Leading on Empty , livre ebook

Praise for Leading on Empty:
“This is a valuable resource for pastors who often neglect their own spiritual, physical and emotional health while they are in the process of serving others. Don’t wait until you’re burned out to read it.”
Preaching

“Having experienced burnout personally earlier in my career I can attest to all Wayne has written, and especially to the fact that out of such a fire can come spiritual growth and maturity. I particularly want to encourage young pastors and Christian leaders who are just starting out in their ministries to devour this book and follow its wise counsel.”
Archibald D. Hart, Ph.D., FPPR.
Senior Professor of Psychology and Dean Emeritus, Graduate
School of Psychology, Fuller Theological Seminary

“Sooner or later, we all find ourselves trying to lead on empty. It’s a tough place to be. But the wisdom, transparency, and godly advice Wayne offers in these pages can spare us the grief. He shows how to keep the tank from running dry or how to refill it if it’s gone empty. If you’re in ministry, you need to read this book.”
Larry Osborne
Senior Pastor, North Coast Church, Vista, CA

Leading on Empty Copyright © 2009 by Wayne Cordeiro
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
Ebook corrections 3.21.2012 / 09.29.2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-0742-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, ® Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by International Bible Society. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org
Scripture quotations identified ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified GNT are from the Good News Translation—Second Edition. Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations identified NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. ® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. www.zondervan.com
Scripture quotations indentified NKJV are from the New King James Version of the Bible. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations identified TEV are from the Bible in Today’s English Version (Good News Bible). Copyright © American Bible Society 1966, 1971, 1976, 1992.
Scripture quotations identified TLB are from the The Living Bible © 1971 owned by assignment by Illinois Regional Bank N.A. (trustee). Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189. All rights reserved.
Cover design by R-29
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: When the Needle Points to Empty
Chapter 2: Forced to Failure
Chapter 3: Power Perfected in Weakness
Chapter 4: Early Warning Signs
Chapter 5 : Solitary Refinement
Chapter 6: Finding the Still Waters
Chapter 7: The New Perspective
Chapter 8: Seven Lessons Hard-Learned
Chapter 9: Finding the Way Back Home
Chapter 10: The Intentional Life
Chapter 11: Finding Solitude in Sabbaticals
Afterword
Notes
Appendix: Retreat Centers and Counselors
Books for the Journey
About the Author
Other Books By Author
Foreword
by Bob Buford
Ambition is a good thing. Hard work is a good thing. Leisure, rest, and play are good things. But there are limits to each. Let me tell you what has drawn me up short, got me thinking a lot about boundaries and limits. This is a story of two good men, men whose work I know and respect virtuous men whose lives have been spent serving God’s purposes and serving others. We have a ceaseless barrage of television news about bad guys who lie, cheat, steal, and break the rules in a variety of nasty ways. But I’m talking about good guys. Most of the people I know mean well. They lead purposeful lives and intend to do so until their last breath, just as these two men did.
But both found themselves beyond their limits.
Both men are senior pastors. Both are very gifted communicators and are loved and respected by the people they serve.
Actually, they are held in awe. Both of them are in their fifties, leading churches with more than two thousand attending each week. Think of the pressure of that job: First of all, the pressures of preparing and delivering a message to thousands of people each week and of being very much under the spotlight. That, combined with the leadership responsibility of what is essentially a very large service enterprise, is hugely demanding.
The first person I want to describe leads a church in the western United States. He began the church himself and is well known as a writer and a speaker at leadership seminars for pastors. Not long ago, I heard him give a message describing his experience of burnout. He said he had gotten to a point where he felt like he was faking everything. He said, “I felt fried inside. I lost enthusiasm for what I was doing. The work that had been a great passion for me had become just a job. I was dragging myself through each day. I knew something was wrong, talked to a couple of friends about it, and finally sought medical help. The doctor diagnosed burnout and prescribed six months of rest absolutely no work. It was that bad.
“I said, ‘no way,’ but I booked a short silent retreat in a Catholic monastery. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me enough relief to at least think deeply about what was happening to me and motivated me to cut back my work schedule significantly. I delegated responsibility for all manner of things to subordinates who did a terrific job.”
The second pastor leads a large church on the opposite side of the country, and he, too, began to experience burnout. A number of people I talked to had predicted it. He was very detail-oriented and reluctant to delegate anything. He was operating a large church as if it were a small parish church, doing lots of pastoral care as well as preparing messages each week. He was a micromanager. He began to feel some physical pain, and as a result took painkillers that soon led to a deep addiction to prescription drugs. It was discovered later that multiple doctors in his congregation were prescribing strong and addictive prescription drugs, not knowing others were doing the same. In each case, he told the doctor involved not to tell his wife about it. He was like a duck that appears calm on the surface and paddles like crazy under the water just to stay afloat. The people on his board felt that something was wrong and thought that they should hire more help for him. One of them later told me, “We were treating the wrong disease in the wrong way, but how were we to know?” Things finally came to a head, and this story found its way onto the front page of a local newspaper. People were shocked. The minister was temporarily relieved of his senior pastor duties and spent six months in a treatment center and halfway house.
In the first case, the pastor is fully recovered and has restored his spiritual vitality and his passion and energy for work. He has been willing to talk about this issue with other pastors in the hope that they will be warned in time. By now, you may have recognized him as Wayne Cordeiro.
The jury is out on the second case. There’s hope. This is a very intelligent man who has taken steps to restore his relationships. He still has the love of members of his congregation who worried about him beforehand. But he’s not out of the woods.
I asked Dr. Larry Allums, my “personal trainer in literature,” about this issue. He told me that a great deal of literature and drama turns around “the tragic flaw” characters not admitting their limits to themselves or others. In Shakespeare, Julius Caesar is a great general but a very poor politician. King Lear was so blinded by his own self-absorption and desire to retire and take it easy that he was careless about putting his kingdom and his own future in good hands. A tragic flaw of many leaders is that they cannot recognize their limits or acknowledge their need for others as the demands of work or ministry scale up dramatically.
Leading on Empty is Wayne Cordeiro’s own journey, a journey that every leader can learn from. Wise people will enlist immediately, and others may study it later, but we will all benefit from this candid description of his road to burnout. These axioms of life and leadership will be an indispensable travel guide. They may not give you quick answers, nor will they make you bulletproof. But they will give you the ability to see further ahead . . . to recognize the dangers of the potholes along the way and also appreciate the beauty of the sunsets.
I encourage you to learn how to avoid the quagmire of burnout, or how to escape it once you’ve landed there, from Wayne Cordeiro, someone who’s been through it himself and has come out stronger on the other side. 1
Preface
How do you lead when you don’t feel like leading? And how do you sail through the dead waters when the wind has died down and that which w