Resolve this year to celebrate other churches and gain wisdom from their pastors and leaders. But resolve also to lean into the unique DNA of your own congregation.
2. Skipping Your Day Off
A church can only be as healthy as its leadership. And part of being healthy is implementing and maintaining healthy rhythms of work and rest.
In the beginning, God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Later, he implemented the same rhythm in the Mosaic law. And while New Covenant believers are no longer held to the ritual requirements of the Old Testament law, we are certainly called to live by the moral principles that underpinned by those statutes.
“Six days you shall labor,” and one day you shall rest. It’s certainly true that some Christians need to be reminded that they are called to labor, but most of those people aren’t pastors.
Pastor, resolve in 2025 to stop skipping your day off. Rest in the goodness of God’s grace one day a week. The work you do is vital. But you are not so important a person that you cannot rest from your labor.
At the end of the day, rest is an issue of faith. In the same way that sacrificing our money through generosity cultivates our trust in God to provide for our needs, sacrificing our working hours to create space for rest cultivates our belief that God is always working—even, and perhaps especially, when we’re resting.
3. Preaching to the Congregation You Wish You Had
A generation ago, it was notable for a pastor to have a “cassette ministry” to distribute recordings of his sermons to a broader audience. It is now the standard for a recording of every sermon a pastor has ever preached to hit the internet within 24 hours of him delivering it—if it was not livestreamed already.
That seismic shift in our technology standards has no doubt affected how preachers approach their craft, particularly when it comes to social media. When a single Instagram reel has the potential of going viral and raising a pastor’s star in online spaces, the temptation is to begin preaching to an imagined online audience instead of the people who are actually in the room.
But your people don’t need to hear a sermon from the next big internet celebrity. They need the pastor who knows them, who has stood at the foot of their hospital bed, who has buried their dearly departed relatives, who knows their struggles, who prays for them in their temptations, to open the Bible and speak to them.
Social media is an important place for ministry, and pastors should think strategically about how to be in those spaces. But never let your online persona take precedence over your embodied leadership with the people to whom God has assigned you.
Pastor, resolve to be present with your people this year. It won’t always be glamorous, but it is where you will see life transformation that is immeasurably more important than having a great online presence.
Lean on Jesus This Year
Pastoring is a weighty task. It always has been. But as you look ahead to 2025, may God bless you with fresh faith, a renewed sense of purpose, and a determination to be used to tell a story that only Jesus can write.
