps them trapped. Your personal self-awareness will increase as you learn how self gets in the way of identifying and addressing issues. Managing Leadership Anxiety offers valuable principles to those who are hungry to understand the source of the anxiety in themselves and in the people with whom they relate. Readers will be empowered to take back control of their lives and lead in mature and vibrant ways.

“Searching for Grace invites you into the kind of relationship that we all long for deep in our hearts. The relationship between Scotty and Russ is scary, vulnerable, painful, but gorgeously loving and drenched in grace.” —Paul David Tripp, author of New Morning Mercies Anxious? Burnt out? Weary? Why is it so hard for our souls to find rest? In Searching for Grace, Russ and his mentor, Scotty Smith, explore the contours of their lives and why embracing God’s grace unreservedly is so difficult for many of us. Their honest conversations offer priceless lessons for parched souls everywhere. Many of us feel anxious and unfulfilled by our everyday existence, yet deeply long for a purposeful, meaningful, and peace-filled life. That tension creates a background buzz of profound discontentment behind everything we do. There is a better way. Searching for Grace reveals the conversations between Russ and Scotty that transformed Russ’s life forever, helping him identify the mindsets that contributed to his restlessness. Straight from his little black journal, Russ shares the seven life-giving principles he learned from Scotty that unleashed him to a refreshingly new life, radically built on God’s grace.

This Is an Invitation to Take Your Power Back! What happened to the spark you had as a child that powered curiosity, engagement with life, and creativity? Has it burned out? Are you feeling emotionally and physically exhausted and cynical, wondering if you’ve got what it takes to make it in this rapidly changing world? Burnout looks a lot like depression, but it’s not a biological bogeyman that medication or simple stress management can cure. It’s a disorder of hope and will that sucks the life out of competent, idealistic, hardworking people like you; and it will be an ongoing challenge for you to take your power back! In this breakthrough work, Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.—a Harvard-trained medical scientist, psychologist, and renowned pioneer in stress and health—straddles psychology, biology, and soul in a completely fresh approach to burnout. Joan’s deeply human (and often amusing) personal accounts of burnout and recovery; the science of helplessness, hopelessness, and empowerment; and the rich wisdom of people who have gone from fried to revived—including many of Joan’s vibrant community of 5,000 Facebook Friends—make this powerful and practical book a must-read for our times.

David Murray writes in the Foreword: 'The minister's soul is the soul of his ministry.' I can't remember where I first heard this saying, but I've never been able to forget it. And, having read this book, I never want to forget it. In these pages, Jim Savastio and Brian Croft establish the foundation of all faithful and fruitful ministry"€"the pastor's soul. But, although their main target is the epidemic of ministerial hyper-activity and the accompanying burnout, backsliding, and brokenness, they carefully avoid over-reacting and running to the opposite extremes of monkish withdrawal or lazy self-indulgence. Instead, you have a book that skillfully walks a balanced biblical path in both content and style. It balances self and others. Yes, the pastor is all about serving others, about sacrificing for the sake of others, about spending and being spent for others, and about pouring out themselves to fill others. But, as many pastors have discovered to their cost and pain, servants are finite, sacrifices eventually turn to ashes, non-stop spending leads to bankruptcy, and pouring out without ever filling up ends in drought. This book reminds us that caring for self is not selfish but necessary if we are to sustain a life of caring service to others. It's not a warrant for sloth or selfishness, but rather a call to self-care that will lead to better other-care.

"How did I get here?" These are the words of many Christian men on the brink of burnout or in the midst of breakdown. They are exhausted, depressed, anxious, stressed, and joyless. Their time is spent doing many good things, but their pace is unsustainable—lacking the rest, readjustment, and recalibration everyone needs on a regular basis. But there is good news: God has graciously provided a way for men to reset their lives at a more sustainable pace. Drawing on his own experiences—and time spent with other men who have also experienced burnout—pastor David Murray offers weary men hope for the future, helping them identify the warning signs of burnout and offering practical strategies for developing patterns that help them live a grace-paced life and reach the finish line with their joy intact.

Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified. Proliferating technologies command our attention. Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread. We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome. Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon. Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing. It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption. Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms. Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

Picking up on the monastic tradition of creating a "rule of life" that allows for regular space for the practice of spiritual disciplines, Ruth Haley Barton takes you more deeply into understanding seven key spiritual disciplines along with practical ideas for weaving them into everyday life.

Big churches didn’t create the problems facing today’s congregations. But our obsession with size has come at a great cost. We’re obsessed with bigness. Supersized meals and TV screens. Square footage. And big churches. “What’s the size of your church?” That question has stirred insecurities or stroked the ego of too many pastors. For a long time, we thought bigger was better. “Church growth” and “numbers” dominated our thoughts and conversations. But more than ever, people are feeling disconnected. Trust in the church is dwindling. In De-sizing the Church, pastor Karl Vaters takes us on a multi-faceted journey through our centuries-long obsession with size, both in and outside the church, and how it has negatively affected those who serve and worship in big and small congregations alike. He also dispels some prevailing myths and affirms what was good and true about the Church Growth Movement. And he invites us to consider how removing church size from the equation can be an essential element in rebuilding trust, restoring relationships, and renewing our spiritual lives. This book reframes the way we see the size of our churches and helps us see health and fruitfulness through de-sized lenses. The result? Renewed congregations that reach surrounding communities and faithfully engage culture.

I’d Like You More If You Were More like Me takes on one of life’s most important questions: How can I get closer to God and other people? We were created for deep connections. When people have deep connections, says John Ortberg, they win in life. When they don’t have deep connections, they cannot win in life. I’d Like You More if You Were More like Me offers help in overcoming one of the biggest obstacles to making deep connections: the fact that we’re so different. Different from God and different from each other. The good news is that connectedness is not based on similarity, but on shared experiences. When one person invites another to share an experience, they’re connected. It can be sharing a beautiful sunset or a meal, having a great conversation over cup of coffee, going for walk, or even teasing somebody. And when we share those same experiences with God, we get closer to him, too. God wants to connect with us—so much that he sent his son to live as a human being. God took on flesh and shared every human experience. So we don’t have to wonder what a close relationship with God looks like anymore. An intimate relationship with God and other people doesn’t have to be a cliché, it can be a daily way of life.